MI352: The Passive Income Playbook w/ Michael Hoffmann

26:47Was this a guy that was already interested in vending machines or how did you find him? Like, how did you find a guy that was like, he's a perfect, it sounds like he's a perfect fit for you. He's a home run hire. And we got really lucky because just like you in a college town, I posted an ad on Craigslist. I had 40 applicants in 48 hours, a ton of college kids, a ton of people out of work. And so, you know, I posted the ad, then everyone inbound, I sent a kind of a response qualifier. The interesting thing is when I grew up in Iowa, that town of 600, where I worked at McDonald's, my parents were really big into trying to give me opportunities athletically and academically.

27:24So I commuted 45 miles to Council Bless Omaha, Nebraska, to go to a private high school. This guy drives his kids 45 miles to Eugene so they can go to the private Catholic elementary school. And then he drops them off at eight on Monday and Tuesdays and sits around town till two to pick them up. So he was looking for a little side hustle while I was sitting around town for six, seven hours. And then it just was like a kind of, you know, like in life, there's these connections that just play out where, you know, if you believe in faith or whatever, like it just played out. And, um, and then within a year, I was like, man, I really got to find a way to bring this guy on full time.

28:07Cause he's just a rock star. And, um, I want him to have even more kind of skin in the game. So was able to make an offer that kind of beat out his current job. And then the great thing is now he can pick up his kids every day at two and vending it. You just got to stock it, get the inventory. I don't care what day of the week. It just needs to be done. Yeah. It doesn't matter when it's done right. So at this point, have you lost interest in real estate? I mean, have you decided to just completely focus on the vending and growing that? Or I know you've got other different things that you do, but I wanted to hear just what you're most excited about.

28:46Like what really gets you jazzed? I'm definitely not lost in real estate. In fact, whenever my wife and I are watching Netflix after we get the kids down, she might scroll through Instagram on the phone and I'm looking at short-term rentals in Hawaii. And like, you know, another one, you know, I'm always looking at, in fact, I just went in on a guy I sat next to on a flight back in December. We just closed on some land in Corvallis, another college town, Oregon state, where we're going to tear down the home and build up at least four duplexes and then section them off. You know, I get two, he gets two, or if we do 10, whatever, which is a fun project.

29:24I did that actually to take a step back. I bought a little bit of land by Autzen Stadium, about 9 ,000 feet, and I built a house in an ADU. But I had them built side by side. permits wise they were a house in adu and then i fenced them off separately and rented them and so that kind of whole house hacking thing so i'm always thinking through things but just with the current climate of rates and where the value of homes are it's just it's harder to find a good deal than it is to like go i mean i have a guy i used to mentor that was a college student in oregon and he just went into his gym that he works out in every day and went to the manager and it's, hey, your vending machine's not stocked ever.

30:05Can I replace it with my machine? And the guy's like, absolutely. And this kid didn't even know, like I intro'd him to that company in Des Moines and he's just figuring it out as he goes. He's 22 years old. That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about, it sounds like you're mentoring people. Like how does that program work? It's called what? Vendingpreneur? Is that what you call it? Vendingpreneurs? Yeah. So this is kind it back to the coach in me and it's, you know, I've taken a lot of courses and even we talked about Nick earlier and even his course and Cody Sanchez's course, both great people.

30:41But I wanted more of a, when I started posting about this, some of my friends were like, Hey, can you help me build a vending route in San Diego? Or can you help me build a vending route in Salt Lake? And that's what led into this, my backgrounds in software. So you build it once and then not have to repeat yourself. So I built out a whole framework, but there was this individual tailored approach to, we're going to go find your leads in Columbus, put them into an outreach framework, and then we're going to help you get meetings. And then I'm going to coach you through how to approach those meetings.

31:12And so that's really what I help people do now that are interested in vending wherever they live. And we do a market analysis. So you're not going into this blind. Columbus is obviously a market that would do well with vending, but we've had people in the middle of Nebraska where there's 15 leads and they're all the best Westerns and super rates along I-80. So it's like, yeah, it's a numbers game. You might as well do like some Christmas lights or something. So how does it work then? You're doing the cold calls. Let's say I want to do this in Columbus. You'll do the cold calls for me. And then, then once you have a warm lead, you'll coach me through on how to approach them and talk to them and hopefully land them as a client?

