The School Of Cash Flow

Not sure what to do next? Asking for help is a powerful tool in real estate and investing! Dale Corpus introduces Jason Mittman, the President and CEO at Only Epic Holdings. Jason shares with Dale how he started in the lawn mowing business. He came across a yard he didn’t know how to manage, so Jason asked the owner for help. He was willing to mow for free in exchange for guidance. Little did he know that he was talking to his future real estate mentor! Do you want to know the rest of the story? Don’t miss out on the nuggets of wisdom you’ll gain in this episode. Tune in!

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Not Sure What To Do Next? Asking For Help Is A Powerful Tool With Jason Mittman

I love interviewing experienced successful real estate investors to understand how they tick and how they got to where they are. I’d like to uncover their mindset and understand the overall progression of their career. You’re in for a treat. My guest, Jason Mittman, has invested in pretty much every asset class in real estate, and I wanted to pick his brain. Jason was introduced to me by a past podcast guest of mine, Ben Kogut, who was a mentee of Jason’s. I was by honored that introduction.

Here’s a little bit more about Jason. He is passionate about family, friends, the outdoors, commercial real estate, public speaking, and business coaching. He is a competitive athlete and a mountaineer. He is a licensed Texas real estate broker, CCIM, Society of Exchange Counselors member, and holds a degree from UTSA.

He has over 25 years of real estate expertise including analysis, sourcing, development, construction, leasing, finance, acquisition, disposition, and brokerage. He has invested in many real estate asset classes including medical office, multifamily, multitenant retail, land, hospitality and single-tenant assets. He has a company called Only Epic Holdings, where he is the President and CEO. Without further ado, welcome to the show. How are you?

I’m wonderful. It’s an honor to be on. Thanks for having me.

This is our first time connecting with each other outside of email exchange. Where are you based in the United States?

I’m based in Golden, Colorado, which is a suburb of Denver. I also have a place out in Summit County because I like to spend as much time outdoors in the mountains as I can. It helps me think, keep my head straight and keeps me balanced.

Where are you right now?

I’m in Idaho Springs. The temperature drop is about 44 degrees. The cloud is around, so if you’re on top of a mountain and you see this, this is the code for, “You need to get down fast,” which applies in real estate a lot. If there are enough clouds, you need to maybe get into a safe spot and position for your next strategy. I apply a lot of lessons from the mountains.

Are you there for some competitive race or anything like that?

No, I’m looking at real estate. I try to make at least one day a week where I go into some town and explore after I’ve done a ton of background work, which is part of the key to success. What are the trends? Where are things going? I read a lot and this is one of those towns that is on a very strong, upward progression from a growth perspective, so I start sniffing around.

Speaking of real estate, let’s backtrack everything. What is your story? How did you get into real estate?

This marked many years in commercial real estate for me. When I was eighteen years old, I had a pretty successful lawn business. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial and went to do a bid on a guy’s house to cut his lawn. This is the kind of yard you see on the cover of Southern Living Magazine, with water fountains and pools.

I had no concept of how I care for a lawn like this nor did any of the guys who worked for me. I went to the owner of the home whose name was Bobby Jorrie. I said, “Mr. Jorrie, I don’t really know how to take care of a yard like this, nor do any of the guys who work for me, but I’ll do it for free personally. If you’ll show me how until I learn how to master it, then I’ll teach my guys and I’ll charge you.” He looked at me and said, “I don’t have time for that but thank you for the offer. I appreciate your honesty.” It’s a key lesson there. Honesty and integrity get you a long way. If you don’t know, don’t be as your way.

It goes through quickly. Saying I don’t know and help me is a very powerful tool in real estate and investing. He gave me his card and said, “If you ever need anything, give me a call.” A few weeks later, I called him and we talked for a few minutes. I told him, “I’d like to know how you make your money,” which only an eighteen-year-old kid would be stupid enough to ask that question. He stopped at lengths and he said, “Are you asking me how I make my money or how I’m wealthy?” I swore, “Aren’t they the same thing?” He goes, “No, they’re not. Not at all. Be at my office at whatever time and day.”

