Steve Niemaszyk got laid off, grabbed a bottle of wine, and started a commercial cleaning company from scratch — then turned a COVID windfall into a real estate portfolio that now runs itself. In this episode, he breaks down how losing a W-2 job became the best thing that ever happened to him, and why the people you surround yourself with will always matter more than any business plan.
Episode 9: From Cleaning Company to Real Estate Deals with Steve Niemaszyk
What do you do when you lose your job and decide that you never want to work for someone else ever again? Do what Steve did. In this episode of Save to Zero, hosts Zach and Mike sit down with Steve Niemaszyk to talk about how he built a cleaning business out of necessity, then used that foundation to move into real estate investing.
Steve shares what it really looked like in the early days with long hours, cutting back at home, reinvesting every dollar, and figuring things out as he went. He talks openly about what it took to rebuild his income after losing his W-2 job, to create systems, to hire the right people, and to grow a business that could eventually run without him in the middle of everything.
You’ll also learn how Steve made the jump into real estate, why being in the right rooms matters, and how his mindset around money changed over time. He also shares why he’s teaching his kids to understand cash flow early, build confidence around money, and surround themselves with people who are already doing what they want to do.
“When you own all of your decisions, it’s all on you.”
“Once you have a grasp on how much you’re spending and how much you’re bringing in, if you can get that down at 18/19 years old, think of how easy the rest of your life is going to be.”
“Literally, the sky is the limit. Whatever you want out of life, if you surround yourself with people who are doing those exact things, you will become one of those people.”
Steve Niemaszy is an entrepreneur and real estate investor who built a successful corporate cleaning business after being laid off from his financial career during the 2008 financial crisis. Through years of long hours, persistence, and building strong systems, he grew the company into a thriving operation that even expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, Steve balances running his cleaning business with investing in real estate, creating multiple streams of income, and a lifestyle focused on financial freedom.
Call Steve Niemaszyk on 603-505-1487
Find Steve Niemaszyk on Instagram
For Investors & the Fund – Learn how the Fund works and book a call
For Borrowers & Deals – Get funding and support for your next investment
[00:04.8]
Anything you see online, anything you see in the mainstream media, that's not necessarily true. Right. You go out and make your own reality. Right. You surround yourself with people that are doing the things or that are thinking about doing the things at that age that you want to do when you grow up.
[00:20.8]
Right. You have to understand what we're talking about during these conversations, and you have to be willing to learn and also be willing to be vulnerable and tell these guys, hey, listen, my dad's telling me how to do this, but I don't know what I'm doing. Can you help me in this aspect of.
[00:37.1]
So put yourself out there. And I said, before you know it, it's not going to be this. This aha, moment that goes off. You're just gonna all of a sudden start doing something because you've been doing it the whole time. It's just finally going to start monetizing itself. Most people think saving money is the answer, but the truth is saving only gets you to zero.
[00:57.6]
Join Mike and Zach as they flip the script from saving to earning from zero to unlimited potential. Welcome to Save to Zero. All right, welcome, everybody, to the Save to Zero podcast. I'm Zach Richards, here with Mike Seidel, and our guest today is Steve Nimzic.
[01:17.3]
So, Steve, before we started recording, you were talking about how you started a cleaning company and take us through that journey and what made you start it and why you chose that industry and just what happened there. Yeah. So, thanks for having me on, guys, really.
[01:33.9]
It was born out of necessity. I was working in the finance world, you know, back during the boom of, you know, 0506 0708, and, then got laid off. And when I got laid off, I literally stopped to grabbed a bottle of wine, came home, sat on the couch with my wife and said, what can we do where I don't have to listen or work for anybody ever again?
[01:53.6]
And that's when Steri Clean, the cleaning business, was born. Because it's not economy driven, there are always going to be offices that need cleaning. It's something that's tough to scale, but, you know, a lot of work will get you where you need to be. And it took me five or six years before was at the same income level that I was prior to starting the company.
[02:13.1]
So it makes sense why you chose cleaning. But, like, how did you. How did you pick that of all things? Was it in your mind before or, like, you're sitting on the couch with the bottle of wine? Right. How did cleaning pop into your head? I heard a couple of other people that I had worked with where they were just picking up some, you know, back then, they didn't really call it a side hustle, but I guess that's what it was, was a side hustle.
[02:32.9]
And I said, well, what if we make this a full time gig and we devote, you know, a full day's work as to trying to acquire new customers and go after, you know, legitimate, you know, class A office space, you know, well known established corporations, and, you know, try to clean thousands of square feet a night instead of a one off, you know, somebody cleaning a house two or three times a month or something like that.
[02:54.5]
So we went into a market that we thought was not affected by the economy as much as others. At the time, I had a finance background. I didn't really want to go into finance because at the time, the world was melting. Right. Nobody knew what was happening. The next year, the market was crumbling, banks were going out of business, the huge bailout.
[03:13.5]
I mean, we all know the story, right? So I figured I'd go into an industry that wasn't affected by any of that, and that's kind of how it was born. So your jumping from W2 to entrepreneur was simply out of necessity versus out of choice?
[03:31.4]
That's correct, yes. And you said it took you five years to get back to what you had been making, as a W2 employee, correct? That's correct. Five years and probably double the amount of hours that I had to put in. Yeah. Right. Wait a minute.
[03:47.5]
You're an employer. You sit back and smoke cigars while everybody else is working. Come on. Don't I wish, don't I wish? All the Instagram influencers today make it seem so easy to start your own business. It's great. You'll never have to work a W2 again. Yeah, okay.
[04:03.5]
Yeah. So what was that like going from making X dollars to Y dollars before you got back to making X dollars? What did you have to do? What did you have to change in your life in order to do that? So it was absolutely awful. I mean, I was north of six figures at the time, and I was working, you know, a standard 40 hour week.
[04:23.8]
Right. 45 sometimes, you know, bringing home good money back. I mean, back in 2008, that was a good living. And then that flipped on its head where we had to literally cut out. Going out to eat, we had to cut down to one vehicle in the house. We bootstrapped everything we had, every dollar we made, we reinvested into the business I was working at night cleaning buildings myself, while during the day going to networking events and hitting the road, going door to door sales, figuring out what direct mail campaigns work, what's the best way to run ads.
