In this episode, we have the honors of speaking with Rick Carlson, who’s been in our Success Stories Ep. 26. Rick talks about how crucial it is to diversify your revenue streams to get through whatever hiccup comes along such as this coronavirus pandemic.
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Rick Carlson: 00:00 I think that regardless of where you’re at, listen, if you’re a cleaning person, I think there’s a lot of opportunity. I’d build a Corona clean package and I would put a price amount on that and I’d suit up and I’d be out there hustling. If I was a host, I’d be figuring out where the niches. You could reach out to the local hospitals and get in touch with like the ICU and the cancer wards and places like that. They have family that that need to come stay while the patient is in treatment. If you’re a true entrepreneur, these are the times that you figure it out and you make it happen.
Julian Sage: 00:32 This is episode number 55 the short term rental success stories podcasts=. Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed? Go to cohostit.com for more information. Welcome back to short term rental success stories. I’m your host Julian Sage. This is a show where I talk to hosts about their journeys and starting and growing the short term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information that’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business like any exceptional hosts. We all strive for five star reviews, so please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy is. It really helps support the show if you haven’t done so already. Going over to our Facebook group, the host nation, to connect with the community.
Julian Sage: 01:12 Hey, welcome back host nation. I’m super excited to be back again with you this week. So in this episode we have the special honor of speaking with Rick Carlson, who was in episode number two, six of the success stories. You can go to shorttermsage.com/STR26 to listen to that episode with Rick. Now Rick, in this episode he talks about how crucial it is that diversify your revenue streams to get through whatever type of hiccup that comes along with this pandemic. Now, my life would have been seriously impacted significantly more if I had not have my primary stream of income being my job. I’, at full time active duty in the coast guard. S`O I have a reliable stream of income that’s been able to come in that has been able to keep me able to pay for my lifestyle. If I was solely dependent on the short term rental income, that would be a very different story.
Julian Sage: 02:00 I know how many people are hurting during this time. I’ve seen a lot of fellow hosts, a lot of my friends that are being impacted by this pandemic and my heart goes out to everybody that has been impacted. And I think during this time, diversification is really kind of the eye-opener for lots of hosts. Lots of hosts are talking about diversification onto other OTAs, other online travel agencies. Not being dependent on one soul stream really makes an impact. I’ve started getting more requests from places like furnished finders for finding traveling nurses. That’s another way of diversifying. I’m diversifying how I’m going to be getting more bookings, but when it comes to income, having diversification in my income has also been able to help. Now again, I have a primary job in the coast guard and short term rentals. My unit downstairs was able to supplement me. It was able to cover my mortgage.
Julian Sage: 02:51 I had a property that I was personally managing that was able to give me some extra money, but I also had diversification and other things such as my other interests. You know, I do create content. I do have a couple of other YouTube channels and I’ve been able to bring in some profit through all of the content that I’ve been able to make. It’s nowhere near where I was getting with my short term rental income. But now that the short term rental income has significantly dropped, these other streams of income are still able to bring in and it’s able to keep me a little bit more afloat. Now I know this isn’t the case for a lot of professional hosts. A lot of hosts that are full time, maybe they quit their jobs because they did want to manage professionally and during times like this, it can be really uncertain.
Julian Sage: 03:32 But I think this is also a wake up call because not only do we have to diversify on where we’re going to be getting our clients or how we’re going to be marketing our properties, but also where are we also getting our money in from. I love short term rentals as it’s really changed my life, but I also do need to know that I can’t get out of the military and just solely depend on one source of income. Having other streams of income is going to be very important or at least where you’re getting your income coming in from other places. We’ve seen things now as such as like Vermont just the other day said that they are not going to be allowing short term rentals indefinitely just due to the pandemic. Having to delist their properties from sites like Airbnb is going to impact so many hosts, but what if we had the ability to be able to tap into other ways of being able to get guests to stay with us.
Julian Sage: 04:20 This is one of the things that I do want to bring onto the show more and that’s going to be about corporate housing companies. I think that that’s going to be a way for us to be able to diversify ourselves and be able to get closer towards where the sole channel of all of these different people are coming in from. Because if you’re able to diversify where you’re getting your tenants and not just from one of these OTAs and you were able to have something that’s more your own, I think that’s where short term rentals in the future are also going to need to go. Not just relying on a single OTA. We’re not just relying on a single way of marketing your place as a short term rental but offering diverse clientele and this is all going to also come to where you are selecting your properties because if you’re in the arbitrage space, you’re going to need to think a little bit more strategically about where are you picking up these properties moving forward in the future.