I showed up in the best dress I could. I had a suit from Goodwill and black shoes that I cleaned up using a black Sharpie marker. That’s another lesson I try to give to people. Be coachable, dress the best you can, show up early, work late and learn. People are like, “I can’t afford clothes.” You can. You may be embarrassed going to Goodwill to get them, but you can buy an iron, you can get something close enough to fit and you can look the best. You can make it happen. It’s just, are you willing? That applies to so much.

I showed up at his office and it was a huge law firm. Two floors of an office tower in San Antonio, Texas. He sent me down to this giant corner office and he looked at me for a long time. It was this awkward silence but I knew better than to speak. Let the silence speak for itself. He said, “I make money as a lawyer. I’m wealthy from real estate. Do you want to learn?” I said yeah. He kept me under his wings and mentored me for eight and a half years from, “When you maintain a building, this is how you do it. When you go do it, this is how you hire a crew and hold them accountable. This is what a financial statement is. This is what a bank cares about and what your partners care about. This is a lease.” He taught law school at night. Before he’d let me use his lease, I had to be able to argue every paragraph of that 52-page lease with him.

I’m so much better from that mentoring and I try to pass it forward, and I’ve never looked back. I started at the young ripe age of eighteen. I had no money and no knowledge. I had some money from the landscape business but I was using it to pay for college. You don’t need those things. You just need to work hard and ask when you need mentoring. With the unbelievable wealth of resources available on the internet, you can get started. If the deal is good enough, that’s more than I had. You can make it happen. That’s the bottom line.

That’s an amazing story. You were there at the right time and place. You’re not being shy to ask him, “How do you make your money?” I don’t know if you were seeking a mentor at that time or if this happened and turned into a mentorship that you weren’t even expecting. Can you elaborate on that? Were you already looking for a mentor or did this just happen?

Asking For Help: You need to work hard and ask when you need mentoring. With the unbelievable wealth of resources available on the internet, you can start.

I don’t think I was but the universe reaches out. At that time, this was the end of the RTC days, which a lot of the audience probably knew nothing about. When the tax law changed in ’86, it had massive consequences, specifically in real estate and it caused the savings and loan collapse. The 2008 collapse was nothing. We lost some banks. In the 1986 collapse, we lost over 3,000 lending institutions. I was doing a lot of loans for bank foreclosed homes. I remember thinking even in high school, “There’s got to be something you can do with this. What if you just paint it and fix it up?” I always had that inkling in my mind about real estate, and the universe connects the dots for you sometimes.

It seems like Bobby Jorrie was this Mr. Miyagi type of person to you. I don’t know if he had other mentees, but I’m wondering what was it that you think he saw in you that made him want to take you under his wing?

I was referred to him, so I had a little bit of credibility. I said, “I don’t know how to do this but I’ll do it for free to learn how to do it right instead of just trying to BS my way through.” I think that weighed very heavily on him in a positive way that this young kid of eighteen was willing to do that. The reality is sometimes you got to put in the work first and you got to do it for free.

It took me 26 years to become an overnight success until I made my first extraordinary deal. People tend to see success in the millionaires and billionaires that they read about, see on television or hear on podcasts that, “That’s how I should start too. It should flow to me.” That’s not the case. The fact that they’re being highlighted makes them an outlier. Most of us have to work for decades. If you put the work in, you’ll find your own version of a Bobby Jorrie. You have to put it forward though.

Tim Ferris got an amazing podcast. He’s an amazing author and very successful. When he was in the Bay Area, he would go volunteer for free at Angel Network Meetups and VC meetups. He would do anything they said for free. That got him in front of the right people because he was willing to volunteer for free, show up, be there and help out. That goes a long way. You have to do it. You can’t just say it.

How you were referred to me by Ben Kogut, who was a past guest of mine, he told me that you were his mentor. I know you mentor other people. Can you tell me about that? This mentorship is important to level up, modeling what somebody that’s successful has achieved. You’re paying it forward and they’re learning from you. What do you seek when you’re looking to potentially accept a mentee?

