The Fastest Way To Build A Six Or Even… Seven Figure Real Estate EMPIRE!
If you’ve ever felt that you’re always chasing the next deal, living deal to deal, month to month, you’re going to love this episode with David Richter.
David is the owner of Simple CFO Solutions, where his advisory services helped a company not only grow from five to 25 deals a month, but took them from being unprofitable to building cash reserves.
David is an active real estate investor who has been involved in over 850 deals from wholesale, turnkey, owner finance, and almost anything else you can think of. He’s on a mission to completely transform how real estate investors view their finances–and help people achieve true financial clarity and freedom.
His newest book is called Profit First for Real Estate Investing. Co-authored with Michael Michalowicz, David has adapted the Profit First mindset and system–something I personally use in my businesses and really believe in–specifically for real estate investors.
In our conversation, you’ll learn how to stop living deal to deal, how David adapted the Profit First principles to address the unique challenges of real estate investing, and what you can learn from his incredible new book
Key Takeaways with David Richter
- Why so many real estate investors end up spending almost every dollar they bring in.
- How his early struggles with cash management led David to the Profit First mindset.
- The steps that go into the Profit First mentality–and why you NEED to pay yourself first.
- How to measure and analyze your success–and why so many people fail to do this important work.
- How David’s business provides CFO services at a fraction of the cost of a traditional, full-time CFO–and how you can work with him.
David Richter Tweetables
“You don’t have to live deal to deal. You don’t have to be in that rat race in the real estate investing world.” - David Richter
“Many people want to feel successful because of the activity. They think activity is success versus the end result being the success.” - Josh Cantwell
Resources
- Simple CFO Solutions
- Profit First for Real Estate Investing: Transform Your Real Estate Investing Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by David Richter
- Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
- The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz
- The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: The tell-it-like-it-is guide to cleaning up in business, even if you are at the end of your roll. by Mike Michalowicz
- AppFolio
- Propertyware
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Connect with Josh Cantwell
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To get access to a free copy of the Flip System, visit, getflipsystem.com/podcast
Click Here to Read the Transcript with David Richter
Josh Cantwell: So, hey, guys, listen, welcome back to Accelerated Real Estate Investor. I’m your host, Josh Cantwell. Today. I’ve got a really cool interview for you. My guest is a fellow named David Richter. David is the author of the book Profit First for Real Estate Investing. It’s actually being released or has just been released on December 7, 2021. Not sure if you’re all familiar with the Profit First books that were originally authored by Michael Michalowiz. He has amazing books called The Pumpkin Plan, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, and Profit First for Real Estate Investors. I’ve read them all. I use them all.
And David Richter has taken the Profit First mindset, the Profit First system, and written a book, co-written with Michael Michalowicz, specifically for real estate investors. David is an active real estate investor. He’s been involved in over 850 deals from wholesale, turnkey, BRRRR, owner finance, everything you can think of, was working with a company that had grown from five deals a month to 25 deals a month, but realized they were actually not even profitable. David hoped that the real estate company makes the turn turnaround from going nearly out of business to actually building cash reserves through his profit first advisory company called Simple CFO Solutions.
He’s the author, again, of Profit First for Real Estate Investing, and his goal is to completely transform the real estate investing industry through these concepts when it comes to how real estate investors view their finances and bring them to true financial clarity and freedom. You can get the book at SimpleCFOBook.com. We’re going to talk about that today. Guys, I personally use the Profit First system in my businesses. So, you’re going to absolutely love this interview with David Richter. Here we go.
[INTERVIEW]
Josh Cantwell: So, hey, David, listen, thank you so much for hopping on today. Welcome to Accelerated Real Estate Investor.
David Richter: Well, thank you, Josh, for having me on. I’m really excited to be here.
Josh Cantwell: Absolutely. So, listen, I love to talk current events with my guests when they first jump on. What are you up to right now that you’re excited about? I know you’re growing your CFO, business, helping real estate entrepreneurs. As you kind of wind down this year and look forward to 2020, what are some projects that you’re working on that you’re most excited about?
David Richter: Yeah, I’m winding up here at the end of the year because we’re releasing the Profit First for Real Estate Investing, December 7. So, depending on when you’re listening to this, it might already be out, but Profit First, the original book by Mike Michalowicz, I wrote the sub book Profit First for Real Estate Investing in particular. So, that has been consuming me a lot for the last 15 months. So, it’s finally coming to fruition here over this long journey. So, that’s what I’m really up to these days.
