Chris Larsen on Creating ‘Next-Level Income’ to Achieve True Financial Freedom – EP 301

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Almost everyone wants financial freedom, but few take steps to make it happen. For many people, even high-income earners, their time is compromised by their need to keep making money–and the things they actively need to do to earn it.

Today’s guest is Chris Larsen, and he understands this struggle well. He’s the author of Next-Level Income and an expert in helping people create and build passive income streams. Chris aspired to achieve financial freedom from a very early age. After many years in the medical device industry and time spent growing his real estate business, he’s turned his goals into reality.

In this episode, Chris shares tools and techniques you can use to keep your money working for you and earning interest. You’ll discover his strategies for generating passive income (including investing in multifamily, self-storage, mobile home parks, and car washes) and how to double down on winning strategies to live the life you’ve always wanted.

One last thing, if you’d like a free copy of Chris’s book or audiobook, simply visit https://www.nextlevelincome.com/book to claim your copy right now!

Key Takeaways with Chris Larsen

  • How to create an opportunity fund strategy that keeps earning interest.
  • The benefits of a multi-pronged approach to passive income.
  • How to make more, save more, and pay less in taxes.
  • The impact that losing his father had on Chris and how that shifted his mindset towards achieving financial independence.
  • What makes car washes such a great part of a passive income strategy–and how to diversify your portfolio with recession-proof businesses.

Chris Larsen Tweetables

“Whether you’re an investor, whether you’re an athlete, whatever it is, if you want to achieve success, you have to make sacrifices.” - Chris Larsen

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To unlock your potential and start earning real passive income, visit joshcantwellcoaching.com

Josh Cantwell: So, hey there. Welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Hey, it’s Josh Cantwell. I’m your host. And today, I have a fantastic interview with one of my friends. His name is Chris Larsen. Chris is the author of a book called Next-Level Income. And Chris helps professionals basically create and build passive income streams to achieve true freedom.

 

Chris is a fantastic guy to talk to and listen and learn from because, number one, Chris is going to talk to you about what he calls his opportunity fund and how to always keep your money working for you and earning interest through his opportunity fund strategy. Number two, you’re going to hear more about some of the context and the information inside of the book. NextLevelIncome.com/book is the site where you can get the book for free for my audience, both the book and the audiobook.

 

Number three, we’re going to talk about Chris’s strategy, which he describes in the book about his multi-different pronged approach to passive income, including multifamily, self-storage, mobile home parks, and car washes. Number four, you’re going to learn what Chris’s primary strategy is to make more, save more, and pay less in taxes. And then we’re going to do a deep dive on car washes. We haven’t really talked before about using car washes as a passive income strategy. And you’re going to learn about three different types of car washes and some of the financial structure and the profitability that comes out of these car washes.

 

You’re going to learn about the express tunnel model. You’re going to learn about the full-service model, and finally, the self-service model and the five different reasons why customers use car washes and how you can use car washes as a recession-proof investment strategy and why it’s still such a mom-and-pop business that’s ripe for yield and ripe for profitability and how Chris is capturing passive income and doubling down on his diversification outside of multifamily with car washes. You’re going to love this interview because we’ve never had someone like Chris on before. Here we go.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

Josh Cantwell: So, hey, Chris, listen, welcome to Accelerated Investor, man. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. I’ll talk a little bit about your book and some of the opportunities that you’re working on right now. So, thanks for joining me today.

 

Chris Larsen: Oh, Josh, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been excited about this as well. And yeah, thanks for having me on.

 

Josh Cantwell: You bet. So, the book Next-Level Income is the latest book in your portfolio to talk to your audience and kind of tell your story about passive income, building income, kind of building out your portfolio. You have a very well-rounded portfolio, not only multifamily, but self-storage and car washes, opportunity fund. So, what I’d like to do is to help our audience get a better understanding of who you are, what you do. Just tell us about the book. Like, what’s in the book? What will people learn when they read the book? What are some of the highlights that you wanted to come across and kind of educate people on when you wrote it?