[04:54.9]
I mean it was just non stop. How did you how long was it before you were able to hire employees to do the work? That started in year one because it gets to a point where you can only clean so much square footage space as one human being.
[05:11.7]
So I mean at the time my two children were home young so my wife stayed home with them and helped where she could. So I could only clean so much. So again, out of necessity I hired probably people that I shouldn't have hired, but hired some people to do some of the work for me and then just kept learning from there and getting more and more accounts and then hiring more and more and more.
[05:32.6]
How did you get your SOPs in place for cleaning? I mean I think I know how to clean but in reality I probably can't clean correctly to the standard of, you know, IBM or Apple Computer. Yeah, that's a struggle. And honestly I didn't even do that right away.
[05:49.4]
I waited till probably year 7 or 8 before I actually sat down and started writing SOPS. And the reason being is we clean such a vast array of different facilities from medical to banking. Right. You can imagine to clean a dentist or an oncologist's office is different than cleaning your local bank.
[06:09.5]
The SOP is completely different. As much as we think it's cleaning. Right. Everyone knows how to clean so it took a while to do that, but I think we have it dialed in pretty well now. And we roll out the SOP to the, to the management staff and then management kind of does the day to day training and ongoing training and quality control with the staff.
[06:29.0]
How did you find out how to clean a dentist's office or an oncologist office versus or a medical facility versus a bank? How did you determine the difference between the two? I'm curious. It was YouTube University.
[06:45.1]
I would just, I would just go online and Google how to do things and what they expect and I would go on other cleaning companies websites and read the reviews from their customers and say, okay, this is what a customer is looking for. So that's what I did. I physically went above and beyond. Probably spent way more man hours than I should looking back to make sure that the customer was extremely happy before I'd move on to the next trying to acquire the next customer.
[07:08.4]
Yeah, I say this respectfully I don't think you went too far. You got your foundation and you set your system. So I give you a lot of credit, much respect for, you know, and to look at your competitor and see what the reviews were and figure out what the customer is looking for.
[07:23.8]
That is brilliant idea. I love that. That's way out of the box thinking. Seriously, that's clever. Well, that's what we do as entrepreneurs. Right. We have to think outside the box. If we stay in the confines of, you know, what the school system teaches us, then we're bred to be employees.
[07:40.9]
Yeah. And would you rather read the bad reviews of your credit your competitors, or wait for your customers to leave you a bad review and then read those and fix it? Right. No, honestly, that transitions into, like, what I'm doing now with STR stuff. Like, I want to know what other people are saying and what the market's looking for before I just go and try to throw something at the wall and hope it sticks.
[08:02.1]
Yeah, that's clever. You were talking about figuring it out. My first company was Medical Alert Systems. Push a butt and get an ambulance. Way back when dinosaurs, ruled the earth is when I started that company. Yeah, I can't get up type thing. That's it.
[08:17.3]
And that was, Yep. Started that back in 87. And what was interesting is I am not mechanically inclined at all. Okay. So we went to install the first system. That was when people actually had phones in their house and they were hardwired in again.
[08:35.4]
This was dinosaur time before cell phones. And we had to go and hook it up. And we had this hardwired phone and then our piece of equipment, and we didn't know which wires we had to hook up to because it was an old house and all the wires were black.
[08:54.9]
And we knew that we had four colors on our splitter. So we were there for probably an hour and a half trying to figure it out. The guy who we installed the equipment for actually went to take a nap. We were taking so long. And, I got on the phone with my brother, said it was a.
[09:10.7]
Then when the guy woke up, I said it was a technician we had coming. There was a problem with his wiring we had to correct. Oh, my God. My brother said, oh, all you do is this. I'm like, son of a gun. We just figured it out. Oh, I didn't say it was my brother. It was a technician that was coming. He was finishing another job.
[09:25.9]
And he's good at rewiring, so he'll have to rewire this for you. Oh, my God. Totally made it up. So for your cleaning company, it sounds like that's what we do. I mean, that's what we do as entrepreneurs. We have to figure it out. Yeah. I mean, if we don't, there's nobody to.
[09:41.4]
There's nobody to point the finger at anymore. Nope. Right. When you work for someone else, you can always kind of pass that buck or, you know, maybe my manager dropped the ball or something. But when you own all of your decisions, it's on you. Yeah. For better or for worse, you own it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
[09:58.6]
Absolutely. So how'd the growth of your cleaning company go? Was it pretty steady or did you have a lot of ups and downs and moments where you reconsidered the whole thing or how'd that go? Yeah, I mean, at the beginning it was pretty steady because I was really gung ho, you know, doing 1618 hour days between the cleaning and, and trying to acquire new customers and sales and everything.
[10:19.3]
And then it kind of plateaued for a little while. And to be honest with you, it's because I was tired. I just needed a little break. So our growth kind of stagnated for a little while. But that was certainly all my fault. I didn't know to hire a salesperson. I didn't know what I didn't know. Right.
[10:35.2]
So once I kind of figured that out, where, hey, there's more to life than just me doing all this work and making the same amount of money, I kind of figured it out a little bit and then expanded the team a little bit further. And then growth, you know, it just kept going from there. Now, your first employee, your first salesperson, did they get paid a base in salary or did they just get paid, you know, got to eat what they kill?
[10:58.2]
So they were base in base plus commission. That's what I meant to say. Which again was, a mistake on my end. The base I paid them was way too much. And they weren't really incentivized on the commission structure as much. Not because the commission structure was bad, but because the base salary was so high that they could live on that alone.
[11:16.8]
Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's. That's, When I had. My second company was a construction company, we did property damage, repair, et cetera. And with our project managers, they got a base and they got paid based on the profitability of the job.
[11:38.3]
So they didn't get paid on the gross sales. Their bonus was not on gross sales. It was on net. Because you learned Very quickly. If you bonus them on gross, they don't care if the job makes a profit. Exactly. We bonus them on net, a percentage of net.
[11:53.7]
And that got their attention. Yeah, we did the same. And then I also added in, a retention piece to the bonus commission as well. So if we'd retain a customer for 12, 24 and 36 months, they would get a piece of that growth moving forward in years to come.
[12:09.1]
So it really, it helped my salespeople follow back up with the existing client base to make sure that everything was going well above and beyond the quality control specialists that we have. Well, then let me ask a question, because in my second company, I had this issue with the sales guy.