Julian Sage: 05:09 Is your place in a location where you can tap into those, let’s say those hubs like those corporate clients or those recurring clients and be able to collect them and have them stay at your properties during times like this. The big message of this episode is going to be about diversification. If you like my show notes for this episode, go to shorttermsage.com/STR55 or if you’d like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to shorttermsage.com/shownotes. With all that being said, on to this week’s conversation.
Julian Sage: 05:34 Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode, I have the special honor speaking with Rick Carlson. Rick is a previous guest on the show from episode a to six. So if you want to listen to that episode, go to short term sage.com backslash STR 26 to watch that episode. Rick, if you please what am I giving a very brief introduction about who you are where you were when we started talking and where you are now. And this episode really is just talking about, you know, what are the things that we’re doing in your business today. And also some of the things that you also foresaw prior to this whole pandemic situation.
Rick Carlson: 06:11 Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me back on. It’s, it’s, it is a great pleasure and honor to be back. I a little bit about me. So I am a an entrepreneur by heart. So I’ve been primarily self-employed for the, for the past 25 years of my adult life. I’ve, I’ve only had three jobs as an adult. I was fired from two of them, which I’m very proud of those stats. Not that in a hundred but pretty close. And so I, what I do in my world, so I’m a, I’m a full time real estate broker, a mortgage loan officer, and then I also have an Airbnb business and a couple of other businesses. And so you know, we, you know, last time we talked where, where I’ve been since then to today. So I’m in a very seasonal market, so through the winter, cause our, our season is just non-existent during the winter.
Rick Carlson: 07:00 I go through, I do went with, you know, winter renters and so they just stay for a very clear defined amount of time and then they leave when the season starts. So it, we just make it work for everybody. My, my goal is just to have lost leader through the winter. I’m not, I know I’m not gonna make money so to speak, but as long as I can cover my cost and that’s, that’s been my main focus. Every winter I’m super nervous. Like everybody, I think in, in my same shoes. And I’m like, Oh gosh, what are we going to do? Like, and, and it just pans out. It just happens. And we don’t always have the answer. We just hustle and make it happen. And it seems to just, everything turns out okay, you know, at the end of the day. So, yeah. So that’s, that’s where we’re at today. And everything’s, everything’s going well. I think we’ve got some new challenges coming up and we will separate the the wannapreneurs from the entrepreneurs as, as we move forward and over the next six months, I think you’re going to see the landscape greatly change compared to what it looks like today.
Julian Sage: 08:06 Now you’ve got quite a few different businesses. Do you think that that’s actually a benefit during this time? One of the strategies that you said, you know, during that slow season, you believe in the previous episode when we were talking, you said that you’d actually rent those out longterm. You’d just leave them furnished or you know, potentially take out the furniture and you’d leave tenants in there. What’s your strategy moving forward? Because right now we’re coming into that high season or we are in that high season, but it’s, you know, it’s more like a slow season right now. So how are you handling the situation?
Rick Carlson: 08:37 Absolutely. So our season is from Memorial day to labor day. So about May 1st to September 1st and this this past winter I put renters in, I left the units furnished. I’ve tried breaking them down and emptying them out so that somebody can move in. A couple of issues with that that I see that I’ve experienced is number one when once they move all their stuff in, they don’t want to move out. Like they don’t want to move in six months or five months or whatever the number is. So when you take furnished rentals, generally you get a little bit more money, but then it’s not as hard for them to make that transition back out of the units. And it’s just, you know, communication super important and set the expectations and be very clear about what’s going to happen. So this past week, I, so I focused on going into fall, I really focused on traveling nurses.
Rick Carlson: 09:34 There was a need in my market for them, which means they needed housing, yada, yada, yada. So I’ve actually had a a healthcare worker in one of my units. He was in for a 90 day contract. They offered him a, this past week, actually on Sunday they offered him an extension and I, we talked about it and it made sense. And so I was looking at like, how do I hedge my bads? Do I gamble and think that we’re going to have a season this season for Airbnb because we originally were on the path to double our production from last year to this year with my Airbnb business. Now I’m really uncertain what that looks like. So what I’ve done is I’ve allowed them to extend because had I not extended the lease, they were going to just go to, they were going to get another Mart, a job in a different market.