Fire in their belly, meaning I want somebody who’s hungry, who wants to succeed in a positive attitude. Ben Kogut has got such an amazingly positive attitude. I started mentoring him when he was eighteen years old. He’s a freshman in college. I started producing a race called the Women’s Adventure Race to raise money for a nonprofit called the Young Survival Coalition for young women with breast cancer, and I needed help. This was like Warrior Dash and Spartan Race long before there was a Warrior Dash and Spartan Race.

I wanted every participant to have an amazing time and I wanted to raise huge money for this nonprofit. I needed help and Ben Kogut had agreed to pretty much do whatever I told him. He stayed in touch and we’d talk on and off. He came to me maybe in his sophomore year in college and said, “I’m thinking about being either a sports agent or going into real estate. Which do you think?” I said, “Do you want to go to law school and maybe make money, or do you want to work your butt off and for sure make money if you work hard and have integrity?”

When you’re 18 or 19, you’ll drop the “for sure, make money. If you work hard, you can make progress.” That’s how he got started in real estate. He said, “What do I do?” First, you need to graduate college, and then you need to get a real estate license. He said, “Now what?” “We need to go find a broker.” He did it every step of the way. He started off on residential. He goes, “How do I get in commercial?” I go, “You have to get a commercial listing,” and he went and got one. Eventually, he proved it enough that I took him in under my brokerage that I was working for at the time, and he just never looked back.

If you can trend success, those traits are very consistent. Here’s how I do these weekend workshops when we do fear setting, goal setting, mind setting, quarterly action plans and vision. It all starts with some of the same fundamentals. I’m going to use a mountain example. All of us are at the bottom of a mountain. We’re at Mount Rainier in Washington State. You and three of your teammates are climbing up and there are 50 people going up. You get up and you’ve been working hard. You look around and half the people are gone. It’s effort. You don’t know the reward yet because the top is far away. As you go up, the weather gets cold, the wind gets bad and it starts snowing. Bad conditions. Does it sound like something that happens to you regularly in real estate where the climate change?

Absolutely.

Correct and you’ve been in it long enough that you know that’s true. You look around and all of a sudden, half the people are gone. You go, “Where did they go in?” Though the weather is bad, we know how to deal with bad weather. We wear jackets and get on a rope. We’ve trained and prepared to know how to deal with challenging problems. Trained and prepared from past knowledge and mentors, so you keep going.

As you’re nearing the summit, you look around and you go, “We’re the only ones up here.” You get to watch the most beautiful sunrise you’ve ever seen. The reward of accomplishment is a beautiful sunrise and views as far as the eye can see. The reason that it’s just you are because everyone else chose to go down as conditions get adverse. As they did not prepare properly, they have to go down. You get the reward and say, “I get to see something so few people have ever seen.”

That’s the same in our business. That’s exactly what we’re doing in the business. We think we’re in the business of buying and owning real estate. What we’re in the business of doing is figuring out how to deal with things others won’t, ethically and honorably, and work our way through huge challenges. In exchange, we get a great reward. The reward is income, pride of ownership, asset creation, asset wealth, and more deals. When you put all those pieces together, you can get a lot of joy and create long-term passive wealth.

Part of the thing about being successful in a real estate sales career is people think it’s easy but it’s not. I love solving problems myself. The harder the problem, the more I love it because the more people won’t touch it. It’s better. Only a few of us are willing to do that and be the last man standing at the top of the mountain. I love everything that you said about all of it. What I love about successful is they persevere. If the going gets tough, it doesn’t matter. We’ve trained for this and we’re ready to go. Going back to your mentor when you were eighteen, what was the very first real estate deal you ever did?

Asking For Help: We’re in the business of figuring out how to deal with challenges.

I don’t remember the year. I was still a semi-pro athlete on teen vignette doing multi-day adventure races. I think it was ’99 or 2000. I had done some residential already. I had a teammate, John Beard, who’s always positive and always incredibly fit. He grew up on a ranch, which means he knew how to weld and do electrical.