Josh Cantwell: Now, where can our audience get the book when it’s out?
David Richter: Sure, SimpleCFOBook.com. SimpleCFOBook.com is where they can find the links. It’ll take you to Amazon too. It’s on Amazon, a couple of other places, and that’s where you can purchase the book.
Josh Cantwell: So, Profit First for Real Estate Investors, so explain that in a high-level way. What does that mean? And then we’ll get into why you wrote the book and then we’ll get into the meat of it. But when you hear the word Profit First for Real Estate Investing, what’s the first thing you think of?
David Richter: The first thing I think of is so many people are living deal to deal, cycle to cycle, month to month, whatever it might be. And this book, this framework is to help manage that so that way, you can keep more of the money. And that way, I’m talking about self-directed IRAs or taxes or whatnot. I’m talking about cash in the bank, making sure that you are profitable so that way, you don’t have to live deal to deal anymore, you don’t have to live through these ups and downs of how real estate goes. So, that’s kind of like the high-level overview Profit First is there to as a system to manage the finances where we’ve got systems for marketing operations, all those other areas. And this is a good framework for the entrepreneur to be able to manage their cash in a very simple way.
Josh Cantwell: Got it. I remember, man, especially when I first got started. So, we had a private investor, it was actually my brother’s mother-in-law who lent us money to kind of get off the ground. She lent us $60,000. And we did one of our very first deals. We’d actually bought a property for 16 grand. This was 15 years ago. And we wholesaled that for 40 grand and we made our first fairly significant profit check, 20, 25 grand.
But then we basically made that profit, and then we signed up for a coaching program. We invested in ourselves. We invested in our future, didn’t do a deal for another month or two, and all of a sudden, we were losing money, and then we really found our niche in short sales and wholesaling and preforeclosures. We wanted to do deals with no money down like a lot of people. That’s how we started. Today, we have 4,000 units of apartments, but we started with a very meager beginning, David.
And in our first full calendar year, which was 2005, we made a million dollars of gross profit. We thought we were killing it. By the end of the year, we did pretty good, like we’ve made a couple hundred grand, but we were like, wait a minute, I thought we just made a million bucks. We didn’t really have a system for how are we paying our first executive assistant, her name was Tracy. How are we paying Tracy? Where’s that money gone? How are we paying for marketing? Back then, we were doing direct mail, we were doing all kinds of lumpy mail where we’re sending out different stuff.
And all of a sudden, at the end of the year, it was like, wow, dude, they’re in a whole lot of money left over. And I would imagine that a lot of people experience that same thing. That’s probably why you wrote the book. So, what was your experience or what experiences did you witness from other investors? What stories, I guess, can you tell us that led you to really, reading Mike’s original book and wanting to implement this for other people?
David Richter: So, my background is real estate investing as well, too. I’ve been a part of some companies where we were doing 25, 30 deals a month. I’ve done over 850 deals with the companies I’ve been a part of and what I’ve done on my own too. And that’s what I saw because I got to be a part of this company for about five years where we took it about from five to seven deals a month, about 25, 30 deals a month. And it was incredible because I got to sit. I was kind of like the utility man. I’m sending acquisitions, got that up and running this position, selling the properties, project management, property management, like I sat in every single seat. One of those seats was the finance seat too, which was awesome because like now, I understood from the beginning to end, from marketing for the property to all the way to when we sold it or rented it, like how the money flowed. And it was just basically a crash course of sitting with a CPA for hours at a time over that year that I was in that seat and just learning all of that.
But what was eye-opening to me was we were making six or seven-figure months and spending and six, seven-figure months as well too, and just as much as was coming in was going out. So, that was a huge lightbulb moment, like, why are we doing this? Like, why do we have 25, 30 people on staff? Like, why are we doing 25 or 30 deals a month if we’re like not keeping any of this money? So, that, to me, was one of the first big eye-openers where I experienced it myself, and it was like, okay, when the world’s going on here.
So, at that time, too, I built my own portfolio and had enough to where I sold everything a few years ago to be able to move and live wherever we wanted and kind of like semi-retired or whatever. And we moved across the country, started working with another investor because my passion is real estate investing. But the first thing I did with him, I said, like, “I got to see your numbers.” Like, you could tell me whatever, but I only trust what the numbers are telling me now.