Rick Carlson: 10:28 But since I extended he extended so we can make it win for everybody. And so there’ll be there until July 13th. Now. So worst case scenario, I know that I have that property covered in the mortgage covered cause my carrying costs on that property are about 1400 a month. So I know no matter what, through July 13th I’m covered, I’ve got another renter that was a winter Renner who we also had the same conversation of if you wanted to stay longer. He’s in a different position. He’s actually local. He’s going through some life events. And at some point he’ll buy a house. He’s just kind of wait [inaudible] so our conversation actually last night was, Hey, if you want to stay longer, let’s work out the details of that and make it work and cause he really likes the situation he’s in overall. So I think we’re going to, I’m going to move him into a different unit and have him probably stay through the summer.
Rick Carlson: 11:26 I mean, he’s unsure where he’s going to go. So if I can get another three, six months out of him and you know, once again, now we’re, now we’re up, now I’m covering my other property and it’s carrying costs. So that’s a win. So then that’ll leave me two units, a two bedroom unit and a three bedroom unit to do Airbnb on. So I figure worst case scenario, I’ve taken 50% of my my carrying and made them longterm. So I know no matter what my costs are, Matt, and then I’m going to gamble with the other two units that I can actually make money and get ahead on those two units if I put them out. And they don’t produce, I will then I’ll evolve those into probably possibly longterm units, but I will just do my longterm units through April of next April 20, 21.
Rick Carlson: 12:21 So that way I’m not getting myself in this vicious cycle of just having longterm Reyers. So I want to get through winter and then in the spring we evaluate where we’re at and then either you got to go or you can stay longer. And we kind of sort that out. The rentals in our market are very difficult to come by. And especially where I’m at. I’m so, I’m in quarter lane, Idaho. I’m exactly a mile from the downtown resort strip, if you will, what little downtown we have. So I have a pretty sought after location and you know, we’re, we’re freeway entrance is 30 seconds away. Downtown is five minutes away. Like it’s just a really good place to be in the low traffic street. So so I’m going to win no matter what. It’s just a matter of how that looks.
Rick Carlson: 13:10 So, and then you had also asked, also asked about diversifying and all that other stuff. I would say that I’m pretty diversified with my industries. So if one one tends to get a little bit less fruitful the others are pretty solid and I have a bottom, I don’t know what you would call that, but like my minimum revenue flow. So like on my janitorial company, it’s the same every, every month is a year, 365 days a year. We just renewed contracts with one, my, one of my larger accounts. And then my other account is, is pretty solid longterm, I believe. But what’s ironic is this morning I actually had one of my cleaners, let’s quit. Because she’s like, I’m gonna, I’m, I’m, I need my last check so I can buy quarantine supplies and just go into quarantine cause she’s afraid she’s gonna catch the coronavirus by MTN somebodies trashcan.
Rick Carlson: 14:04 And so her, her, right. So I think that, you know, is it the right move? I don’t think so. Not my opinion, but who am I to make that call for somebody else? And w with that, are you, because of the strategy that you were saying with your units you’re, you’re taking the units that you think would be more profitable during the high season, taking the tenants out of those and moving them to other units, or you think it’d be better for longterm rentals? So the one, the one, yeah, so my, what I would say my premium unit and, and my units are pretty nice, like they’ve all been remodeled and updated and they’re pretty nice. But my nicest one is the gentleman that’s in there, he likes the option of having one of my other units better because it is a single, it’s a, it’s a ranch style home.