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. So, Josh, you do a wonderful job with your platform, educating people, giving them a vision for how they can achieve financial independence. And that was the goal of the book. It was a little bit to tell about my story. If you want to get a copy of it and you’re listening today, you can get a copy for free. I’ll send it to you, NextLevelIncome.com/book, the address, and I’ll send you a copy.

 

Yeah, talk a little bit about my story, how losing my father and my best friend early in life really kind of gave me this internal motivation to be financially independent. And what I realized was I said, “Hey, I want to live life on my own terms. I don’t want to have any regrets.” And the fact of the matter is, in this life and the world we live in, in the United States, you need money to do that.

 

So, if you don’t have money, you’re always going to have to compromise something, whether it’s your time, time with your family. Maybe, you may have to compromise ethics at work if you need a paycheck for some reason. And I didn’t want to be in that position. So, I laid out a plan very early in college to become financially independent.

 

I started in the stock market and eventually, long story short, I bought my first piece of property at 21 and started in the residential side, but ultimately, about 10 years ago, moved full force into the commercial side. We started multifamily, as you mentioned, Josh. And we expand the portfolio now to include self-storage, mobile home parks. And over the past six months or so, we’ve also started to acquire car washes as well.

 

Josh Cantwell: Got it. I love it. So, for somebody who, regardless of their age, where that resonates with them, where they’re compromising, maybe not going to every one of their kids’ baseball games, basketball games, football games, volleyball games, they’re compromising corporate that’s sending them off to travel. They’re compromising because they have to be at certain meetings at certain times. And there are other things they’d rather be doing. What were some of the things that you did right at the beginning, at age 21, that said, “Okay, I’m not going to compromise,” that you made the decision, but what were some of the tactical things that you did to actually make that a reality?

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. So, first off, I think it’s important, whether you’re an investor, whether you’re an athlete, whatever it is, if you want to achieve success, you do have to make sacrifices, okay. So, I think it’s important to note, like I won’t say I never had to make a compromise, but what I did right was I made a plan early, Josh. I made a plan. I said, “Okay, this is the plan.” Now, my plan was to buy enough single-family properties. So, once I paid them off, I’d have $10,000 a month free and clear coming in.

 

And I don’t know if that was the most efficient way. And that’s exactly why I wrote the book is to talk about how you can be more efficient, and the plan that I came up with and I share now with people is first, you have to make more money, you have to keep more of your money, and then you grow your money. And I think that one of the other things I did well is I went out and I found a career where I could become an accredited investor.

 

And I’m sure a lot of listeners are familiar with that term, but accredited as a single individual is $200,000 of income or more. My goal was $300,000, where I spent 18 years in the medical device industry and I worked a lot of hours, especially when I was growing our real estate business. It was not uncommon. I probably averaged six days a week, 16-hour days for many, many years to do that. But I made a plan. I’ve worked that plan. And I think the more money, the more capital you have come in, makes things easier. And there are plenty of things I could have done a lot better as well over that period of time, too.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah. My audience knows I’ve been recording this solocast series around the 9 Traits of Elite Entrepreneurs, and one of them, which is actually rule number 1, is to invest for cash flow now. Not to invest for equity now, but to invest for cash flow now because the cash flow is what allows this financial independence to happen regardless of how much equity is out there. You can’t eat equity. Equity is on paper. You can only eat it once you realize it and sell off the property, which we don’t really want to sell a lot of our properties off because we want to keep building the balance sheet and sell them sometime down the road at exactly the strategic time.

 

So, it sounds like that was something you were willing to do, was I want to work in the medical device field. But I’m going to acquire these single-family homes, move into multifamily, focus on cash flow, not on flipping, not on equity, but cash flow. Tell me about that for you because there’s always the temptation when you have a property with a lot of equity to sell it, right?

 

Chris Larsen: Oh, yeah.