Josh Cantwell: Yeah, numbers mean a lot.
David Richter: Exactly. So, I went in there, and there weren’t numbers, really. There was nothing there to be able to see because like the person who is inputting it wasn’t putting it in incorrectly. So, like after getting that all together over the next three months, that was a second eye-opening thing to me because once we had these numbers in place, the owner told me, like, I feel like I have control over my business now, like now that I know the numbers and I’ve seen them, and now I can make decisions from them because what he did, he saw that he could refinance a couple of his properties. He had some single-family residential houses and he refinanced them and put several hundred thousand in his pocket. And he was like, now I could do whatever I want with this money. I could sit on it. I could go out, buy another property, or whatever. And that to him, after that, he looked at me and said, “This has been life-changing.” And I was like, oh, I whoa, like, okay.
So, now I’ve had my own experience. Now, I’ve helped someone else, I think I want to help other people. I can see the potential of just knowing those numbers, getting the finances in order. That’s when I called a mentor and said, “Hey, I’m thinking of starting this business to help investors with the financial side of their business.” And he said, “That sounds great, but have you read Profit First?” So, I said, “Ah, no, what’s that book?” And he said, “Just read it. Trust me.” And so, I downloaded it that night, took 10 pages of notes, and said, “This is it. This is the framework that I want to help investors because this speaks to us. It spoke to me as a real estate investor.” My background isn’t CPA accounting or whatnot. I have great people that have those degrees in their name, like with our company. But like for myself, this was an easy book that I read, could say, I understand this. This helps me manage the cash.
So, then we started implementing the Profit First system inside of real estate investing businesses. I saw that working, and that’s when I hooked up with Mike last year. I reached out to him and said, “Hey, this is really working, what we’re doing. People are saying actual bottom-line profit, like taking vacations, having more time with their family, all this great stuff.” And so, I asked him, like, “Could we do a book for the real estate investing world?” And so, that’s where he was like, “Yes, I’d love that.” So, got pretty close to Mike over the last year.
And now, we’re launching the book. So, that’s kind of my story with real estate investing and profit first and why I’m so passionate now about this because that same person that we were working with, doing all those deals had lost a lot of his rentals in 2008 and 2009. And other friends that I had during that time lost a lot of their properties. And like, if they just had a system like this, not only did they not have to lose their shirts, they could have capitalized on buying the rentals at that time and getting a better foundation and not having to live deal to deal or so. It just lit a fire under me. That’s why I’m speaking everywhere I can get on podcasts, just trying to beat this message over and over again. Like, you don’t have to live deal to deal, you don’t have to be in that rat race in the real estate investing world.
Josh Cantwell: I love it. So, we implement profit first in our business. We don’t talk about it very often. Obviously, I was on your podcast, which was fantastic, and I did talk about it. But with my audience, the profit-first mentality really is about carving out the profit first, setting it aside in a separate bank account, right? And then when you look at your financials, your P&L, profit and loss statement, balance sheet, having different budgets of where dollars are going to go, taxes, marketing and advertising, operations, where these different buckets of cash going to go, but profit first to come out to pay you, the owner. We all talk about pay yourself first before you pay the government, but how many of you are actually doing that? Very few.
So, when we buy a property, we actually take an asset management fee and an acquisition fee off the top. Right when we buy the property, set it aside in a profit account that we, me, Glenn, and Tyler, my partners, get to spend. It is profit, it is money because then we’re going to work really hard for the next two to five years to stabilize this apartment asset. Then when the apartment cash flows, we know there are these different buckets, these kind of profit-first buckets. We know what the net free distributable cash flow should be. We know that when we bought the property, now, three or four years later, we’re actually seeing it happen, okay, because we’ve stabilized the building, we’ve raised the rents. We know what the expenses are, how much are the taxes, how much of the insurance, what’s the utility bills that get paid out of a separate property management account. Then you have the mortgage and you have the preferred return to investors gets paid out of a separate account. So, we’ve allocated these dollars according to the principles I learned from Mike Michalowicz in the original Profit First book.