Rick Carlson: 14:56 It’s a duplex, but the big side of it is a ranch style. So there’s only one adjoining wall where right now he’s above the other tenant. And so there’s a little bit of noise transference. And so he’s, you know, and he’s a super nice guy and I really like him and I really enjoy him as a person. So anything that I can do to help him in his situation. And then it also helps me. I mean, you know, we’re not you know, I’m not, I’m not the guy that’s like, I want to help everybody and I want it to be a reciprocal relationship, not just me winning or them winning. I want everybody to win, if you will. And so if he’s willing to stay longer, I know he pays rent, he doesn’t quiver about it and he’s super, he’s been super good to me. So if I can keep him longer, I will. So, but he just wants to be in a different unit. I was willing to lead him in that unit longer. But you know, he, he said he’d rather be in an, in a ranch style unit, which, which is fine. I have it available coming up. So,
Julian Sage: 15:57 I think the last time that we talked, you said that you don’t increase the rental price for your furnished units. Is that just your location specific or have you actually been increasing the price?
Rick Carlson: 16:09 There’s a little bit of a premium on the, on the monthly or on the, on the winter renters. But once again, my goal is to fill them and pay the bills. I just know five months out of the year, my goal is to be a loss leader. If I make money, great. But I would rather not be paying $2,500 a month to carry, to carry these two properties. And, and I just bought, right. There’s going to be somebody, some people that question those numbers of like, how can you carry two properties for 2,500 a month? Well, I bought them, they needed work. You know, I’ve put a lot of money into the, into the one property and I’m in the process of putting not as much money but money into the other property. So, you know, I did look, you know, the birth strategy, if you will. And so I bought them as investments and put sweat equity into them. So my front end numbers are really low. And then my backend members, I’ve put my own money and out of pocket. So, so my carrying costs I’ve done, I’ve done pretty well with my carrying costs and those would look very different had I just financed it all up front or you know, whatever bought them remodels. You know, my goal is just to break even through the winter cause I know I’m going to make my money in the summer.
Julian Sage: 17:26 W what were prior to us heading the record, you said that you are actually kind of anticipating something like this, this happening which is, which is pretty surprising. So could you kind of talk about the strategy that you’ve had that you, the mindset that you’ve had kind of prior to this and how you’ve been best preparing yourself for a type of situation?
Rick Carlson: 17:45 Absolutely. So for the past I would, I would say for the past 24 months I’ve been starting to prepare my team that, you know, things are going to change. We just don’t know when. So, you know, as an 18 year real estate professional, I’ve seen, I’ve seen the market go up, down and around. I went through Oh eight, and I was, I was super really, I was super ill position it going into that market and I, and I lost everything. I legitimately lost everything except what little money that I, I, I squirreled away. And that is what I went on to buy the next business with. And then, you know, that was an equipment purchase and then we built that out. So for the past six to 12 months though, I’ve really been honing out on my team as far as what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, how we’re positioning ourselves in the market and how we’re diversifying in such a way in ensuring our or avenues of revenue to get through whatever hiccup comes along.
Rick Carlson: 18:45 So, you know, I, a lot of people, while I do agree that you really do need to focus on one thing to be great at one thing, you need to make sure that if your one thing is not insulated from the economy, which most things are not, that you have some diversity in, in your income. Because once again, I went through this in Oh eight, I had three houses across the country. I own, you know, I own two businesses at that time and one was real estate and one was in the restaurant, a chain of restaurants. And it was the Epic storm that just wiped me out. And so, you know, 32 years old and one of your pregnant girlfriend’s mother that is no fun. And you know, for us to really embrace lessons, they have to be painful. And that was, that was definitely painful.
Rick Carlson: 19:33 So I feel like I learned from that. So I’ve, I’ve literally in the last 11 years since since that time, I’ve just busted my butt to get past the obstacles that were in the way, build some diversity and, and make sure that if that happened again, I wasn’t, I wasn’t going to be in trouble. And so, you know, and it’s one of those things where I build something, I get it running without me, and then I kind of move on to the next thing. And so it’s just been, you know, it’s just the little tweaks. And you know, it’s, it’s not always fun, but I can tell you right now that I am excited, I’m genuinely excited about the future and the opportunities to come because I understand that people are freaking out and it’s the 10% that are just going to be like, this is awesome. Let’s go help some people and let’s go make some money and make it a win win for everybody.