 

Josh Cantwell: Unlock all this equity, sometimes it makes sense to do that, but for most people, it’s just building the cash flow is where it’s at. That’s what allows you to have the financial independence, to not have to compromise. So, what were some of those decisions that you made to kind of just focus on cash flow, cash flow, cash flow?

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. Oh man, it’s a wonderful point. You can’t eat equity. And also, the other thing I found, I have coaching clients, Josh, that make hundreds of thousands of dollars. You know what they said to me? “Chris, I feel like I’m living paycheck to paycheck.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? You’re a millionaire.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but I got all this money tied up in my 401(k). I don’t have access to it.”

 

If they lost their job, they don’t know what would pay the bills. And that’s what I talk about, like develop a plan where you have enough income coming in, enough passive income cash flow coming in on a monthly basis to cover your expenses, whether it’s basic expenses, everything that you need now or everything you need now, plus some. I’m part of the mastermind, and we call it the 200% Club. Our goal is 200% passive income of our current expenses.

 

So, yes, cash flow is important. I write about Chapter 3 in my book. So, once you build capital, you need to put it into– I call an opportunity fund, not an opportunity zone, but an opportunity fund, a fund that houses your capital before you deploy it. And again, this is something I could have done better, Josh. I used high cash value life insurance, which I know you’ve had some guests talk about it recently on your show here. And that’s a way where you can continually keep your money working.

 

So, think about this. You have cash flow coming in, but if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank over the past year, you lost if you were to leave the government 8%. I’d say it’s probably more like 10% or 15% due to inflation. Today, we had the highest CPI in 40 years. It will be nice and call it an adjusted CPI.

 

So, you want a lot of cash flow, but you don’t want a lot of cash sitting there and doing that. So, how do you balance, keeping your equity at play in this income? And that’s where I think we put something in place in our strategy. We call it the Investment Optimizer, which is basically housing your cash inside of a cash value insurance policy, where then you can deploy it when you need it, and then you can flow your income back into there and continually moving your capital. And you know, an investor, I mean, if you don’t have that money sitting there, getting eaten away by inflation, I think, at a minimum, you can earn a couple of extra percent a year on your investment.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, so guys, the mechanics of that because I used to actually sell that stuff. When I was out of college, my audience knows I was a financial advisor, series six, 21, 22 years old and I sold overfunded cash value life insurance. And some of that went into the stock market. Some of it was going into the portfolio of the life insurance company. I worked with Northwestern Mutual and I worked with MetLife and I worked with some others around Cleveland…

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah, great company.

 

Josh Cantwell: Even playing some of the big boys, right? And the whole idea there, the mechanics is put the money in, if let’s say it’s earning an 8% to 10% return roughly regardless of whatever the investment vehicle is within the life insurance, but you can then, when the right opportunity comes, borrow the money back out of there, deploy it into, let’s say, a multifamily investment or a car wash or self-storage.

 

And then when that deal pays off, let’s say you put it into a multifamily opportunity and that thing’s paying a 6%, 8%, 10% pref on your money, you’re getting that preferred return, you can then shove the money back into the life insurance policy. And the net cost of that is about 1%, give or take. And so, the money’s still earning a positive return minus the cost of the borrow. It’s really an amazing vehicle.

 

I do it, I overfund the life insurance policy and have it forever. I’ve got an investor, one of our biggest investors that’s got millions of dollars with us in our multifamily opportunities. We’re always on the phone talking about, “Hey, I got to put $200,000 back in my overfunded life insurance. And I just got to do it once a year and then pull it right back out.”

 

Chris Larsen: Pull it out, yeah.

 

Josh Cantwell: So, that’s how that works.

 

Chris Larsen: Love it.

 

Josh Cantwell: That kind of is the opportunity fund. That’s kind of the thing.

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. And that’s what I call– in Chapter 3 of my book, that’s my opportunity fund. How’s that? And to your point, Josh, it’s setting up the structure correctly. But let’s say that same coaching client, if instead of max funding his 401(k), he funded his 401(k) up to his company match and then he took the rest and he pumped it through one of these cash value life insurance policies.