31:55Exactly. So there's two ways to do this. We have the crew that's all just do it myself way, where we give you the leads. We break up the leads into two criteria, all the businesses in your zip codes with a hundred plus employees. We're all the, let's just say multifamilies with a hundred plus units. And so again, foot traffic, and then we'll pull property management info. We'll pull ownership info and hand that off to you. We have email scripts. You can go run and do it yourself, cold call yourself. And then about a little over a year ago, we were doing the cold calling for people, the more the higher ticket done for you type solution.

32:31I was like, man, the cold calls are like my number one expense as a business. So just like some of the guys you've interviewed on the podcast, vertical integration type stuff, I actually started to build out a cold call center myself. So we have six full time cold callers. And these people, when a vendingpreneur signs up, they pick their business name. They set up a business email. Let's say it's BuckeyesVending at Gmail, something free and easy. And we'll actually set up a campaign coming from that email. And then the cold call script is coming from your business name. So it's, hey, I work for Patrick, the CEO of Buckeyes Vending.

33:06Do you have vending? Oh, you do. Are you happy with it? Oh, you're not. Oh, they don't stock it often. Why don't we have Patrick come by and show you what we can offer? That's awesome. You've got a lot going on and we're going to go into some of these other different passive streams that you've got going. But how are you managing your day-to-day, your time management and that kind of thing? How are you just structuring an average day? Yeah. So this is a whole, if I think of my three passions, right? At the end of the day, they all lead to freedom of more time. So I got my family is number one.

33:43And then I got passive income to be able to spend time with my family. And then I got my what I call health and human performance. And to me, that's everything from efficiency, mental focus, like physical, all of those things, what I went to school for. So I'm huge into like batching things, you know, whether that's Wednesdays or my kind of my podcast days or every morning I try to do something physical to break a sweat, whether that's a run or, or. Aren't you into rucking? Are you into. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rucking this morning with my dog. And then, so yeah, there's always that. And then there's a family time.

34:22Usually I try to do an hour of deep work before we call it. the fire alarm goes off in the house and all the kids are running around or the two kids are running around just like screaming and whatever. And then I dropped my daughter off at daycare and then I just have a kind of blocked sections of the week that are really efficient. I try to have my calls in the afternoon when I'm like out hitting balls or something. So are you then, do you work then from home or do you have a, do you have an office with like where you keep all the product and that kind of thing. Yeah. So I have an office where like, this is all whiteboards and then I share a door.

34:59So I have a two room office and the other room is for my, our local route vending my business partner. So he can, we have a whiteboard in there where he's tracking all the sales. We, we can store product in there, all of that. Got it. I wanted to take a little step back. You were talking about how each vending machine like would pay for a certain thing, like your club membership, your golf membership or daycare or whatever. Alan Corey, who was a real estate guy, he had a similar idea where he would do it with real estate rentals, but he would call it like his internet house or his electric, like the electric bill house.

35:32He kind of thought of each house as like, this one is paying for this expense. And it's a kind of a cool way to think about it. Yeah, that's exactly. And that's where, I'll be the first to say, vennies not get rich quick it's a parlay game it's just like your first rental isn't going to cash flow enough for you to leave that nine to five but you got to start somewhere and that's the same thing with this as well and for us we've been blessed that it doesn't take up much time even when i was doing it myself before hiring eric it didn't take much time i gotta go stock on my way to the course i go stock on my way to the gym it's not i have to block off and then guess what if you forget or you're on vacation for two weeks and you don't make it there if you run out of Snickers.

36:14It's not like a rental where if the toilet breaks, you got to have a plumber over there now. If you run out of Snickers, they're going to buy a freaking Twix. So I wanted to ask about your exit strategy. I see like in biz buy sell, vending routes for sale all the time. Are you going to be like Warren Buffett and regret this if you sell it? Or what is your exit strategy? Will you hold onto this for the cashflow or Or what's the end game? Yeah, I think now we want to hold on to it because we've built a system that is just predictable, both predictable and what we're going to do with revenue, but predictable with our cogs, predictable with just everything.