Julian Sage: 20:28 I know you’re, you’re, you’re handling yourself very, very calmly during there in the sun certain time. And I think that’s really awesome. And, but that’s probably also because you’ve, you’ve experienced something very similar. Do you see that experience in 2008 very similar to the one that we have today? Or are they pretty, pretty different in
Rick Carlson: 20:47 Your eyes? That’s a great question. I would say that I would say that they’re different. We had some factors going in to that, that we don’t have today as far as the legislation and how they’re, and how they’re handling things on the government level. We’re so early into this, it’s really difficult to say one way or another. The issue. The biggest issue that we, that we run into is that since 2008 till this Corona’s situation arrived, we had the longest progression of finances in the history of finances. So we never had a hiccup, we never had a setback. We never had a, a plateau longterm plateau that said, okay, things are cooling down and, and I’ve kind of watched it. And, and what’s ironic is we’ve had multiple events that I thought this is pretty, this is pretty significant and this is going to set the chain.
Rick Carlson: 21:44 And I don’t remember exactly what it was and I’m sure my facts are a little off here, but there was like a, like I think two years ago, the blue chip stocks lost like $1 billion in value in one day. Nobody was talking about it, nobody mentioned it. And I thought, that’s really weird. And so, and then we just moved on and I thought, well hell, if you a, you know, if, if the market loses $1 billion in one day and it can be explained, why is that like what’s happening there? But everybody just glazed over. It moved on. And so we’re w there is no history to repeat itself here. We’re 12 years into a progression. Who knows what’s going to happen. We just don’t know. We don’t know. Is this going to, you know, there’s a CDC report that I saw that was leaked supposedly, and they’re saying that this thing’s going to last 18 months.
Rick Carlson: 22:35 Well, the question that I ask is how do you, are you prepared for this thing to last 12 you know, 12 to 18 months. One of my neighbors is the, is a high level at a local bank and she talked to her builders. She called every one of our builders last week that she has financed. And every one of them said, we’re moving forward. We’re not stopping, we’re not slowing down. The need for housing is still there and they’re just moving forward. So I don’t know if we’re in that situation where everybody’s in denial and everybody’s, you know, just kind of winning and seeing. But what I see as a majority of people freaking out, like, you know, I had one of my, one of my janitors, she quit this morning and she says, I’ve got to look out for my family and I got to look out for my health and this, that, and the other.
Rick Carlson: 23:24 And this is a person that [inaudible] when she goes to work, she doesn’t come into contact with anybody. She’s in an empty building by herself. She’s wearing gloves. Unless you touching God knows everything. And then touching her face mouth and you know, well how Ross, you catch this thing. I don’t see how, I don’t see how you, how that, that’s to me, that seems like one of the same stripes you could have in this timeframe. But yet she’s, she’s freaking out and she quits and she’s, she’s, she’s climbing up and going away. And I just said, perfect. I’m said, you know, I appreciate, I respect your decision and I absolutely respect your decision. Best of luck to you. And so those are the people that are going to be really hurting longterm. I think that, you know, to freak out during times like this is, you know, people are looking for, for leaders and if you have like in my position, I have multiple people that look at me for direction and assurance that we’re going to be okay.
Rick Carlson: 24:23 And I trust me, I had this conversation with my real estate agent a couple of days ago and she’s like, I’m a little nervous. And I’m like, why are you nervous? Like this is, you don’t understand, this is what I’ve been preparing you for for the last 12 months. Like I’ve been waiting for this. Like I, I get goosebumps cause I’m so excited that, you know, the world is gonna the world’s going to change for the good we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten an abundance of supply without the demand in a lot of industries. So, and one example of that is we’ve, we’ve gotten an abundance of real estate professionals in the real estate space without the supply of transactions to feed all those agents. So, just like in 2008, 70% of the agents are going to bail out, go do something else, go back to their job, whatever it is, and 30% are going to pick up the Slack and actually, and then it’ll turn back into a healthy market for Airbnb and the vacation rental world.
Rick Carlson: 25:20 I think you’re going to see a little bit of the same thing. There are some markets that don’t allow Airbnb or they’re, they’re super strange at like Denver where it has to be a primary residence to be an Airbnb. In my local market, we don’t have those restraints. So, you know, I think that, you know, guys like me that are hedging their bets are gonna are gonna fare pretty well. There’s like there’s, and I won’t mention any names, but there’s, there’s definitely some guys in, in the vacation rental space that have, you know, a hundred units. And you know, Sean, I’ll leave that. I’ll let you figure out how the last name is, but Sean, and, and he’s had to switch and you know, he, they do 2 million plus a year in revenue and they’ve just had to reformat their model and they’re back to 80% capacity as of this morning. So I think the opportunity is there. I just think that it is a matter of shifting your focus and how you do business and just not freaking out be the, be the calm in the storm because that’s what people want to see. And when you freak out, you know what I tell my clients in every Zahra that I’m in is when you make emotional decisions that costs you money. So make logical fiscal based decisions and you’ll, and you’ll be okay.