 

Now, he actually has access to capital where he can create this income. He has flexibility. So, let’s say he loses his job. He can just go and grab some cash out of there, or hopefully, he’s already created that income to do it. So, I think that’s a fantastic strategy, something that I set up. My son’s 12, we set up when he was 13 years old. But again, I didn’t do it exactly like I would do it now.

 

And we’ve tweaked some things. I use a line of credit now, so it lowers my cost of capital even further. It makes things a little bit more convenient. And hey, if it’s more convenient, you’re probably even more likely to do it. It’s going to be more efficient.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, I love it. Now, one of the things that I was really interested in peeling back the onion on, Chris, because we’ve talked a lot about multifamily, we’ve had self-storage guys come on, and we talked about syndications, but you said you diversified into car washes, right? And these car washes, like I get my car washed, it’s completely automated, like there’s a completely…

 

Chris Larsen: Oh, yeah.

 

Josh Cantwell: There’s this multimillion-dollar machine washing the cars and there’s one person, guy or girl, usually a young person in their early to mid-20s, just kind of hanging out. Thank you, nothing breaks, saying hi, oh, you put your credit card in. Oh, do you want to upgrade? Do you want to do the monthly plan? And I’m like, this is a multimillion-dollar business with one employee.

 

So, help me understand your play in the car washes, and let’s talk about a deal so my audience can understand the culture of acquisition cost. Are there value-add opportunities? What optimizes a car wash’s net free cash flow? Because I’m interested in learning more about this for myself and seeing how can I diversify into that as well? So, tell me about car washes.

 

Chris Larsen: Yes. So, you hit, man. That was the perfect intro because you touched on a few different things here. So, I’m going to go through them sequentially. So, first off, you mentioned value add, Josh. My book is about adding value just like you do in multifamily real estate. But as you know, you can take the value-add strategy, it’s a Warren Buffett strategy, it’s a Benjamin Graham strategy of investing, finding value in businesses.

 

And you can do the same thing in multifamily. You can do the same thing in self-storage. And yes, you can do the same thing in car washes. And I think it’s really important to note before it’s our business first and foremost. Yes, they have real estate, which is usually about a quarter, maybe a third of the value of that business, which we love real estate.

 

We also love the depreciation from the equipment. So, you get to maintain that. So, that’s something important to note. It is a business more so than real estate. That means there are more levers to pull, more knobs to turn, more inefficiencies that are out there. Also, more things to screw up if you got the wrong operator.

 

So, first off, you mentioned the express tunnel model. So, you have maybe one up to five employees, but yes, these tunnels are, typically, at a minimum, about $3 million to build. They range in size from 100 feet all the way up to our largest tunnel that we have is 165 feet. And you can run it very efficiently.

 

And our generation, people like it because if you go back a generation or so, people, like other people use the form. They get out of the car. They do a full car wash. So, you have the express tunnel model, you have the full-service model. That’s where you drive up and you have a team of people that are cleaning your car. And that’s nice. It’s a professional car wash, takes a little bit longer, but if you’re a retiree and this is your weekly routine and you get your Cadillac cleaned like my grandfather did that he renewed his lease every two or three years, that’s like a weekly ritual. It made him feel good. And that’s an important point I’m going to get back to is feeling good.

 

Then the other model is the self-serve model. So, when I was in college, I raced bicycles since I was 14 years old, kind of on and off. And I finished a mountain bike ride or race or I’d finish a race. I had my bike on the car. Well, you can’t drive through one of these automated washes. Yeah, they wouldn’t let me through with my bike rack on or my roof box on.

 

So, you go to one of these self-service and you do it yourself. You put the quarters in, which is a real pain in the butt. Some have credit cards now, but they’re also kind of eyesores because they got like 6, 10, 15 bays. So, cities don’t like these a lot, but you don’t have any employees. They’re nice.