[12:25.2]
How did you reconcile him saying, well, I did my job. If they didn't clean property or qc didn't do their job, that's not on me. I should still get my retention bonus. That only came up once. And basically, if there was a complaints that we've gotten or received from the customers, we would go over that with the salesperson as well as with the staff on site.
[12:47.0]
And they were okay with us taking that retention away from them. They didn't really put up too much of a fight. But that didn't happen a whole lot, to be honest with you. Like I said, it only happened one time. So now you're doing real estate and a couple other things. So what does the structure of the cleaning company look like today so that you're no longer working in the business all the time and now you have time to do this other stuff?
[13:09.0]
So I still do work a little bit in it. I still do. I oversee invoicing in the accounts and all that kind of stuff. But, since then, my wife has kind of taken over operations. And then so the structure would be myself as the president. My wife's kind of the vice president slash operations manager.
[13:25.1]
Then we've got, a couple of management supervisors underneath her and then, staff cleaning staff underneath that. So it allows her where she does all the interviewing. And I kind of let her run the day to day with that. And then sales will report to her as far as what's coming in, what's on the horizon.
[13:46.8]
She'll then try to ramp up staffing for that and just kind of run things by me every couple of days just to kind of let me know, just so I have a pulse on what's going on. But it's allowed me to free up. It's allowed me to free up my time where, I mean, truthfully, I'M probably spending five, six, six hours a week on that company.
[14:04.6]
Okay, that's what I was going to ask. And how about your wife? Yeah, she's probably 15 to 20 hours a week, so not bad. No, and managers are running it on a day to day basis. You guys are just doing it from the 50,000 foot level? Exactly.
[14:20.2]
Yep. They're running it day to day. They're checking on, you know, inventory, quality control, everything but staffing. She still likes to hire the staff for whatever reason. We've gone back and forth with that, but she doesn't want to release that. That's fine. Now, do you do background checks on all the staff?
[14:36.5]
Yeah, of course. We have to. We're in a lot of state facilities and a lot of, a lot of, you know, high security buildings where, you know, they've got to pass a pretty extensive background check before we even considered to bid on the account. So what made you look at real estate? You know, everybody kind of has a different story of how they fell into it.
[14:53.3]
And I don't think many people set out to be a real estate investor. No, they don't at all. And for me, you know, like I said, we had bought our first house. I mean, you know, we lived the American dream, right? Had a, had a great job, bought a house and then said, okay, now we need to buy a bigger house because we had another child.
[15:09.9]
And then, you know, with the cleaning business going. But how it started for me was one day I was literally stripping, and waxing a floor. And one of my buddies called me and he was, he was, he was trying to get in the game of real estate. And you know, he was flipping maybe one or two houses a year and didn't own any rental properties.
[15:26.9]
But he called me and he said, what are you doing? You want to come look, take a look at a house with me? And I said, honestly dude, I'm stripping and waxing a floor right now. He's like, it's Saturday morning at 9am what the hell are you doing? I'm like, well, I'm going to make two grand today. What are you going to do? And he just, he changed my mindset where he says, we could possibly make $100,000 on this flip.
[15:49.2]
Why are you worried about that 2 grand that you're going to make on Saturday? And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, well, that two grand I can put towards a Disney vacation or something. You know, like my mindset wasn't, has hadn't shifted Yet. So I finished the job. I called him the next day, and I said, all right, let's go take a look. Well, okay. Hang on one second. Sorry.
[16:05.3]
Sorry to interrupt you. When he said, you're gonna make 100 grand, did you even believe him? Like, no. Okay. That's what I'm like. Come on. Yeah, come on. Come on. No. Come on. It takes me, like, six months to make 100 grand. Come on. No way. Okay. No way. Okay.
[16:20.5]
That's what I figured. Because that's what everybody's thoughts are. So. Okay. For some reason, you decide to call him back, though, right? So continue. Yeah, I did. I called him back the next day. We went and looked at the property, and he reached out to me because I had the capital. So he was kind of like, bird dogging things.
[16:36.1]
He was, out looking for. Looking for stuff. And he would approach a couple of guys that he knew could fund it. Right. So we went through the deal. I looked at the property. I said, yeah, we could do this. All right, let's do it. So I ended up buying it with him. We split it. What was that one?
[16:51.6]
I think that was like 65, 35. I kept 65 because I was funding it and still, you know, dealing with contractors and whatnot. So we ended up flipping it. It took us, five months to flip the project. And we made, I think, 65,000.
[17:09.3]
Not the 100 that he promised me, but it was still. It was still $65,000, which at the time, that was like, oh, my God, this is real. This can really work. So were you hooked after that first one? Oh, my God. Yeah. I was an addict. It was crazy.
[17:24.4]
It was crazy. Literally, Zach. Two months later, I bought my first rental and then bought another rental 30, days after that, then bought another rental 30 days after that. Nice. So you jumped in both feet. Oh, I jumped in both feet. At that point is when I said, why did I start a cleaning business?
[17:43.1]
Interesting. Yeah. So now, you may have said this, and I missed it. How long have you been in real estate? Real estate started in 2018. Okay, so you've been at it going on. It was pre covered back when the markets were normal, right?
[17:59.4]
18. 19 were normal. And then Covid hit early 2020, and that's when things went absolutely bananas. So how many houses did you pick up during COVID Well, during COVID Remember, I owned a cleaning business. No. So Covid was a money machine for us.
[18:16.9]
Okay. Interesting. Printing money. I was going to wonder if nobody's in These office buildings and don't need to be cleaned anymore. But I guess you have enough other clients where it was still worth it or. Yeah, we did. So at the beginning, everybody was still at work. They didn't really do the shutdown until a little bit later on.
[18:33.9]
Right. And then people were still trickling into the office because nobody knew what this thing was called. COVID 19. And then they, they came out with these hydrostatic sprayers where you'd go through and disinfect the whole, the whole building. And you, you'd get to charge a dollar a square foot for that, which took my staff like 40 minutes to do.
[18:51.8]
It was just amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Invoices were going out for thousands of dollars an hour. Yeah, absolutely amazing. Yeah, it was crazy. So, at that point. So to answer your question, during COVID I was closing a deal a month. Wow. Just because you're making money and had to do something with it.