Julian Sage: 26:43 What are, you know, I really, really I think that that’s such a great piece of advice that when we are making emotional decisions during this time and we’ve, we’ve been making a lot of emotional decisions during this whole up cycle. You know, everybody’s looking at, you know, the, especially the rental arbitrage model and they’re looking at how much profit there is and they’re just emotionally investing into all of these properties thinking, you know, I’m going to make all this money and now, you know, we’re an oil on the opposite side. Now there’s a lot of people talking about this is a model of it’s going to die, you know, all the rental arbitrage hosts are gonna, you know, be out of pocket now and it’s, it’s a dying model. And it’s very fear of fear and emotional based thinking. But what, what were some of the things that you were doing strategically during these past few years to be able to prepare yourself for this type of situation?
Rick Carlson: 27:29 So I think the number one thing for me is, is diversity. Because I got caught with my pants down in 2008 I was in a really bad position. Things just kept getting worse and worse and worse. I was paying like $5,000 a month to keep one business afloat for two years. And I should have, in hindsight, I should’ve not done that. I should have saved that, you know, $120,000 and I would have been in a much better position. Instead after everything was done and I was homeless, I was sitting on like $17,000 the cumulative total after I sold most of my assets. So going into this, I was really focused on diversity and, and trust me, I, a few of my mentors were very adamant against diversity. They said, you need to do, you need to focus on one thing, you need to go all in on one thing.
Rick Carlson: 28:20 And I said, I said, I appreciate that and I love that. And I’ve got solid residual income from these two different businesses that I’m not working for in that. And I’m not trading time for dollars. So why would I give up something that’s not taking away from my Headspace? And, and I’m very glad, I’m just very glad that I, that I stuck to my guns on that because had I just stuck with say, one thing like real estate, you know, we wrote two offers last week or you know, we had two offers go under contract last week. Things are still moving, but I can tell like the, the things have changed and, but we don’t know how they’ve changed and to what degree. So if I only was a real estate agent, I’d be super nervous. I would, I wouldn’t be freaking out, but I would, I would legitimately be wondering what the hell I, what the hell is going to do?
Rick Carlson: 29:13 And you know, I, and, and in myself, I, myself and and, and to partners just bought a, another house, a single family house. It’s the first single family house I’ve owned in five set five, six years, six years. It’s the first thing of family house I’ve bought in the six years. But once again, the ROI on it is very good. It makes a lot of sense. Even with the market doing what it’s doing is making lot of sense. So I think that you just have to move with purpose. And, you know, I, so when I go into any situation, whether it be a business or a real estate investment or any kind of investment, my goal is to have at least three exit strategies. If I’m living in the house, I can’t afford it. We rented out. And if I can’t rent it out or well, it’s live Airbnb, if I can’t Airbnb it, then we run it out longterm.
Rick Carlson: 30:05 And if I can’t rent it out longterm, what else can I do with it? If I can’t do anything else with it, then we sell it. So you just have these steps. And once again, I don’t make, you know, for me, I’m not emotional about the decisions that I make. If it makes fiscal sense, we do it. And if it doesn’t, then we don’t. And a lot of people, even one of my investors, we look at certain investments together and it’s, it’s just doomsday. And that’s worst case scenario. This, that, yeah. And I said, yeah, but what if, what if this goes right? What if option one goes right cause we’re now we’re 300 axing are our ROI. Option two only. Let’s say option one doesn’t work. Option two works out and now we’re only, you know, this, this ROI, worst case scenario, we’re walking away with a, you know, a 10% gain, which, you know, you’re not going to get in the market. So I think it’s just important to have a calm head and, and have an exit strategy. And for me, I always have multiple exit strategies going into whatever it is.