 

But when we looked at the model, the majority are these express tunnels when it comes to profitability. You can have high profitability. You don’t have to have as much overhead with the employees. And you can really, we’ll say exploit the membership model, which is what you mentioned, Josh. So, if you say, “Okay, the focus is going to be the express tunnel model, how do you add value?”

 

So, the first way you add value, real simple, is increase revenue, right? Well, we love going in and putting $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a door and increasing rents a couple of hundred dollars a month in our multifamily properties. Wonderful strategy, but it can take a couple of years to renovate all of those units. You can go in, and just for an example, we bought a wash. We bought it. They had about 600 memberships. We sold as many memberships as they had in a year in six weeks.

 

So, you can go in and you can teach a small team with very simple sales skills. And this is coming from somebody who had spent a couple of decades in sales, very simple sales strategies. You treat them well, you may pay them a couple more dollars an hour or give them some bonuses. So, that person that’s standing there, if their card reader, as you mentioned, Josh, is saying, “Hey, Mr. Cantwell, it’s nice to see you again. I know you’ve had your car washed twice this month. If you got the membership, you would actually save 10 bucks this month and you can wash it as many times as you want.”

 

And that’s called monthly recurring revenue, MRR. And that is a wonderful thing to have coming in because if it rains, like it did here in Asheville, North Carolina yesterday, people probably are going to get their cars washed. Hey, guess what? We still get that recurring revenue coming in. So I’ll pause there for a quick second.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah. So, if it costs 3 million bucks on the low end to build an express tunnel wash and the city is supportive of it because it’s not an eyesore, kind of fits in with the other single-tenant retail like an Arby’s or a McDonald’s, it kind of just fits into the landscape structure and architecture of a busy road and you put an express tunnel model in 3 million bucks, what level of membership is kind of the breakeven if you will? How many memberships? And is that really the goal, like build it and get memberships to X number, and then anything over and above that is profit? Is that how you look at it?

 

Chris Larsen: That’s a good question. So, it depends. There are a lot of variables that go into it. But I think the thing that I really kind of highlight is that the profit margins on this are about 50% on these. So, you can kind of base and say, hey, if we’re selling a $30 membership and it costs us, again, $3 million, you’re probably looking at $5 million, maybe even as high as $10 million for this.

 

But if you’re generating an extra hundred memberships per week that you own one of these, let’s say $3,000 a week, you can increase your revenue of, say, $1.5 million gross in a year. And if your profit margin is 50%, that’s $750,000. So, you can do the math. If you’re paying $5 million and you get $750,000 a year, that’d be from zero. And then it grows over time. So, you can continue to grow that membership, grow that membership, and it becomes extremely profitable.

 

Josh Cantwell: And so, a guy like me, big multifamily portfolio, kind of the backbone of what we do and will always probably be, the steps to getting one of these started, to find out, like planning, zoning, commission, figuring out where they’re willing to put one of these, is there a feasibility study done to determine what the other competition is around if there’s room for one of these, and then finding the right size lot in a builder? Are there franchise builders that their specialty is building these express tunnels? Tell me a little bit more about like getting off the ground if I had the appetite to build one of these $3 to $10 million facilities, which I sort of do. Where do I begin?

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. So, all right, let’s talk about operations and the challenge with operations because that’ll answer a lot of these questions, and then the strategies for acquisition and disposition if that sounds good. So, first off, operations, again, while leveraged, we have an engineer that’s our director of operations for the car washes, mechanical engineer, also he actually has a civil engineering degree as well. And they did a lot of chemicals, like impregnation for medical.

 

That’s important because this is a mechanical and chemical business. You can increase or decrease your cost of chemicals. You can decrease your cost of chemicals, 50%, just by making sure you have the right dilution rates, the right spray angles, the right nozzle tips, all these things. Are you spraying it at the right time? Because think about it, it’s like a symphony when you go through one of these washes, Josh.