[19:09.5]
I mean, yeah, I didn't want to spend it. Right. I didn't want to spend it. And they didn't want to say, okay, this is going to last forever. So I just kept buying real estate. I mean, smart, not foolishly. In hindsight, I wish I bough more multis, but at the time I was just buying condos because they were easy. I was picking them up for $90,000 and I was buying one every month.
[19:27.9]
So I gotta ask, how many of those hydrostatic cleaners do you have sitting waiting for the next Covid to come along? Six of them.
[19:40.0]
We oil them and start them up once a month because I know we're gonna need them again. Yeah, I hope that comes back one day. But. Oh my God, I remember when those came out too. I had people reaching out to me, trying to, trying to get their hands on, they were a hot commodity at the time.
[19:55.0]
I got asked, what did you pay a piece for them? Oh, 2,500 bucks. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. But at the time, it was good luck finding them. People were offering me 5,000, 8,000, $10,000 for them. I didn't want to sell them. No way you're going to do one building in a day.
[20:11.6]
You'll make more than that a day. We were doing three a day. Wow. So you must have wised up and realized that you should have bought a couple of those before everybody tried to get their hands on them. Then I did. As soon as I realized what was going on and where the, the, the news was taking us and what people were seeing, I started ordering as much as I could.
[20:32.6]
We were ordering pallets of disinfectant because you couldn't get them. Wow. Same thing with PPE Masks and gloves and all that. We were just stockpiling everything because I knew that once this went to mainstream, there was no. You couldn't get anything. Very smart. Yeah. That's impressive.
[20:47.8]
We used to, in the, restoration industry, I would buy an air mover for $300, rent it out for $30 a day, and we had the things for 10 years. Yeah, exactly. They just print money. Yeah, they just print money. But I wasn't anywhere in your league.
[21:02.8]
I mean, I bowed down to you. $2,500. You're making thousands of dollars a day. You've put me to shame. That's amazing. And, that's really what catapulted me into the real estate world. I mean, and now I, you know, I'm very thankful that I learned the lessons that I did and took the lickings that I did in the cleaning world to.
[21:25.2]
I say cleaning, it's more the business world. So that now I know how to properly analyze and run much larger deals now in the real estate realm. So what is your mix between STRs long term and multifamily?
[21:41.6]
So I'm about 40% STR and 60% long term. And do you have any single families or at all Or is it all monthly? When it comes to the long term? The only single families I have are like, lifestyle, assets that I bought that I may want to have later.
[21:57.8]
Like, we've got some places in Florida. I have them as long term rentals right now. But I know that if I don't want to renew their lease, and Liz and I are saying we're done with New England weather, then we just keep the house for ourself. Okay. How do you manage from that far away? I learned that way by doing it, doing the STR route.
[22:15.6]
So you reach out to local contractors, different cleaning companies in the area, which I'm pretty well versed in that. So we were able to source handymen and cleaners and utility guys pretty simply. Right. I didn't really get into the STR world until I had flipped a bunch of houses up here.
[22:34.2]
So I kind of have a little bit of a construction background after flipping so many properties that you know what to ask for when you're, tapping into a new market and you're trying to find a handyman or an H vac guy, or you kind of know the probing questions to ask and, you know, if they're going to, you know, meet your standards or not.
[22:51.5]
So when you look for an H VAC guy or a plumber, any of your mechanicals. So you're not looking for GCs, you're looking for more handyman. I'm sorry, I switched gears there. I'm sorry. When you're looking for a handyman, you're just looking for an all around guy.
[23:07.6]
You're not looking for a gc? No, no. Not when we pick up an STR in another market. I don't really need a, full GC because I don't plan on doing a full Renault Gut or, or flipping it or something like that. So how do you find those guys? Are you just looking for a chuck with a truck who has skill sets?
[23:25.6]
Essentially, yeah. Or I'll really. What I do first is, because I lean so heavily on the cleaning background, is I'll start sourcing cleaners first and then I'll ask if they have any Airbnb or STR experience. And if they do, that's plus. Then I'll ask who have they worked with before?
[23:40.9]
Like, I'll throw a scenario at them where, let's say we have a guest that, you know, they're complaining that there's condensation everywhere and we realize that the AC is bad. I'll ask that cleaning company, have you worked with any vendors in your local area that you can recommend to me? So then I'll try to put it on them to send something to me without me having to go blindly on Google and reading reviews.
[24:02.0]
Yeah. When I owned my construction company, what we would do is we would, work with the local Home Depot, the pro desk, because they know who's doing work and who isn't doing work. Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah. A lot of guys will complain about other guys or they want to stick their chest out and saying how they have to go and fix somebody else's work.
[24:23.4]
Yeah. But we always found Home Depot and what we would do is twice a year, the whole pro desk, we would send lunch over to them and they were constantly sending us good contractors. Oh, yeah. We got to work very well with, the, pro desk. So that's a great idea.
[24:39.1]
I have a pro account too. I never even thought of that. Thanks for telling. Yeah, that's good. I like that. Yeah, absolutely. And we were also looking for some longer term, some more, like, specific skills versus handyman. So what we would do is, with the building, department, we would ask the guy, Perry, I Remember him?
[25:00.7]
The guy who was approving our, permits? We would ask him who the good drywallers were and stuff, and we got along very well with him. And he would refer the people that were coming in for permits consistently and not getting complaints and so on. So know if that helps at all.
[25:17.2]
Yeah, absolutely. Another great resource. I didn't think of that either. Yeah. And, I'm guessing that probably helps when you got into a new market. Right. Like, I'm a New Hampshire guy, so dealing with somebody from New England area, it's pretty easy. But, you know, Liz and I are flying down to Houston next week to go look at some property down there.
[25:33.3]
And, you know, to speak to your point, going into the local Home Depot or. Or into permitting in. In the specific towns that we're looking at, that really goes a long way. Because now you're dealing with people in that market that have proven themselves in that market. Well, what I would do if I went in new is I would just walk in at lunchtime with five pizzas.
[25:55.0]
Just walk in. You're a buyer, you're a customer, and you're giving them a gift. Yeah. They're gonna listen to you right away. And what I always do is let them know that, listen, this is your market. You're the expert. And, you know, it's, guys, we all wanna stick our chest out.