36:52Like we've ironed out the kinks. That's not to say if someone comes with a ridiculous offer that you wouldn't say no. But I will say this reminds me so much the self-storage kind of craze. I think right now, vending, the market's definitely not saturated yet just because of the amount of new builds coming out of COVID from commercial real estate and apartments and just a land grab with that. But I think in two to three years, vending will be the private equity snatch up this kind of sector of the market because of cash flow. Now you have three years of cash flow, all of that, that people are going to do a lot of consolidation.

37:32Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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40:57All right, back to the show. So on these machines, I'm just thinking on our own, we've got a credit card reader. Is that like where most of the sales come from? Most people don't carry a bunch of cash. So is it mostly credit cards that are how people are making the purchases? Yeah, it's totally dependent on the location. We have a pumpkin farm manufacturing plant up by Corvallis and it's a bunch of Hispanic workers that don't have like smartphones or they love cash, just more of their culture. That really surprised us because it was more of a modern micro market where we would typically install a kiosk that was cart only, but they insisted they actually wanted a cash machine.

41:36So it was interesting. It wasn't hard. They have those two. It's just, they're definitely more outdated and not the norm. So let's get into some of the other things you've got going on. Can you share a little bit, some of the other passive income streams that you're doing to, again, like your whole goal is building freedom for your family and just time. Talk to me about some of the other things you've got going on. Yeah. So I got some Bitcoin mining. So that's out of sight, out of mind. I hired a third party farm, a mining farm right outside of Philadelphia and got some minings. Depending on where Bitcoin is, I get kind of$500 worth of Bitcoin sent to my wallet every month.

42:17So that's just been three years of, I don't even look at what it is month to month. I just know it's a set amount of Bitcoin every month. And then do you keep that in Bitcoin or do you, tell me about that stuff. Yeah, no, I haven't touched it. That's great. It's just been mining and it's just been completely out of sight. I'm lucky enough. I've had to touch it. How is the Bitcoin having or having, however, what people say it different ways, but how has that affected your income? It hasn't much because it's just such a, to me, it's a dividend. And it's a small part of your overall. exactly portfolio like i think that would probably but the other so you know on my kind of my trading portfolio and stuff i definitely have a lot more bitcoin um because i do think the having and where things are going and it's just you know it's an interesting time so i do have more in that kind of portfolio for sure that the mining is more just set it and forget it i don't even i haven't even looked what's happened since pre-having to now with that because it's such a small yeah you know, it's 500 bucks.

43:23I don't just. So you mentioned trading. Do you, is that part of the, some of your activities too, is like doing different trades or, or are you more of a buy and hold kind of guy, like with the Bitcoin? That's a good question. You're going to expose me a little bit on here. I do have a little, don't tell my financial advisor this, but I do have a little slush fund. I guess you could say that's like probably more gambling than anything in Robinhood where I believe in Apple and I'm going to buy some Apple on the dip and write it out. It's not financially sound. And then that's way out of our kind of automatic deposit.

44:02Our monthly paycheck takes 10 % out to a different account in Schwab. This is more of my fun money on my Robinhood app that if we have leftover money, I'll just kind of take it in there and align it with companies I believe in. I've worked in software with the government for a long time. So I'm very familiar with like Palantir. So like I know Palantir's fundamentals on the inside where people are going off their project. So like those companies, on the dip, I'll just buy some more. Yeah, that's fun to do. So I wanted to hear a little bit about like just words of wisdom, like people trying to get something like this started.

44:40What are just like, what would you have told your younger self, like getting started into this? What do you wish you would have known or what kind of advice from an older guy would you have wished somebody would have told you to make your journey and path a little easier? I think the first thing is be curious and take your shot. And I know that sounds so obvious, but a perfect example in sales. and I didn't grow up wanting to be in sales. I got into it because I think naturally as the startup evolved in Palo Alto, I was a good listener and I asked a lot of questions because I was curious. And a lot of times the best salespeople and I think Patrick, it comes back to your comment earlier of like, you know, you have a guy coming on the show in a couple of days and kind of a big name.