 

You’re like, okay, the water is coming in and the guy’s spraying my bumper. And then the pre-wash comes on and then you have the soap come on, and then you have your tires, all that stuff. Think about it. If something’s spraying your car for 10 seconds and it’s on for 10 seconds or 5 seconds before you get there and 5 seconds after instead of just those 10 seconds, that’s 50% wastage. So, you can decrease that massively.

 

Also, you can increase and decrease the conveyor speeds, the distance on the conveyor to help adjust for timing when people go through. People want to feel good. I mentioned my grandfather want to feel good about his car. People want to feel good. Quality is number four out of the top five when it comes to these washes. People want convenience, they want value, they want consistency, and they want to feel good when they go through this.

 

So, operations are really important. We looked at how can we do this? And what we found over the past 18, 24 months is that you can work with a franchise and get one of these started. You can go buy a current operation and bring their operating team along with you. But there’s really not a lot like multifamily, Josh, we got great options. We can say, hey, we’re going to interview these three property management companies. We just don’t have as many options in the car wash space. So, we built our team from scratch.

 

So, if you want to do it on a small scale, I’d say probably the easiest thing to do is just go buy one that’s already in place and then see how you can improve operations, you’re going to learn a lot. If you want to build one from scratch, you can certainly do that, but I’ll tell you what, we’ve bought, I think, three or four brand-new car washes here just in the past four months from operators that built them and we’re like, you know what? I want to sell it. Like, this is a lot harder than I thought to get going. So, I think probably buying one that’s already built or working with a franchise makes sense for a small operation.

 

Now, here’s why it’s exciting from a larger scale. So, the largest operator in the United States has 2.5%, 3% of market share. The international standard for a major player in a market is 5% or more. There is no single major player in this market. So, what does that mean? There are a lot of opportunities. At today’s demand, it’s going to take 15 years to build out express tunnel washes. 15 years.

 

You mentioned, one of the things you said, the major concern when you look at sites or when you look at current washes is how close is the competition. Dilution is the major. So, as long as you can build one of these on top of another one, you’re probably in pretty good shape. So, we can buy these at around 8x multiple of EBITDA. And by packaging them in a portfolio, you can sell it at 12x to 15x multiples of EBITDA because you can sell to a larger group or a private equity group.

 

Now, it’s like, whoa, okay, why wouldn’t we do this all day long? The answer is we’re trying. We’re looking to grow our portfolio to 100 to 150 here in the next two to three years. The opportunity is that, this is why I mentioned probably the easiest thing for you to do, Josh, is go look at buying one, 15% of the market is controlled by the bigger players, 85% of car washes today in the United States are owned by operators that own less than five. So, we’ll call them mom and pops, right? And they’re making great money.

 

One of my coaching clients, they were killing it. They’re making $300,000, $400,000 per location. So, they don’t really have the same incentives to optimize and turn those levers. And also, maybe they don’t have the investment to upgrade all their blowers so that your car is a little bit drier and the customers feel better when they get out or their vacuums or the microfiber cloths, maybe they don’t have the capacity to do that or they don’t get the deals that we do because they don’t have the amount. Maybe they can’t put the technology in place.

 

We overlay our multifamily in our CoStar data. CoStar, they might be a little inside baseball for some people with some of this data as well to determine, hey, what are our good sites? What are good locations for these? So, we take all that combined with our investor base and we’ve built a model to go out, acquire, like I said, over 100 of these locations. We’re on number 17 in acquisition roundabouts since we started this year, and our brand is called Hurricane Car Wash. So, be on the lookout for it.

 

Josh Cantwell: Oh, man, that’s phenomenal stuff. So, one last question regarding the structure, the tactical structure of the car wash, is it similar to multifamily bringing in limited partners, having GP sponsoring a loan, paying a pref return, and then trying to refi yourself? Help me understand what’s the…

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah, very similar. Again, it depends on your exit strategy. So, if you’re looking to exit as a portfolio as we are, it’s going to be a little different strategy. But yes, you can do the same structure. I’ll say it’s a little more complex with respect to the waterfall. The other thing is, one of the reasons I love moving from residential to commercial real estate, and bear with me here, is everybody’s in a suit. Like you work with professionals, is what I’m saying, people that are professionals.