[26:10.6]
Yeah. We walk in on day one and say, listen, you know more than me. You're better at this than me. Can you teach me? I find that people will open up and teach you. Absolutely. Stick your chest out and you're trying to flex. They're looking for a way to kick you down. Exactly.
[26:26.2]
Yeah. This is your market. You're the expert. Tell me what I need here. Yeah. Well said. That's perfect. Yeah. Okay. Zach, I have 2 million questions I could ask. Okay. That's why I'm just kind of letting you go, because you're asking a lot of good stuff.
[26:43.2]
You mentioned a little bit before with how much time you spend on the cleaning business, but I imagine kind of what happened was you dabbled in real estate, and then it kind of took off, maybe more than you expected it to. So did you have to pull out of the cleaning business because you wanted to do more real estate, or were you already, like, systematizing the cleaning company a little more so you didn't have to spend as much time on it?
[27:06.3]
How's juggling both of those working? I guess is my question. It's like anything, right? Just being an entrepreneur in general. Is rough. It's not all rainbows and unicorns every day. But we didn't really need to go into the real estate space.
[27:23.1]
But now that I'm here, I'm glad I did. And I get to spend as much or as little time on real estate as I want to. I don't have this as a necessity. This isn't my main driver of income. Right. So for me, I wanted to look at it that way as this was, this was an investment in myself and in my time, so that I knew real estate could be like my end game.
[27:45.8]
You know, cleaning business will always produce what it produces. But real estate for me is kind of that. That fun outlet. Right. So I don't really have many hobbies other than scuba diving. So when I go into a deal, like, I'm all in. Like that's what I want to do. I like, I'll run numbers 15 different ways from Sunday to poke holes in whatever business plan I have to try to see if it'll really work or if I'm just crazy, which sometimes I am.
[28:13.5]
So your finance background has served you very well in real estate? Absolutely, yeah. The ability to run numbers and that thinking outside of the box. Right. So yeah, finance is great from a one plus two standpoint. Right. But you guys are finance guys as well.
[28:30.2]
There's other ways to look at and structure certain things that traditional banking doesn't allow or has never really made public that it exists. So in real estate, I like talking to guys like yourself or some other guys out there that really get creative on how we can put a deal together and how that capital stack looks.
[28:50.7]
Yeah. I gotta tell you, and I know Zach will back me up on this, we do single family homes all the time. Those are easy. We can probably do them sleeping, you know, it's simple, meat, potatoes, meet the numbers, et cetera. But when we find somebody who has a multi family and we have to cross collateralize something else, and you've got GPS on it and you've got different entities and you end up with five or six different entities, you're cross collateralizing different properties from different entities and you're talking a couple million dollars of a loan.
[29:24.6]
I gotta tell you, that charges me up. That's what I'm saying. That's fun. Right? And we've got two attorneys doing custom documents for that loan and they're working with the borrower's attorneys to. Oh yeah, it's a lot of fun to do that. Yeah, that's the good stuff. That's the Meat and potatoes that you can't really explain to people that haven't done it.
[29:42.4]
Yes. Yeah, I get such a charge out of that. I actually had somebody one time call me and this is someone who had a several year relationship with me and it was just never a fit to do work together. And he had a million dollars that had gone hard on a multi family.
[30:01.4]
And 24 hours before closing, $4 million of his raise evaporated because the person who was bringing the money to the table, his close didn't happen and the seller would not give them an extension because he knew he had the million dollars and somebody had offered him more for the building than my buddy was paying for.
[30:27.1]
So he was very happy to let that thing go past 5 o' clock the next day, I'm sure. So my buddy spent the evening, on the phone until 10 o' clock at night Eastern Time and he raised $2 million. He called me the next day at a little after seven in the morning, got me on the phone, explained to me what was going on and I had the capital available and we lent him $2 million in six hours.
[30:53.7]
Wow, that's fast. And that was exciting. Well, it's exciting because my attorney also said you need to sign a document that states that I recommended you not do this deal.
[31:07.0]
Hopefully the deal panned out pretty well in the end for everybody. Panned out very well for everybody. Now did we go into this in a silly way? No. With private lending, to me, 90% of the deal is the individual.
[31:23.3]
Yeah. You're betting that you've got to have a comfort level with them because if you have a good person, the paperwork is simply a dust collector. Correct. And everybody I lend to, I want the paperwork to be a dust collector. Well, I had a three year, give or take, three year relationship with this guy. I knew him, I knew where he grew up, whatever.
[31:41.1]
We had had extensive conversations on a personal level. I also knew that he had a multiple eight figure net worth. So as part of it, we cross collateralized everything that he had, because we had to do it so quick. And he said, I will give you a UCC filing on everything that I own, my other two businesses, all of the properties that I'm in on, I just can't lose a million dollars.
[32:06.5]
So whatever we wanted, he gave us everything. He said, I don't care, I'm going to pay you back in 12 weeks. And he actually ended up paying us back in ten weeks. Okay. So it was easy to do from the perspective of we had a relationship.
[32:21.7]
And I said, I need documentation on this. This is what I'll need. He said, hold on a minute. I'm going to send you a folder. If there's something in there that you need that I don't have, I'll be amazed, but I damn well will get it for you, because I'm not losing a million dollars. Yeah. So that's good.
[32:38.0]
I mean, you guys protected yourself. Right. And those are the types of deals that really light me up. Right. Because that's something that's fun. You got to think outside of the box. You have to be creative to get this thing over the finish line. Yeah. And everybody's working together because there's complete transparency.
[32:54.3]
Exactly. Okay, listen, Steve, this is what I need to do to protect my capital. Right. And then you respond and you say, absolutely, I would do the same thing if I were in your shoes. I understand you can't completely underwrite this. Normally, I'm not going to let you cross collal. Collateralize everything else, but in this instance here.
[33:12.1]
Let's do it. And the attorneys are on the phone talking back and forth. We're having conference calls, but it happened. Good. And that was fun. You can see I'm still getting psyched. I'm getting excited now, and it was a couple years ago. Yeah. That's cool. Good stuff. Yeah.
[33:27.2]
Fun. So now getting. Shifting a little bit more into mindset stuff, because we've gone pretty detailed through your background. One of the things I know about you and I know when we were at the, UFC event a few months ago is you really have your son involved with a lot of the business stuff that you have going on.