I have to do a deal almost. I was driving back from a Landmark forum in Houston, Texas to Austin. I wrote down, “I’m going to do a commercial deal.” I saw a “For Sale. Bank Owned” sign. It was a full city block on highway 290, 45 minutes outside of Austin. I started doing research which is a key lesson. If you want to win in real estate, you need to know the data. I sat down with Mr. Jorrie and we talked over the deal. I went to go make the offer, and it was a low-ball offer.

As I’m going to make this offer, I pulled over on the side of the highway and I called Mr. Jorrie. He said, “Are you in Giddings?” I said, “No, I’m on the side of the highway. I turned around. I can’t go.” He goes, “Are you okay? Were you in a wreck?” I said, “No. I just can’t go.” He goes, “Why? What happened?” I say, “They’re not going to accept my offer.” He goes, “It’s not up to you to say no. It’s up to them to say no. Get back in your car and go make the offer,” and then he hung up on me.

I went and made the offer. I’m sitting at the bank and I gave him a two-choice proposal. That’s a great option, by the way. If you want something to be accepted, don’t make an offer because you’re going to get a counter. Make 2 or 3 offers and say, “Choose one.” Just make sure all three of those offers are acceptable, drive it in one way or get close. If you give somebody a choice versus give me a yes or no, it’s a lot better to give a choice.

I give them the offer and I stand up to leave. He looks at me across the desk because I told him what was wrong with this building. He was the president of the bank. He didn’t know it had asbestos because he was the new president. They owned it for fourteen years. He was like, “We got to get these off the books,” and said okay. I sat back down and I looked at John. I didn’t know what to do with okay. I was only prepared for no. He accepted and signed it. I have that LOI framed on my wall with the before and after pictures.

For the next six months, John Beard and I would go up there because it was in such bad condition. We didn’t have any real money and wealth. We did the work ourselves. We bought a full city block on a highway frontage. We probably made 6X on that at the end of the day. The storefront glass were giant tempered glass sliding door windows that we found on Craigslist. We didn’t have any money for new materials.

The metal mansard roof was used Mueller building metal that we figured out how to build a facade from and then figured out how to paint it. If you’re willing to put forth the effort, it’s wonderful to have your back against the wall. What you should be scared of is getting comfortable. That’s when you’re at the greatest risk because you’re not watching the ball. You’re not working hard and not paying attention to your investors’ capital. When you get comfortable, put the brakes on and go, “How do I get uncomfortable?” That’s going to put you forward. You’re going to be watching the ball when you’re uncomfortable and nervous.

You are a champ when it comes to being resourceful. You do whatever it takes.

I didn’t have any choice.

What are the nuggets that you learned from that initial transaction that still stick with you? What are the best lessons you learned from that experience?

One, never be afraid to make the offer. It is irrelevant what’s being asked. All that’s relevant is what are you willing to pay for it and what’s it worth. What they’re asking for has nothing to do with the deal if you’re a savvy investor or a guardian of other people’s money. The second thing is we had a few investors who trusted us. Be a guardian of other people’s money. That is your obligation well above your own money and your time. If you take other people’s money, your obligation is theirs first.

Their money before yours and your fees. Their interests before your own. That will guarantee you tremendous success. We did a deal where we’re buying a portfolio of seven buildings of industrial and retail. At a conference, I stood up and pitched the deal. We raised the money in about two minutes. That was not the deal. It was because they believed in us. They believe in the syndicator and the investor. They know we only do have good assets. The third thing is to work your butt off and always push on price.

Whenever you’re spending the money on the asset, where can you say it is? Can you say $1,000? You go, “It’s not worth $1,000.” You’re right if it’s a $10 million project but it’s not. I’ll give you another example from this resourcefulness that’s embedded in me. We just had to do a 20,000 square foot concrete slab and I saved $3 a square foot. That’s $60,000.