 

When you’re buying from a mom and pop that maybe they’re not accounting properly, it can take weeks to get a proper purchase and sale agreement completed. It’s a little bit dirtier. It takes a little bit more work to get these deals done. But again, that’s where the opportunity lies, in my opinion.

 

Josh Cantwell: And has the acquisition come from finding the commercial data of the existing mom-and-pop owner and going direct-to-seller because I don’t necessarily see a lot of business brokers or commercial brokers, like a Marcus & Millichap or a Colliers or a Newmark? Do they list and sell car washes? Or this is all about direct-to-seller because…

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah, you’re going to deal more with the business broker. And then you also asked about like commercial construction companies do these as well. And there are certain ones that did focus on it. So, yeah, it’s a similar model. Obviously, it’s a little bit different. Yeah, it’s Subway, like Chipotle. Yeah, but they have their own different intricacies and different things that do that. But if you zoom out and look at the model, it’s like Blaze Pizza, Subway, Chipotle, it’s all built around kind of the same basic concept.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, I love it. So, Chris, as we kind of round third here and head for home, I’m curious to know, as you look back on your journey, your entrepreneurial journey, your investing journey, what are some things you think you got right that you would kind of convey back to your coaching students or my audience and say, hey, I did this right, you guys should really look at doing this? And then what are some things that you think that you would change or do different if you could redo the whole journey again?

 

Chris Larsen: Yeah. So, I think one of the things I mentioned earlier, Josh, building a plan and sticking to that plan. Like real estate is not a get-rich-quick game. It’s a get-rich-slow game in my opinion. And I like that from an engineering perspective. I like that there’s predictability in that. I think I got that right. I think I got, like I’m still doing the same “value-add strategy” that I started with even though I was in residential over 20 years ago now.

 

Now, what I think I should have done earlier is I should have gone and found a mentor. And if you’re listening and you want to go do something, Josh, I know you have a wonderful program, find somebody after you decide on your strategy, what makes sense for you and your personality, those that make sense for my personality. Going sleepless at 3 a.m., thinking about stock trades, that’s not good for me, I knew that. But I wish I found somebody.

 

And now, I have a coach. I’ve had a coach for years now. And I coach others because I think it makes you better, it makes you sharper, and it keeps you learning. And I would have done that much sooner. I try to do a lot of things myself. I learned a lot. I think it ultimately benefited me, but ultimately, it slowed me down.

 

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, I love it. Chris, listen, this has been fantastic, learning more about your journey, your opportunity, fund strategy with overvalued life insurance, the diversification between multifamily and self-storage and car washes, and of course, your book. Again, guys, my audience, pick up the book right now. It’s NextLevelIncome.com/book. Chris will give you a free copy of the book and audiobook. They’re at that website, NextLevelIncome.com/book.

 

And again, we just got a half hour here, trying to peel back the onion on some of the things that have worked for Chris. Certainly, a lot more you can learn by diving into the book. So, Chris, listen, thanks for jumping on the show today and thanks for sharing with us.

 

Chris Larsen: Josh, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

 

[CLOSING]

 

Josh Cantwell: Well, hey, guys, listen, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Chris Larsen as much as I did. I really enjoyed talking about a different type of strategy, a different type of passive income model, and hearing a little bit more about Chris and his car wash play, his mobile home park play, his multifamily and self-storage play, the opportunity fund that he talks about with his overfunded life insurance. Really, really enjoyed all of those discussion points.

 

If you enjoyed the interview, go ahead and smash down on the Subscribe button. Subscribe today to the podcast, whether it’s on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify. Make sure you subscribe, number one. Number two, leave us a rating and a review. And number three, make sure you share this interview all over social media to share the word about Accelerated Investor. I appreciate you being here, and we’ll see you next time.

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