[33:45.9]
So talk about. Like, I'm sure your mindset changed about money when you transitioned from W2 to being an entrepreneur, and you're obviously trying to impress that on him. So how's that going and everything? It's going well.
[34:01.1]
So it's funny you bring up the mindset and the children. My, oldest son, I just dropped him off last Sunday. He's in Thailand. He's. He's a. He's a scuba instructor in Thailand now. He's planning on living there for the next three years. Oh, wow. That's cool.
[34:17.0]
Yeah. I'm down one. I'm down one. And then the other one is kind of learning what. What we do from a, flipping standpoint. Right. So he knows the buy and hold is. Is the strategy to have. The problem is, being 18, 19 years old, they don't have the Capital to go buy multifamily.
[34:32.0]
Right. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to teach him how to save his money. Also flip some homes to build up that seed capital to then buy multifamily so that you never have to answer to a boss ever again. So to speak to the mind shifts.
[34:49.3]
You know, the, the mindset shift for me, yes, that happened when I started the cleaning company. But it really happens once you become financially independent, right? And that fi number is different for everybody. But, but once you have a grasp on how much you're spending and how much you're bringing in, if you can get that down at 18, 19 years old, think of how easy the rest of your life's going to be.
[35:11.3]
Oh my God. I know. Huge. Huge. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm 47 years old, right? So if I learned this 30 years ago, I mean, my life would look a lot differently right now. You know what I'm saying? Not that it's bad, it would just be different.
[35:26.9]
Different, right. So I'm trying to help them understand that, you know, everything you see in the, I was going to say the newspaper, but anything you see online, anything you see in the mainstream media, that's not necessarily true, right? You go out and make your own reality, right?
[35:42.9]
You surround yourself with people that are doing the things or that are thinking about doing the things at that age that you want to do when you grow up, right? And I tell him that the reason he's like, dad, why do you go to all these meetings and meetups? And I said, well, I don't go to a lot of them, but the ones I do go to, there are like minded people in the room.
[36:01.8]
And he goes, dad, well, it just seems like a bunch of older guys just talking about deals.
[36:10.9]
We are talking about deals. And I said, you have to get to that point, right? You have to understand what we're talking about during these conversations and you have to be willing to learn and also be willing to, to be vulnerable and tell these guys, hey, listen, you know, my dad's telling me how to do this, but I don't know what I'm doing.
[36:29.4]
Can you help me in this aspect of it, right? So put yourself out there. And I said, before you know it, it's not going to be this, this aha, Moment that goes off. You're just going to all of a sudden start doing something because you've been doing it the whole time. It's just finally going to start monetizing. Itself.
[36:44.5]
Yeah, right. I'm sure you guys know this too, right? You know the old adage you hang around with, with, you know, five millionaires, you're going to be a millionaire. You hang around with five smokers, you're going to be a smoker. Yeah, yeah. And I noticed, yeah. Like for example, when I was gonna start lending six years ago, I remember all the people trying to talk me out of it, had never owned a business, didn't have any money.
[37:05.6]
And I'm like, okay. It also works in reverse where I'm like, all right, all the people that are talking me out of it, I don't want to be in their shoes, so maybe I should try this and see what happens. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the message of mindset that I'm to, now give to the younger generation to let them know that literally the sky is the limit.
[37:28.2]
Whatever you want out of life, if you surround yourself with people that are doing those exact things, you will become one of those people. Yes. What I find very interesting is if you're around successful people and you ask them for a help, 99.9% of them want to give a hand up.
[37:49.9]
They won't give you a hand out, but they'll absolutely give you a hand up once you make a connection with them and you bring value to the table. You don't just suck information from them. And it's always ask, ask, ask if you can give. And obviously on a smaller scale, I said, bring the pizza to the Home Depot, guys.
[38:08.6]
You give first and then. And you lay all of these seeds. And they're not all going to sprout, and they're not all. And the ones that do sprout aren't going to sprout at the same time, but once they do at 18 years old, my God. Yeah. That's why I tell him, you know, he's.
[38:26.5]
He's young and ambitious, right? So he's like, dad, this taken too long. I said, man, you're just 18. Give it five years. Yeah, let's give it five years. In five years. Like, if, if he was able to manage owning, I don't know, six to ten doors in five years, well, he'll be set for the rest of his life.
[38:44.8]
Absolutely. Yeah. And then you go from, from making two grand waxing a floor to, somebody says, you're gonna make a hundred grand, and you can't believe it. And. And now you look at some deals and say, we're gonna make 100 grand. That's it. Is that What? You know, should we look at something bigger? It just, yeah, totally changes when you surround yourself with the right people.
[39:03.8]
Yeah, exactly. To speak to that point. I mean back pre Covid, I would take on flips or weird make 40 to 60,000 and now I won't even entertain it unless it's 75 or more. It's just not worth my time. It's funny, I remember reading a story one time about Richard Branson and somebody offered him like $100,000 for one hour speaking engagement.
[39:28.4]
And his assistant kept saying no. And they finally got to this point where we'll give you our million dollar. And I don't know the exact story but. But we'll give you a million dollars for 15 minutes. And his assistant came back and said, sir Richard Branson wanted me to thank you for the final time.
[39:44.8]
But he focuses on one thing at a time. And your 15 minute talk for a million dollars is not his one thing right now. Wow. So he can turn down a million dollars for 15 minutes. And again, I'm sure the number's not exact. So years ago that I read the story, but I focused on the point where he's making so much money he won't talk for 15 minutes for a million dollars.
[40:05.5]
Like, holy cow, that's crazy to think that big, right? Yeah. And that's just. And here we are chewing the fat right now for more than 15 minutes. Right. And we're not paying you a million dollars either. Nobody's getting a million bucks for this call. Wait a minute, that's what you promised for me to get hungry.
[40:27.1]
I'm me. That's funny. But yeah, mindset being in the proper rooms, 100% for me. I didn't grow up with money. And I remember the first time it hit me was I was going to school at nyu and a friend of mine, her dad was a, vice president at ABC Television.