So, David, when you saw what other investors were going through of feeling, oh my god, I’m doing 10 deals a month, I’m flipping X amount of properties and doing wholesale deals, I own these rentals or whatever, but at the end of the year, they’re like, oh my God, I actually lost money. I actually had to borrow money from an investor or borrow money from a bank to just pay my bills. I actually have a loss. I took money out of the business that I didn’t even really make because the business wasn’t even profitable. Help our audience understand. Let’s start with some of the core principles of profit first that are going to be in the book that gets released on December 7th. What is the profit-first mentality? What are some steps that are in the book that you can tell us about now?
David Richter: Yeah. So, let’s talk about, number one, the mindset behind it because you hit the nail on the head, where we love our formulas as investors. So, we’ve heard the formula for business. It’s been sales minus expenses equals profit, like that’s the one we hear everywhere, like, okay, I make a sale, I pay all my expenses, and then what I have left over, hopefully, I have something left over, but like you said right there, usually it gets down to that. And no, we’re borrowing money or like our accounting might tell us we made money, but there’s no money in the bank account. So, it’s like, that’s where we hear that pay everyone else first, and then what you will have left over is your profit.
The profit-first mentality is the end of formula is sales minus profit equals expenses, meaning I make a sale, I take my profit first. And then what I have left over is to run the business and run that. And that’s where so many people, I feel like, in the real estate world, we’ve heard that though, the problem is we’ve heard Robert Kiyosaki, say, pay yourself first. Or if you’re a reader, the richest man in Babylon, a portion of all I have is mine to keep. And like these books that tell us that, but it’s like it hasn’t become a reality until you make it a habit inside of your business, until you make profit and profitability, a habit on every deal that you do in every single transaction and making sure that you have profit every single month, year, every single deal.
So, how do you do that? What are those practical steps? Like Josh was saying, you are setting up buckets or bank accounts because as investors, the biggest mistake a lot of us make is we have just one big bank account that all of our operational expense money is in and all of the different money that we have. Income’s coming in there, and it’s going out, and you have no idea. You look at it one day, you’ve got a million dollars in there, and then the next day, you have $10. So, it’s like there are these wild swings, and you have no real control over what’s going on in your business and your money.
And that’s where also, that one of the big principles of profit versus Parkinson’s law, like however much time you give yourself to do something is how much time that task is going to take. And like if you give yourself two weeks to do a project, it’s going to take yourself probably two weeks to get there. If you give yourself a day, you’ll figure out how to get it done in a day. But with profit first, it’s the same thing, but with your money, if you give yourself too much money, like if you have that one big bank account with $100,000, you’re going to be very tempted to spend all that $100,000. But if you split out your money into different bank accounts and say, this one is specifically for my expenses, and now instead of it showing $100,000, it’s like 25, then you know you have 25 to spend on your operational expenses. Now, it doesn’t look like you have 100 anymore because that other stuff should be for your profitability, should be for other areas of your business. So, that’s a core principle of profit first.
But the practical step is to set up specific bank accounts for your profitability. The core accounts is a profit account, owner’s compensation, owner’s tax, and then the operational expense account. So, those first three accounts, though, are for you, the business owner. They are for, number one, the profit so you can take a distribution every quarter for the hard work of starting your business. Like, that’s why you started your business was to be profitable. And if you don’t have a profit, you don’t have a business, like that’s why. Unless you’re running a nonprofit, then you need a profitable company and cash profit to feel like you’re the business owner giving you that control of your business. Then the owner’s compensation, if you are doing work in your company, you should be paying yourself as consistently as possible, so like if that’s biweekly, monthly, however often that you need income and you want income.
Josh Cantwell: Like a salary.
David Richter: Exactly, like a salary. So, that’s that owner’s compensation is where your salary would come from or just on a regular basis, paying yourself. And then the owner’s tax is like everyone at the end of the year, unless, well, a lot of people are listening here might have huge depreciation, might never pay taxes, but if you run any type of active investments and you pay taxes, how many times has it come to the end of the year, and you hear these people say, “I got to sell a couple of properties”? Like you said, Josh, I got to get a loan or something just to pay the tax bill or whatnot. So, saving for those throughout the year so that way you don’t come in super stressful when it’s the beginning of the year and comes tax time. So, you set up those three core accounts.
And then there’s also an income account, which is basically just a holding bucket. I call it the control account, that income account, because that’s where deposits sit until you push it out and transfer it to those other accounts so that way you are directing the flow of your money and being intentional with every single dollar rather than it going into just one big pot, in and out, and you have no idea what’s going on. So, those are the core accounts of profit first to be able to give you a better, clearer picture, number one, of where your finances are. Number two, like really helping you pay yourself first, have true cash profitability and not just some made-up number on a profit and loss statement that you never see. So, like having actual true profitability for you and your company.