45:26And, but at the end of the day, you took your shot and you got him on that show. And I think I remember the first time I ever reached out to Cody Sanchez. And at the time I was like, oh my gosh, that's Cody Sanchez. And then it's, everyone has a cool story and you can't get in the door without trying to open it. And so, you know, I remember the first time that tech startup I worked at, I did a cold email to Mark Cuban and he responded right away. And I was like, Mark Cuban. Yeah. Oh yeah. Cause he, his assets are these athletes to keep them healthy on the court for the Maverick. I just went in.

45:57And so like, I'm a huge believer in curiosity and professional persistence because nine times out or nine out of 10 people that say they'll send you a follow up won't do it. It'll be that one that does, especially in today's world with AI and like the personalization piece of this, there's going to be such the cream are going to rise to the crop. The reason I got that job in Palo Alto when I was making 1200 bucks as a strength coach in St. Louis was because I was the only candidate they interviewed that mailed a thank you note to the CEO. And how many people do that these days? Nobody does it.

46:30No one. Yeah. I'm a huge believer in just handwritten simple notes just makes a huge impact on people because nobody does it. Yeah. Even like finding deals, like real estate deals. I have so many friends that find good deals by doing like campaigns or going by a property and then they have a little note card and they'll just write a little handwritten personalized saying and put it in the mailbox. So you've got the Bitcoin mining, you've got the vending machine roots, you've got a couple other things. You've got an Airbnb now. And so you've had the two rentals, but you 1031 those, right? So tell me about like your next like steps in real estate, what you did.

47:09Yeah. So we had the two rentals in St. Louis. One was around 70K and 80K. So we, during COVID and the appreciation and flux, we were able to 1031, both of them, we got over a hundred K on bulls. So good returns. And we put - You had a hundred, a hundred K in capital gains. Is that what you said? Not a hundred K. I mean the one, the 70 K one, I think we sold for one 20. So we had 50 K it was only five years, maybe four or five years. So whatever that difference is, but we 1031 that to a, by that time we had moved to Oregon. So we bought a condo and bend at a little, it's called sun river resort if anyone's ever heard of it.

47:50But that was fun because it was two hours from where we live. So we could go visit and the non peak times. Plus it was a mountain town and it had three golf courses. So it rented out in the summer for those people that wanted to do summer stuff. And then it had the skiing and the winter at Mount bachelor. So we'd always go visit in the fall after labor day or before Memorial day in the spring and those non peak times. So it was the best of both worlds that rental we bought for two 50 and we sold it for four 25, two years later, this is like the whole COVID. Yeah. Right. Everyone's going remote.

48:23Everyone's moving out of the Bay and moving to Oregon and Bend is exploding. And so we bought a rental in Tampa sight unseen. Oh, I really wanted to find a market that wasn't, I just didn't feel good about how things were appreciating so fast. So I wanted to find a little more stable market that like had business. I knew there would be huge military base. And so those short-term rentals would be a lot of not just tourists, but more of the stable. I'm traveling for work to Tampa and bringing my wife and kids. So we need a pool or something like that. And that house, we haven't, we've had it three or four years now, and it hasn't done less than a hundred grand a year in rental revenue.

49:04In fact, I would consider last year a down year and it did 120 K. And it's Airbnb only. Yep. And you bought it sight unseen, huh? How did you, how did you do that? Yeah. So it was interesting. I, I was using those sites kind of like Zillow for short-term rentals. So AirDNA and Rabu was the free tool at the time. And I'd find like a market, let's say Clearwater Beach. And I'm like, okay, I think we want, there's not very many four bedroom rentals on the market. So we're going to focus on four bedroom rentals. Then I go to Zillow, find a four bedroom rental, and I would plug it into Rabu. And I was like, oh, wow, they have a four bedroom rental three streets away that it's saying it's doing 150K.

49:44And they have this true story. It said that. And I was like, there's no way a rental is on 150K. So on Rabu, they had the Airbnb link of all the properties. So I went to the Airbnb link. I messaged the property manager and I was like, hey, we're thinking about buying in this market. Do you want our business? And so she said, yes. And I said, then you need to send me the revenue verification of the last two years. And sure enough, the W-2 or the W-whatever form of the revenue, the K-1 or whatever, showed that it did 150K. And I was like, wow, that's awesome. And that's when, yeah, we went into it.