[40:49.5]
And I didn't know and I go to their house in New Jersey and it's a three story house. Like oh my God. So we go in, we're on the back deck with him and two of his friends and we're just having a conversation, we're just talking and come to find out, one of the guys who has given me a lot of grief because I was an economics major, he was the executive vice president of Mobile Oil, he lived a couple doors down.
[41:13.8]
And the other guy who was sitting there was the president of ABC Television. And it hit me that, wait a minute, they're no different than me. They're just Doing things different than me. So I need to do different things. And that's what changed.
[41:30.1]
That was a major mindset change for me is getting in the room. Like, man, I just need to drive a different path. And I'm like, Zach was saying, you can never talk to somebody who has never owned a business about what it would mean to own a business, because they're going to talk you out of it.
[41:46.9]
Take the safe route. Become an adjuster for an insurance company. Work for Charles Schwab. That's the safe thing to do. Save your 401. Do all that. Yeah, yeah. That doesn't work, though. It doesn't work. And then, you know, to take that a step further is, you know, Zach, a lot of your friends told you that you were crazy for starting the business when you did.
[42:06.5]
Right. But now that you guys are established and things are successful, now when you start to talk to, friends or family about what you're doing is, you know, those pain points that you have seem impossible to the normal person. Yes. Right. Like, once you.
[42:22.0]
Once you achieve a certain level of success, it's almost impossible to go backwards and talk to the same old people that didn't believe you could get there in the first place. Because when you speak to them, you're speaking a different language for one. But two, it almost counts. It comes off as, like, bragging.
[42:39.5]
Yes. Because. Right. Yep. Which is not. Like, it's not the truth. Like, I'm not bragging. I'm just trying to figure out this problem. Yeah. Like, for example, we. We did a, 1.4 million dollar loan last week. And, like, week. Talk about it, Talk about it with business owners and people like, oh, how did you do that? What was the details?
[42:54.6]
This and that. I was telling one of my other friends about it, and it just, like, it doesn't land and. Exactly. You feel like you're bragging and I'm like, I'm not bragging. I'm just like, this is. Well, this is how this business works. This is what I do. It's fun to talk about. And you're just like, you kind of give up after a little while.
[43:11.0]
It's just, this doesn't work. We're not going anywhere here. It's completely different conversation. Yeah. I'm in the middle of a deal right now on an 11 unit in Manchester, and the DSCR is coming back at like 1.13. Right. So I'm talking to some friends like, what can we do?
[43:27.1]
And then I'm like, wait a minute. Why am I Even bothering talking to friends. Let me get people on the phone that actually know what the hell they're doing. So I called a couple of people, and they're like, no, no, let's try this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Talk to a different bank. Do this. And I think we maybe may be able to get the deal over the finish line. Oh, cool.
[43:42.5]
Cool. Awesome. I don't know yet. I'm going to do a final walk, through again tomorrow. Okay. It looks like it's going to close conventionally. Nice. Nice. But again, it speaks to that point when you try to bring your friend into the deal.
[43:57.8]
You're like, hey, I'm trying to buy this $2 million building. You lost them right there. Yeah, I lost them right there. Their eyes glaze over. They're like, you're trying to do what? I'm like, yeah. And then the rest of the conversation is stupid. Yep. It doesn't work. Yes, exactly.
[44:16.3]
Yeah. It's kind of like you're an H vac guy and some. And somebody comes to you. Sorry, you're speaking to an H vac guy about, I don't know, plumbing or something, and they're not going to get it. They're just going to stand there and just spin their head, and it's just a totally. I. I don't understand what you're saying.
[44:32.3]
You're speaking a foreign language to me. Exactly. Yeah. What I get a kick out of is the people that you've known from childhood and you've been your friends for a long period of time, and some of them. And it will happen. It happened to me. I'm sure it's happened to you guys where they get resentful and they say, man, I wish I was as lucky as you.
[44:49.9]
Yeah. Yeah. I was working 18 hours a day cleaning toilets. Yeah, I was lucky. It's funny, some of them have said that. One of my best friend's mother just recently passed away, and we all got together afterwards. We, went to a restaurant. We all had some drinks and whatever. And that's kind of when the truth starts to come out.
[45:07.6]
And how people like, oh, it must be nice to have this or have that. And I said, where the hell were you guys when I was working 18 hours a day cleaning all night and being a sales guy all day? Oh. And still trying to be a father of two kids. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like Steve, like Mike Ketchin and I, we joke about it all the time that people say, oh, must Be nice.
[45:25.9]
Like, he gets that all the time. And, like, the only thing you can say is, yeah, it is. And that's what I say at this point. I'm like, you know what it is? And then sometimes it's like, if I don't like the person that says that, I, you know, when they say, oh, must be nice, I, what I say is, yeah, you should try it.
[45:43.0]
People don't see. People don't see the behind the scenes. They don't see you waxing a floor on a Saturday. They don't. They don't. That's not the fun part. That's not the part anybody's jealous about. No. Or even flipping. Right. So there's a lot to. Going into acquiring an off market property.
[45:58.2]
All they see is the Instagram photos of how nice and beautiful this kitchen came out. Right. They don't understand, like, I have a conversation with Zach about financing the deal, then I have to have a conversation about finding the deal, then I have to have multiple conversations with the GC and the contractors. They don't see any of that.
[46:13.6]
All they see is the nice check that I post at the end. And then we tear up the, subfloor and it's rotted. And now we make 20 grand less than we thought we were going to. Like all that kind of stuff that people don't notice. Asbestos has to be dealt with and this and that. Yeah, yeah. It's never ending. Right. So it's calculated risks that we take.
[46:29.4]
But from the outside looking in, all they see is successful. They don't see all this grueling time that goes into making this big check. Yeah, exactly. That's one of the things. And I'm sure this is going to trigger some people. That's one of the things that bothers me about people saying that the 1% should give us more money, we should tax them more.
[46:50.7]
And this has always been my position.
[46:55.8]
If you spend a, Saturday hanging out with your family at the park creating memories, I'm happy for you. If I spent a Saturday stripping a floor and I made $2,000, why do you get part of my $2,000?
[47:13.9]
You chose to go with your family, which I support 110%. And you got the joy and the connection and everything that went along with that. Why do you get my money? I can't take any of your joy. Why do you get to take my money? And nobody's envious of you stripping the floor on a Saturday.