Josh Cantwell: Oh, I love it. I love the methodical, simple way of just depositing money in a control account, then pushing the money out into four subaccounts, profit account, again, for distributions for the owner, maybe once a year, once a quarter, and owner comp or an owner salary account, again, that could be paid out two weeks. I’ve been paying myself a W-2 wage all of my life from my own businesses. I actually have a separate company that is essentially the employee holding company where all of my businesses, whether it was a flipping business I used to have, or there are a lot of private lending. I had a private equity fund for a long time. Now, it’s all apartments. The employees work in these different businesses, but they all get paid by a company called Madhouse Media because it’s a freaking madhouse around here. But I take a distribution or salary out of Madhouse just like everybody else every two weeks, not a lot, but it’s a regular recurring paycheck. A lot of that I defer into my retirement plan.
And then the third bucket is owner taxes. Again, like you said, I don’t end up paying a lot of tax to be transparent with everybody because of the depreciation and the bonus depreciation, cost seg studies, all those different kind of things, but we allocate for it in case. And then finally, number four is expenses and for us, each apartment complex has its own expenses. So, each apartment complex has dollars coming into its control account, then it pays out profit, especially when we first buy it. Then we have our expenses going out. And we’re really working with apartments. It might take us two to four years to stabilize a building. So, I’m not planning on taking any money out. I have partners and I have limited partners that I have to pay first. So, that’s the goal. But the whole goal is to work until the business is stabilized and as soon as it’s stabilized, then not only are there expenses, but there’s also profit. There’s also the mortgage. It all goes out of different accounts and different buckets.
Here’s one of the things I’ve seen for multifamily guys, David, is what my property manager handles all that, right? Property manager is taking all the money in the account. Property manager is paying the bills. Property manager has no oversight. All of a sudden, the owner/operator gets the P&L, and the property manager doesn’t have a 50% expense ratio, they have a 63% expense ratio, and the apartment building is actually breaking even or losing money because the property management company that’s actually controlling the cash flow is not subscribing to Profit First. How much of this is about really taking ownership. I think so many people, they want to feel successful because of the activity, like they think activity is success versus the end result being the success.
David Richter: That’s so good.
Josh Cantwell: People that are just like, well, I do five deals a month, or I own 100 units of apartments, I’m successful. No, you’re not. You just have activity or even liability that you signed up for.
David Richter: Right, exactly. That’s so good because that’s what we see. You go to those masterminds and people are, like, oh yeah, I’m doing these many deals. It’s like, okay, true success is like, you not been feeling guilty out there because you have no money in the bank or you being up there and actually having a healthy bottom line profit. It’s like, those are the things why we start the business, why you get into multifamily, why you get into real estate is to be profitable. And it’s like, we lose sight of that because of what you said, it’s like the stigma is if I can sound successful, that’s success. Not that do I have the bottom line profit of why I started this business to really measure if we’re winning or not?
Josh Cantwell: That’s right. Yeah, at the end of the day, I think so many entrepreneurs are addicted to activity and the more active I am and the more networking with people who are successful, what matters is what you actually keep, guys. It’s what you actually keep. So, like for us, to give you a real application, every Monday, we have a leadership meeting. We meet at 11 o’clock every Monday. That leadership meeting is me and my two partners, Glenn and Tyler, Roberdo, our CFO, and then our property management company. We talk through it that meeting where we’re at.
So, like Fridays, today, I’m recording this on a Friday. I got in today already this morning, reports from all the 17 different apartment syndications I own. I have reports on every single one of them. I have the rent roll and I have the P&L. And it comes right out of AppFolio. It comes right out of Propertyware. It comes right out of the property management software, but I don’t just open it, get the email, and delete it. We actually analyze it versus the budget. So, when the income comes in, it doesn’t just say, here’s how much you made, here’s your expenses.