The HPAC is very expensive. It was $1,000 a ton before. It’s $2,500 a ton now but I was able to save $200 a ton. I needed 60 tons so I saved $12,000. Between those two line items, that’s $72,000. The money adds up quick. It’s not just my money. It’s other people’s money too. We put about 50% of our own capital into a deal. When you lead by example and by your work ethic, the deals come together.

You’re an experienced fundraiser for syndications. For people that are trying to get in that space to start raising funds and attracting investors, what do you recommend for folks to do to even start that off? Any advice?

Asking For Help: You’re at the greatest risk when you’re comfortable.

I’m working on a book and I’m working on it from the investor’s perspective. In other words, if you’re an early investor in other’s deals, what should I look for? That applies to everyone. What everyone will tell you and is the correct answer but is also the easy lazy answer is, “Who’s the person? Who is the person putting the deal together? Who’s the investor? Who’s the syndicator? I want to know about them.” They’re right but what if it’s a bad deal? What if that syndicator, God forbid, dropped dead? How’s the deal going to sustain? The first thing to say is, “If I can put together a strong enough deal, I’ll find the money.” Let me ask you a question. If I want a property in your neck of the woods in the Bay Area and I found a 12% cap multifamily, how hard would it be to raise money if I had that building under contract?

Within my own network, that would be pretty easy.

Everybody will be jumping on that. That’s out of control.  If you find the right deal, you can make up for your youth of not being a great investor. They’re going to want additional controls and additional oversight. Focus on finding a quality deal that you would be willing to share with your grandmother, “My grandma would put money into this deal. I would feel comfortable with my grandma putting money into this deal.” If you find that deal, that will get you started. We can take risks in your deals because our reputation is strong. We guarantee the loans. We put a lot of our own cash in, but you can find those right deals. They are out there still in any market, good and bad markets.

I want to switch gears to your company, Only Epic. Tell me about that. When and why did you start your company Only Epic?

We had two companies, Mittman Real Estate and AR Interests, Inc. AR Interests is a holding company. It’s a management company. That stands for Adventure Racer Interests because I was an adventure racer. Only Epic came about because I hated a company being named after me. I wrote down a series of words that were valuable to me like doing things in an epic fashion and ways that were monumental. I used the synonym finder then I started searching for websites that were available. No kidding, I had a long list of words that were of meaning to me and that’s how it came about.

I brought on a partner who helps in putting together deals. He’s got a good finance background. We get along well because he’s an ex semi-pro road bike rider. When we’re on a trail run, we’re giving each other a lot of smack talk. I thought, “This guy is willing to smack talk me? Let’s go into business.” We decided to join forces and merge. I brought him into Only Epic and it’s gone very well.

We’ve had our hurdles. If you don’t, you’re not really in business. If you’re a developer or a serious investor, as a caretaker of other people’s money, if you’re not waking up 2 or 3 times a year going in a total panic like you’re going to lose it all, you’re probably not a developer, a serious syndicator or a build it guy. You don’t take the value of other people’s money strongly enough.

The answer is it’s a variety of things that make Only Epic. We syndicate deals in the Southwest, Southeast and Midwest. We put together a portfolio of seven properties in Ohio, Kansas and Texas closing with very favorable interest rates. That was a fund. We’re putting together another fund. I’m working on this book, Two Gifts To Investors. We’re going to give it away to people. Hopefully, it will be helpful. Do your thing and spend time outside. As a company, we value education, family, health, fitness, and doing very good deals.

What asset class do you guys mainly like to focus on? I know you’ve done a lot.

My bread and butter is going to be retail centers that are suburbs to one of the Top 50 MSAs that are anchored by either a grocery or a Walmart type. We also do medical office building and then my partner, Stewart does some multifamily and self-storage. We’ve done a lot of single-tenant things for AT&T and Verizon. We split between value add and other asset classes, and that’s putting a lot of light industrial. It’s just in time for logistics near an Amazon Hub. Those categories are pretty easy for us to slip into. It’s been successful and we’ve learned an awful lot. The market conditions are changing, so I’m not sure where we’ll invest in five years, but that’s where we are now.

What kinds of investment strategies do you employ to create value in these properties?