50:22We had a realtor we trusted down there. And my sister lives in Tampa. So we go there usually once a year. And yeah, sight unseen, I furnished the whole thing off Facebook Marketplace without ever visiting. It was crazy. And you're managing it completely remotely, right? Yep. I have that gal I met through that DM on Airbnb. I have her managing it. So it's so passive. I trust her so much now where I'm like, look, if it's less than a$300 fix and repair, I don't even want to know about it. So as we said, you've got a lot going on. What's your biggest bottleneck right now or your biggest challenge?

50:59I heard you talk about how if you can't go away for three months and your business has grown, you're the problem. So tell me a little bit about what your biggest challenges are in managing all this. There's always the, if my kids would sleep more, the three and the one-year-old, because I know I always would laugh because you would always, I'd always coach people up on the importance of sleep. And then what I didn't realize until we had kids is like, when you know the importance of sleep and you still can't get that whole angle. But I think the challenges are always evolving. The big thing for me, if you come back to the book we talked about earlier with buy back your time is I'm very big into delegating and then just letting them run with it and just not trying to be that bottleneck for them.

51:43So like a perfect example is we have this vending machine being delivered tomorrow. Like I wanted everything to be smooth. So they weren't calling me for the delivery. They were calling my operator. Like basically I want these guys to move out. And it's funny with my vending for our coaching program, we made two big hires at the end of March and I was a little nervous because we're very lean and our EBITDA is very healthy. I was like, man, these are two strategic hires. The first months that I let them run the show and I removed myself from the business, Patrick, guess what happened? We did our best month ever.

52:16So like the back to the comfort crisis, Michael Easer talks about this a little bit too, is if you can, and even Dan Martell and so you can remove, you should do an exercise where you remove yourself from your business for at least four weeks and see what happens. I love it. I'm trying to think about it. I don't know. I need to get some systems in place, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dan's book will help you with that. That's great. Yeah. That one is Buy Back Your Time. I think we talked about that prior to the interview starting. So that's Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. And then the other one was The Comfort Crisis, right?

52:50Yeah. By Mike Leister on the surface. It's definitely not a motivational book. It's not a Jocko discipline equals freedom or anything like that. It's more of a taking this concept of being uncomfortable leads to gross and using real world case studies. Like even the military, they're known to rock so many miles every morning, but why? And so they go back to the 1800s on why they started rucking. What does rucking do to your physical health, your mental health, like all cold plunging? That's a perfect example. Like going on four, seven day Miyagi type trips, whether that's like a hunting thing in the backwoods, that's what the story is built around.

53:29But people that sign up for a marathon and haven't ran a mile in three years, like doing these uncomfortable things that at least once a year that kind of get you to, okay, wow, you thought this was possible when in reality it was that. Yeah, I interviewed Scott Young, who's an author. He wrote a book called Ultra Learning and he just came out with a book called Get Better at Anything. And he talked about, he did a TED Talk and he basically did this MIT challenge where he did the computer science program or the entire program in a year. So a four-year degree at MIT, he did it in a year for the cost of like the textbooks, which was like 1500 bucks.

54:08And then he did another language challenge where he, every three months he was learning another language and he did not speak English at all. He and a buddy did this. They would go to South Korea, China. I think they went to Brazil and then maybe like France or Spain. So the four different countries. But like that, he asked that question, if this is possible, what else could you do in your life? Once you do these hard challenges, it then becomes what else is possible for my life if I can do something this hard? Like where's the limit? Yeah. And this is something I keep coming back to as a dad and a father.

54:42And when I was coaching and then watching my wife be a coach, like you could tell the kids that we're going to go to the next level, whether that's play professionally, whether that's be successful when they graduate just by knowing their parents. Really? And that just fascinated me. Like I could literally have a conversation with parents and just know how their kid, like it was just in Dan Hurley, the Yukon coach. So they, they just won, I think two, two national titles in a row, but there's a video that went viral online after they won. And he's the first thing we do when we bring a kid on a recruiting visit is we watch how they interact with their parents.