Right next to that in the P&L is budget. Budget is pro forma. Here’s where we need to be on the right column versus actual on the left column because it’s the little details in the middle that’s still down to the bottom line. It tells you where you’re profitable. I don’t just go right to the bottom line and say, “Yup, we’re profitable.” Even if we are profitable, I’m like, “Nope, we’re going to roll up to all the subaccounts” because where are you going to see the bleed is, what are the utilities? Do you have a water and sewer bill that’s totally out of whack because you have a leak? David, here I give an example. We had a guy die in one of our apartment buildings in the shower. So, guess what was happening. The water was running for three days.
David Richter: Wow.
Josh Cantwell: He had a heart attack. Natural is what happened. People die from heart attacks all the time, no big deal. But we did a wellness check on the guy, sure enough, he was dead in the shower with the water on. So, the water bill that month was pretty high. So, you look at that and you see the P&Ls. Oh, my God, the water and sewer bill was 25% more than normal. That’s an example. I got my repairs and maintenance, my R&M budget. And on one of the properties, last month, it was $4,000 over budget. So, we start drilling into it. That’s the not sexy, not fun stuff that ultimately spills down to the bottom-bottom line and tells you, are you really profitable or not? Those are the little actions that’s not sexy, it’s not fun. Those meetings can be a little bit draining.
So, what we did again, last Monday was again our monthly leadership meeting. David, what we do is we actually go to a hotel room. We actually rent a boardroom. Not all of us in one small hotel room. But we’re in one big boardroom. We all sit. We actually put the P&Ls for the month and the quarter up on the screen. And my whole team, as well as the property managers sitting in the boardroom dissecting the financials, asking questions, poking holes. What’s this? What’s that? That’s the stuff that most people aren’t doing. David, why aren’t they doing it? From a psychological perspective, what do you think is stopping people from taking the extra step to do their analysis of where they’re actually at? Is it because they’re afraid of the result or afraid of the work, afraid to be embarrassed because they’re actually not profitable?
David Richter: Well, those are all good answers. I would say the number one is most people don’t know how to do that. And that’s not something, like you said, this is not the fun part. You don’t go to a seminar to learn about the finances. We go to seminars and webinars and all that type of stuff to learn the marketing tricks or how to do this or that or the operations or like the stuff that sounds a lot more sexy. But at the end of the day, those are the types of things, like you said, if you can cut some of those things out, those go directly toward your bottom line to give you that money to be able to do the fun stuff.
So, it’s like a lot of people associate that with like, this is just going to be painful, like if I go through this because I don’t know, I’ve never been taught this, I don’t know what I’m looking at, I don’t know what to think. And like you said, they feel embarrassed and it’s like, well, you’ve never been taught this side. Unless you have an accounting background, you aren’t going to these types of seminars and you are going to these types of conferences to learn about this side. And that’s why I do love the Profit First because it’s still all about making it as simple as possible for the owner, here’s where your cash is, but yeah, that’s where I’m seeing a lot of people, just they’re embarrassed or they don’t know that side of the business, so they try to avoid it as much as possible. And that turns into nightmares with their finances. And it’s like, then they wake up one day and then you are, you’re making $1 million, but you’re spending 1.1. It’s like, what in the world happened to our business? Why are we doing so well, but hurting so much? So, that’s why, yeah, I would say the big one is avoiding it just because most people don’t have that education and then feel embarrassed about it.
Josh Cantwell: Right. Got it. David, what’s your goal with writing the book? What did you hope to accomplish from it?
David Richter: To get people out of the rat race, like to really get people out and to financial freedom in a simple way to give them a system. I want this book to blow up not just from the sales aspect in selling a lot of books, so I make a lot of money. That’s not it. This has been a labor of love. This is my real estate investing background. How do I want them help, make sure entrepreneurs, those real estate investors don’t go down these paths of making a lot of money, but they’re not keeping any and then just getting burned out all the time. So, I wanted to write this book to make sure that investors had that advocate that speaks real estate investor, not just CPA babble talk, and like all that, but speaks the actual real estate terms, terminology, and to say, here you go, here’s how you can manage your cash really simply, set up this system, and at least get it set up for you so you can start being profitable. So, that’s my big purpose in life.
It’s been fun, too. It’s been fun realizing like this is how I can contribute in a massive way to the real estate investing world. If you can just get this mindset and if you can get these principles down and these habits in place, you will see the profitability this next year, in 2022 or 10 years from now. Like whenever you start this system, you’ll start seeing the fruits of that labor and start putting that inside of your real estate investing business because, Josh, you’re probably one of the people that have been doing it for a long time. So, you’re now in there. Now, you’re seeing, like this has been incredible what we’re doing and what the results of that is. And that’s what I want for everyone from this book if they’re doing one deal or a thousand deals, like this to get inside of your system as soon as possible so that way you can be Josh saying, yes, we have a profit account. Yes, we actually pay ourselves. Yes, it’s not a big stress on us, like we actually have the money and the cash to do the things we want to do.