Julian Sage: 31:03 Awesome. Well, you know, I, I, you know, I appreciate you jumping on here and Sharon sharing your message, Rick. Is there anything else that, that you feel that for those listeners that are tuning in and they’re may be freaking out, maybe they have a bunch of different businesses, maybe they think everything, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s all gone. They have a cleaning business. They, they’re a real estate broker or a real estate agent and they have some, some rentals. And maybe they’re worried, maybe they haven’t had that type of, they haven’t had to experience something like that. Do you have any, any words of advice to someone that is in that similar situation like you?
Rick Carlson: 31:38 So I always say if it, you know, I tell my team, I say, listen, there’s, there’s two kinds of people in this world. There’s lines in their sheep and most people get offended by that and they don’t, they don’t want to understand it. But you know, lions are the leaders and the people that pave the way, they give you the confidence and they show you the path to accomplish these great things. The sheep are the people that, that help you accomplish that. And the, the piece that most people miss is we need each other. It’s the lion’s not here to solder the sheep and the sheep’s not here to feed the lion. We’re here to feed each other and do this thing together because it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. What’s important is that you recognize who you are. You embrace that and you and you, you align yourself with a counterpart.
Rick Carlson: 32:23 Because I couldn’t do what I do without the people that I have on my team. They theoretically in some cases, couldn’t, couldn’t do with what they want to do without, without somebody like me. Now, I think we’re all capable and we all have our our strengths, but we all have our weaknesses. So for me, I surround myself with people that their strengths are my weaknesses. I don’t need another one in me on the team. We wouldn’t get anything done. We talk about these big grandioso plans all freaking day, but nothing would get done. And so, and next thing you know, we’re now we’re all broke. So, you know, I think that regardless of where you’re at, listen, if you’re a cleaning person, I think there’s a lot of opportunity. I’d build a, I’d build a Corona, a Corona clean package, and I would put a, put a price amount on that and I’d suit up and I’d be out there hustling.
Rick Carlson: 33:16 If I was a host I’d be figuring out where the niches, you know, you could reach out to the local hospitals and get in touch with like the ICU and the cancer wards and places like that that have family that or that need to come stay while your, while the patient’s in treatment. There’s a ton of that and it’s in every market for the most part. I think every and every market is going to be a little different. So whatever that opportunity is for you, you will make it happen. And listen, if you’re a true entrepreneur, these are the times that you figure it out and you make it happen. If you’re, if you’re a true team player or dare I say employee, that’s okay too. Embrace it. Align yourself with that right person that’s going to help carry you guys. Cause you know, in the words of Gary Vaynerchuk, not everybody’s a number one, it’s okay to be a number two through third cause the, the number 30 person at Facebook is worth a hell of a lot number. Oh, I have a lot more than number one. Me and my organization. I have no problem being a number two through 30. By the way. I just happened to be a number one in today’s world that may change down the road. So figure it out. You’ll make it happen regardless of what that looks and don’t be ashamed of who you are and what your position is in this world because it’s needed and it’s necessary.
Julian Sage: 34:36 Thank. Thank you so much, Rick, for the, for the encouragement. I think you know, you’re, you’re strategically unemployed and I think that that’s a very, it’s a very you know, you’re, you’ve, you’ve gone through this before and I think that that, you know, having experienced that you have just a wealth of knowledge. So I appreciate you coming on here and taking the time to help help the host nation and, and build that confidence back up.
Rick Carlson: 34:56 My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
Julian Sage: 34:58 Thank you. And until next time, host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you hosts benefited from the show. If you found value, please go on over to iTunes, leave us a review and let us know what you enjoy about the show. If you’d like to talk to hosts that have been featured in these episodes as well as the community, go on over to our Facebook group, the the host nation.
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1. If your one thing is not insulated from the economy, make sure you have some diversity in your income.
2. Instead of freaking out, shift your focus on how you do business.
3. When you make emotional decisions, that costs you money.
4. When going into any kind of investment, have at least three exit strategies.
5. Have a calm head and have an exit strategy when going into whatever it is.
6. There’s a lot of opportunity for cleaners. You can offer a “Corona-clean” package.
7. Reach out to local hospitals.
8. If you are a true entrepreneur, these are the times that you figure it out and you make it happen.
9. Don’t be ashamed of who you are and what your position is in this world because it’s needed, and it’s necessary.
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