55:21Do they respect their parents? Do they open their door? The door we're going in a tour, an apartment. Do they open the door for their mom? How do they talk to their mom and dad? Is it like, leave me alone? And I was just like, oh my gosh, this light bulb just came on. And it was just, I mean, it's amazing. For me, I'm like thinking back to my parents and all the uncomfortable, I showed cattle and my dad would make me get up at five in the morning to go wash these cows. And I'd hate every minute of it. But now it's, that is why I get up at 5 a.m. now. That's when you get all the hard things done.

55:55That's fascinating about interacting with the parents. And by doing that, you can tell how the kid will do if he'll, you know, advance to the next level. I haven't seen that Dan Hurley video. I'll have to check that out. I'll send it to you. It's really good. And then Dawn Staley parlayed that next. And she's like, we won't touch a kid if she, you know, the classic mom-daughter dynamic, if she won't respect her mom on the visit. And I was like, wow, this is, and both of those teams, I think South Carolina actually won the full team. Yeah, they beat Iowa. Yeah. That's awesome. What other traits?

56:27You mentioned curiosity. What are some other traits that you see in the people that you've worked with on the vending machines, like specifically that, that you see in like, that guy's going to do well? Yeah. We're to the point now where we're trying to, within our community, like who are what we call our athletes? Like who are the ones I just want to go to that next level. And I don't know if it's initiative or it's just those people that that you talk about the gross mindset and kind of the Carol Dweck. And when we were at Stanford, that it was a really popular book at that time, really, because that's where she was at.

57:04But it's just that constant growth mindset. And it's just so interesting. And I'm not talking like they'll go read 50 books or listen to 50 of your podcasts. They actually take what they learn and put it into action. Like you were just talking about the gentleman you interviewed that traveled the world going to learn language. Now I'm like, man, I want to listen to this episode. And then where can we go travel and put this into action? Because listening or learning it is one thing, but putting it in action is the next. And we see that all the time with our students is we can schedule the meeting for Patrick at this high rising Columbus, but like, he's got to go, I can't fly there and do the meeting for him.

57:41And then how do you parlay that meeting to the next meeting? Or how do you ask that guy? Like after that meeting is about to end, Hey, do you have any other properties in Columbus? Would they be interested in this? It's like constant, curious, gross mindset that, I don't know, it's just interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. We've got that Carol Dweck mindset. My wife is a therapist I mentioned beforehand. And I think the two mindsets, one is just a fixed mindset and one is a growth mindset. The fixed is like, you just don't really think that much is possible. The growth mindset is like anything's possible.

58:17I just got to get out there and try different things. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, it's just that if you're comfortable, it's never good. You look at Nick Saban, you look at Belichick, none of those athletes were ever comfortable working for them. And as much as that can be a little frustrating, it's also why Tom Brady is who he is. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I can talk this kind of stuff. I love like sports psychology and books and all this, I could talk forever here. And that's what's fascinating to me with golf. I never grew up golfing. And now that we're fortunate enough to kind of belong to a club and stuff, the game of golf and that mental, you want to talk about the gross mindset, the inner game of tennis.

59:00I've got, I just was given that book, The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Galloway. Is that his name? Galloway? Yeah. Think about it. We used to train a bunch of baseball athletes when we were building this tech in Palo Alto. So it was a bunch of pros from Stanford and Cal that would come back in the offseason to train. And we would use their data to build out our machine learning models. And it was just fascinating to me. An all-star baseball player will fail seven out of ten times and make the all-star game. Like, think about that. There was Mitch Hanegar starting right fielder for the Mariners.

59:30He made it to the all-star game because his batting average was over 300. And yet they go through these slumps. And, like, life and even your business is the game of baseball. You just got to show up every day and get through those trials and tribulations because everyone else won't. They'll just give up. Yeah, that is a unfortunately very common thing that people just expect success right out of the gate. And that generally isn't going to happen. Yeah. You got to take your swings. And this has been fun. Any other people or books that have really influenced you along the way or people that you try to model or emulate?

1:00:08there's not necessarily people that i would probably try to emulate i think i'm that stage in life where you're not going to please everybody whether that's people that want more of your time or you just gotta prioritize what you believe in and take a stand that's like even nick huber i laugh at how many people roast him on twitter and he's never gonna win any of those arguments but like you look at warren buffett you look at phil knight if you've ever read shoe dog you look at Elon, you know, you look at Jeff Bezos, you look at all these entrepreneurs, they always just kind of took a stance on something.