Josh Cantwell: Love it. Love it. Listen, David, if someone like me likes to read the book but is not ultimately going to slow down to implement because a lot of people say, “Yeah, I read the book. I was at the gym, I read the book.” You’d actually read the book, you listen to it? It makes you feel good that you finished the book, the audio version. Or you went on vacation, you read the whole book. And then, like a lot of people, you get busy with your life, you don’t do anything with it. You actually don’t execute, create the buckets, create the accounts. Your company, you set up a CFO firm that can actually engage with people and actually consult with them to do it for them or do it with them to get this kind of lined up. Tell us a little bit more about your service.
David Richter: Yeah. So, I created a fractional CFO service because a lot of investors, they’re too big not to have someone on the team helping them with the finances but maybe too small for a full-time CFO, like a full-time corporate CFO on their team doing financial modeling and all this stuff that corporate CFOs do. So, I started a fractional CFO which is basically a part-time CFO for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO to be able to implement profit first and to be able to help get people accountable to transferring the money, making sure that they are paying themselves, like giving them that reliability and that control over their business.
And then also, we do other things as well, too, like making sure you have your numbers in place and you can go through a profit and loss and look at those expenses and cut those things out. Or like if you need to start a new marketing channel, like, how do you analyze that and how do you get a better bottom line? And how do you not spend, like just throwing money out the window? So, that’s exactly what we do within real estate investors, and a lot of people we work with that, like you said, don’t have the time or don’t want to implement on their own and want to have experts come along beside them and help them implement this system and just help them overall with their finances. Because, like I said, this is not the part where we get to go to a conference or seminar on the finances. So, this is why we started this business and wanted to help people from the financial perspective.
Josh Cantwell: Love it. Love it. That’s fantastic. Listen, the book is out. I’m going to say that now because by the time we’re done recording here, get through Thanksgiving, the book is going to be out.
David Richter: Yes, it will.
Josh Cantwell: Where can they get the book, David, again? Tell us again one more time.
David Richter: SimpleCFOBook.com, SimpleCFOBook.com.
Josh Cantwell: Love it. David, listen, I’ve got some live events coming up too, and a mastermind group. I would love to have you talk to that group. Those groups about these concepts because a lot of those people are intermediate to advanced investors that are really good at doing the deal, but a lot of them still probably struggle with where’s all the money going? I got one woman in particular that I consult with who I think you can help right away. So, listen, David, this has been an absolute blast having you on Accelerated Real Estate Investor. Guys, go get the book. David, thanks for joining us today.
David Richter: Thank you so much for having me.
[CLOSING]
Josh Cantwell: Well, there you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed that interview with David. I really enjoyed that discussion because frankly, if it’s not in the books, if it’s not in your financial accounting, it didn’t happen. You guys all know that real estate can be very manual, meaning you’re writing manual checks, you’re paying contractors, you’re paying vendors. I would encourage all of you that you need to implement an online digital tracking system where all of your accounting, all of your books, all of your expenses, all of your income is done online so that it can be tracked by your CFO.
And if the CFO you have can’t do it, then look at hiring David’s company Simple CFO Solutions to help you with a fractional CFO solution and help you get your books in order. So many real estate investors fail because they’re writing checks against bank accounts that they think have money that don’t. And ultimately, they find out that they’re actually failing and losing money when they should be making money, even large big businesses that are doing millions of dollars a year surprisingly have lost money. So, implement the Profit First for Real Estate Investing in your business. Make sure you pick up the book. And I look forward to hearing how you’d used it in your own company.
If you enjoyed this interview, don’t forget to leave us a five-star rating and review. It’s always so important to me to hear your feedback. I just want to tell you how grateful I am when you do leave us ratings, reviews, feedback. It means so much to me. It would mean so much to me if you would do that right now. Tell us how we’re doing. Tell us what you liked about the interview. And don’t forget to pick up David’s book, comes out on December 7th. Thanks a lot for being here today, and we’ll talk to you next time. Take care.