What we look for is if its value-add is either poorly maintained, poorly managed or both. If it’s in a great location, hard signalized corner, good traffic amount and good visibility, that’s what intrigue us. If it’s industrial and near a lot of other access ports, highway infrastructure, barge infrastructure, rail infrastructure, if it’s close to Amazon Hub, you likely have a low vacancy in the area, so those things will have an impact on our decision-making. We like rents that are at or below market with low vacancies.

My strategy is when I’m working with an investor, my goal is not to make a ton on rent increases over time. If I can keep up with inflation, I’m happy. What I don’t want to do is lose ground. Protect money first, then make more wealth after that. If I’m buying a building that’s getting $50 a square foot in rent for a retail coffee shop, but the market is $25 a square foot of rent and the landlord got it because he amortized the TI, I don’t want that building. If that tenant never leaves, I’m never going to get that $50 a foot again that I paid for. I would rather get that building for $20 a foot knowing I can replace that rent. It’s some value creation and it’s some risk arbitrage, as well as making sure you have assets where you can secure good long-term low-interest debt.

How do you guys find your deals? Are a lot of deals being given to you since you’ve been doing this for a while or is it a mixture?

At this point, fortunately, our email inboxes is always a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing that there are always a million deals in it. It’s a curse because we never get through it all. There’s too much in there.

Out of all of the asset classes and real estate that you invest in, do you have a favorite?

My bread and butter for decades has always been retail shopping centers. Now, I like Class B minus light industrial. It’s good because there’s a flex space even more. The light flex, I can break it up. I can increase the size by taking out a wall or adding a wall. I’m always going to have a list of tenants wanting that space. Think of the air conditioning guy, the plumber, the t-shirt print shop. I’m not paying above replacement costs. If I’m getting a tilt-wall industrial, I’m paying a big price. Some B minus light industrial may not be the prettiest thing, but do they do well. I like to buy things below replacement costs. It cost me $120 to build, but if I can buy it for $60 and add $10 to get it where it needs to be, I’m going to beat the competition who builds a new building because they can’t compete with my rent.

What are the challenges in that space if there are any?

There’s a lot. I encourage your audience to start researching and using after-action reports. Every time you come up with a problem, document it so you learn. It’s not really a challenge for this asset class as much as our industry in general. Interest rates are so extraordinarily low. The stock market did make a correction, but not a big one. There’s a lot of unknown with government programs and government regulations as far as foreclosure and evictions.

With so much unknown in interest rates and historically low compressing cap rates, what happens when interest rates go up? What do we do in a stagflation economy, which it appears we’re in? You then add to that some other disruptions of the supply chain that are affecting construction costs from concrete, CPVC pipe running more than copper pipe, HPAC, and you’re signing a lease not knowing what your true tenant improvement expenses are. There are ways we arbitrage for that.

Asking For Help: If you don’t have a problem, then something’s wrong. Learn from your problems and move forward.

We put up limits, but there’s a lot of unknown between debt, government regulation and construction supply chain. We’re in a lot of new territories. The other thing I like to add to that is we have a very serious workforce problem. That workforce problem is tied not just to the supply of workforce but to the supply of affordable housing for the workforce. If you have staff at a restaurant and they can’t hire people because that person can’t afford to live in that area, you have a tenant who can’t pay rent. It all trickles down.

What kinds of advice do you like to give to newer aspiring commercial real estate investors?

Do a fear-setting exercise. You can Google the Tim Ferriss podcast or reach out to me via LinkedIn, and we’ll send you our fear-setting forms. Before you focus on what your goals are, focus on your mission and vision. Goals are meant to achieve the vision, so set your vision first. Vivid Vision is a great book by Cameron Herold to help you figure that out. Do your vision work, then set your goals to achieve your vision. You break it down, then do a quarterly action plan to achieve your goals, and build on it from there.