1:00:45They don't try to play both sides. They try to understand the other side, but they have this kind of belief. And that's why, you know, I look at Cody and Nick on this kind of boring biz side and they've just taken a stance. It's, and to me, that's just, I really respect that because they're not trying to please everybody. They're not trying to live in the middle. There's no politics game. They might not know everything, but here's why they take, taking the stand they've taken. So for me, I'm, I'm really, Elon's really intriguing to me. I just read that PayPal mafia book. Oh, did you? Success rate of all those guys and the Peter Thiel.

1:01:21Oh, it's just, but all of them, they probably, pardon my language, they were probably dicks to a lot of people and some employees hated working for them. But now you look at that book and they interviewed people that were fired by elon or you know pissed off by peter and all of them are like yeah that's why they're uber successful they were so focused and put the stands you've got all this stuff going on do you ever and i i am in the same boat where i've got a lot of different things going on do you ever feel like you need to just focus on one thing to get really good at just one thing yeah i was going through this phase probably six even when i started twitter i only been on twitter what was that september of 2022 so not very long and my whole idea was passive income streams and this whole let's build a disneyland of basically take bigger pockets but instead of just real estate let's like patrick comes over to the cash flow kingdom and it's like laundromats, car washes, all of that.

1:02:23And then this guy goes over to the crypto kingdom. Well, 95 % of my questions that were, people would reach out about was vending. And so like, to me, it really opened my eyes. I was like, what am I trying to do here? And you probably see this with your brand, with the podcast and kind of, you realize this whole shotgun approach is not the best way of focus. And so for me, yeah, it's been really fascinating. I'm totally open to other income streams and other investment ideas. I mean, I just did an investment project with a group that's building oil lube stations in Florida, but it's more of the passive, like I'll pay a little more premium capital for their time to take it on and I trust them.

1:03:06So that's kind of the focus for me has been more on learning how to say no, probably more than everything. Yeah, that is a good thing. Like the to don't list, I think Tim Ferriss calls it. Like don't stop doing these things. Or if you're going to take on something, what are the three things you're going to, I guess, offload? Yeah. It's interesting that people wanted to hear mostly about vending. Why do you think that was? Because I think it's so real. Like you talk crypto, you talk any of these kinds of things that you talk, whatever, let's say self-storage. At the end of the day, everyone's used a vending machine.

1:03:45Everyone's gone through an airport. Everyone's been in a rush to, even last night I landed at midnight and my ear was still clogged. And right when I got off the plane, literally at the gate was a vending machine. And I went and bought a pack of gum, just to like, you know, it was a$3 big red pack. I was like, what in the heck? This is 10 cents off Amazon, but I need it now. I can't hear out of my right ear. Yeah. Mike, this has been a lot of fun. I really have enjoyed this. Enjoy your time and your insights. You're a super smart guy doing a lot of interesting things and helping a lot of people along the way.

1:04:19Is there anything that we didn't get a chance to touch on or talk about that you wanted to? No, Patrick, this has just been an honor. Yeah. It's your brand speaks for itself. So just grateful that you brought me on here and yeah, what you're doing, what you're about, huge fan. So again, thanks for having me on. Yeah, my pleasure. How can people learn more about what you're up to? Talk to us about different ways they can get in touch with you. Yeah. If they're interested in the vending machine route, we have a website, vendingpreneurs.com, really built around this whole idea of people that were teachers or anything in the world, sales reps, or just wanted a side hustle, stay at home moms, whatever, that wanted some extra income so they can go through there if they want to learn more.

1:05:05Got a ton of case studies of all firefighters, et cetera. And then mrpassive.com, I do have a newsletter that goes out every kind of Friday. And then I'm on social media. I'm probably on Twitter the most, but I'll definitely try to get some of this content once it gets released out there on some of my other channels as well, because I do have a little bit of a following on some of those other ones, but Twitter is like probably my most real time off the hip kind of content. Yeah, yeah. That's how I found you was on Twitter. So yeah, just again, thanks, Mike. I appreciate your time and insights here today.

1:05:39Yeah, thank you, Patrick. Good to be on here. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon.

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