You take it one step at a time. You break it apart into bits and you just start achieving. Write it down and you have to do it with discipline. You have to focus. The fear of “I don’t have money” or “I can’t find a deal” was told to me by someone who said, “How is it coming on finding deals? I don’t have any yet and I’m frustrated.” How many offers did you make this week? None. How many deals did you look at this week? 1 or 2. Ben Kogut works for HGH Investments. Do you know that they look at over 500 deals a week?

He told me that on the show.

You tell me where the odds are at better finding a deal. Is it looking at 1 or 2 and making no offers or looking at 500 to 1,000 and making 100 offers? It’s a statistics game. If it’s $1 million and the building is worth $400,000, but it’s been on the market for two years and you’re embarrassed to make a $400,000 offer, that’s on you. Make the offer. Let them say no.

Any big goals that you’re working on, either personal or business?

It’s to get this investor book published so I can get it in the hands of people and help them. I’m going to try to speed Summit Denali in Alaska. It’s two of us. We’re going to solo it together. We’ll be next to each other but we won’t be on a rope. We’ll there for each other in an emergency. My goal is 96 hours or less from base camp to Denali and back down. It’s normally two weeks. We’re going to be doing another real estate fund. The goal is to hopefully have enough good, quality assets under contract to put that fund together by January 1, 2022.

I love to ask this question towards the end. What does success mean to you?

I’m going to ask you a question back, do you consider Richard Branson successful?

I do. Yes.

What if I were to tell you that Richard Branson’s goal was to be a wreck lose and to live solo on an ashram? His lifetime goal was to just live quietly in a cabin. Would you then consider him successful?

That’s making me think. The thing is I know other things that he does and whatnot, but I don’t know that other side of him. If I just were to focus on that aspect of it, probably not, but I know that he definitely use that in business and everything he’s built, so I focus on that.

The challenge is success needs to be an individual goal, not what you read about. If your goal as a successful person is to have a successful podcast, a real estate investment platform, and help educate people, you’re successful. The first thing is to define really, truly, deeply what success is. Here’s what success is not. You will not be on your deathbed going, “I wish I would have worked more.” It’s maybe, “I wish I would have spent more time with my partner, outdoors, and giving to charity,” but it’s not going to be, “I wish I would have worked harder.”

My answer is more of a question. What do you want to define as your success? I would encourage you to not say a dollar amount. That’s easy. Once you know the tools to make money, money is like a river. You have to know how to reach in, scoop, hold onto it and redeploy it, at least in real estate. What is success to you? What is success in business, family, spiritually, physically and mentally, and then think, “I feel pretty fortunate where I am or I have some work to do?” For most of us, we have work to do. To box yourself in to try to be like the guy on the cover of a magazine, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Don’t do that. Focus on success to you as an individual.

You made me think and I appreciate that. What’s your superpower that’s contributed to having this great life?

No matter how many times you knock me down, I stand back up. That would be one. Two is I believe, as Gary Keller says, “You fail your way forward.” Solve problems but if you don’t have a problem, something is wrong. Learn from your problems and move forward. I’m a big believer in learning from my problems and moving forward. Hopefully, not repeating the problems too many times over and over again.

How can somebody get ahold of you? 

Find me on LinkedIn or Facebook. I’m not much of an Instagrammer, but I do have an Instagram account. It’s @JBoMountain. On LinkedIn, @JasonMittman and on Facebook @JasonMittman. Our website is OnlyEpic.com. Hit me up either with a message on LinkedIn or one of the other social media platforms. As soon as that investor book is done, we’ll gladly send out digital copies.

I appreciate that. That’s all the time we have. Thanks, Jason, for joining me on this episode. I enjoyed our conversation. You offered tremendous value and insight for me too. I appreciate you. I appreciate all that you do. To my audience, thanks for checking out this episode. Remember to leave a review on iTunes. It helps me attract even more guests like Jason. Until next time, live life abundantly.

Important Links:

• Only Epic Holdings
• Young Survival Coalition
• Vivid Vision
• @JasonMittman – LinkedIn
• @JBoMountain – Instagram
• @JasonMittman – Facebook
• Tim Ferriss podcast – fear-setting episode
• iTunes – The School of Cash Flow Podcast