[47:32.2]
You know, they're envy of the money that you make. Not the work. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's what it is now. So now that I've been doing this a while, I've got investors reaching out to me. Hey, can I partner up on a deal with you? Yeah. You know, and I'll give them my terms or something, you know, a 60, 40 or a 70, 30 split.
[47:49.4]
And they're like, wait a minute. Why? I said, well, did you do any of the work to, acquire the property? Are you handing me a deal, or am I finding the deal for you and financing the deal and GC ing the deal and closing the deal? And, you know, and they realize who's doing all the work here. Right.
[48:05.3]
Like, so who's doing the work here? You know? Yeah. And that's such a poor mindset, especially if they're new to it. They have to look at this as, I would do this for free so that I can learn. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it goes back to your other point, Michael, is when you said earlier, just keep giving and planting those seeds.
[48:22.9]
If you can give to that many more people, eventually someone's going to take you up on their offer and then take you under their wing. Yeah, yeah. But maybe I'm just crazy, but I'm looking at this and I'm saying, I'll come in and do it for free. You're going to give me 30% of the profit, and I'm going to learn from somebody who's been down this road before and can show me the map.
[48:40.3]
Dude, I'm in. Yeah, right. You're getting paid to learn in summer. Yeah. Getting paid to learn. This is better than college. Yeah. Yeah. That is true. That is true. Yeah. Holy cow. With real life examples, not just a professor talking at you. Yes.
[48:55.5]
When I. When I sold my second business. Yeah. And it's somebody who's doing, not teaching. Exactly. Yes. I agree with that statement. Why are you teaching? Because I don't know how to do it. Right. When I sold my construction company, before I got into lending, I was gonna flip houses.
[49:14.9]
And I found a guy in Florida who was doing, between flipping and wholesaling, 50 houses a month. Wow. And I was going to. I ended up getting into a mastermind. He was in. But before he started it, I had done some research. I was aware of him through somebody else I knew in the Florida market.
[49:31.9]
And I had gone on vacation, and I had decided, okay, I did enough research on this guy. I'm gonna. When we get back from vacation, Lois, my better half, I'm gonna fly to his office. I'M gonna fly to his city, walk into his office and say, listen, I will work for you for one year for free, and I'll do anything you want if you can teach me about real estate and how you flip houses.
[49:56.1]
How'd that go? It didn't. He joined the master. He started a mastermind. I was flying home. I'll never forget. I was in the airport, and, you know, things come up on your phone because big brother's always watching us. So Mark Zuckerberg knew everything that I was doing, and an ad came up that he was starting a mastermind.
[50:15.6]
I'm like, I'm, in. So we had a meet and greet. There were a bunch of people, went to a training that he was giving. You know, they always start with the training, then they go to the Mastermind. And about 10 of us went to dinner, and somebody sitting on the side of me said, so you're gonna join the mastermind?
[50:33.1]
I said, yeah. I decided before I walked in the door, yeah, you were on there. I knew I was in. He only wants 25 grand, and I get access to him seven days a week. Yeah, I'll pay the 25 grand. Right, done. So they came around the table and asking, who's in? I'm like, me. They said, okay, well, you have 10 days that.
[50:49.1]
No, give me the. Give me the instructions. Yeah. Right now? Yes. Stop selling. Stop selling past the sale. I'm in. Where do I send the money? Leave me alone. Let's eat. Right, right, right. 25 grand?
[51:04.2]
Are you kidding me? And I told people I joined a Mastermind. I paid 25. You pay 25,000. You can learn on YouTube. No, I can't. No, you can't. No, you can. I may be parts and pieces, but I want to learn from the guy. And I've got his cell phone number, and I can get on the phone with him and say, hey, this is what I ran into.
[51:21.5]
Right, right. And he actually. When I decided that I didn't want to flip houses that I wanted to lend instead, I told him I had actually set up this whole thing. I had a partner, and we were going to flip houses.
[51:36.6]
He was going to be the front end. I was going to be the ops guy. He's a Wall street guy. He's got great people skills. You'll learn from me very quickly. I don't have great people skills, so I wanted him to be the front guy. I don't want to be the front guy. You deal with that stuff. And I set it all up, and I spoke with this guy who, did the mastermind.
[51:53.9]
And I said, okay, this is what we're going to do. And what do you think? He said, I think you have a great system, but I don't think you should flip houses. Oh, wow. And I said, why? He said, because you have a fair amount of capital. You've told me what you want to do in terms of time freedom.
[52:11.8]
I'm going to introduce you to a guy who has $100 million of his own money on the street, and I'll see if I can get him on the phone with you. He said, I can't guarantee I can, but I'll give it a shot. Do you want me to give it a try? He texted him and like 15 minutes later, the guy called me.
[52:27.2]
He said, I'm walking out the door. I'm due to walk out the door. I'm waiting for my wife. Get dressed. I'll give you 10 minutes of my life. Wow. And it ended up being a 45 minute call. Amazing. And then that puts you on the lending path. On the lending path, absolutely. What happened was he ended up being an economics major, I was an economics major.
[52:46.2]
So we had this bromance going right from the beginning because we were talking about different theories and so on, and it was like the last 10 minutes was about lending. And he said, listen, I got some people coming together. They've asked me, if you want to pay me X amount of dollars, I'll sit on the phone with you guys for a day and go over stuff with you.
[53:02.6]
We'll do a zoom. Cool. Shit. I'm in. Done? Yeah. And he said, I'm going to charge you for it. I said, great, what's your wiring instructions? He said, I didn't tell you what I was going to charge you yet. I said, yeah, you'll be fair. Just text it to me with the wiring instructions.
[53:17.8]
Perfect. And that was it. I'm in. That's amazing. It's an education. I'm learning an educa. I'm learning from somebody who's got $100 million on the street. I could learn one thing from him and it's worth every penny. Of course it is. Yeah, sure. All right, I'm getting excited now.
[53:33.2]
Go ahead, Zach. Well, all right. So we're just about out of time here. So, Steve, if people want to get ahold of you, reach out. What's the best way to get, in touch with you cell? Phone number is 603-505-1487. You can, find me on Instagram under Stevenimczyk?
[53:51.2]
N I e A S Z Y K I'm sure you've had to spell that before. My entire life. Steve, it was great having you on. Really appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Thank you, guys. This is a blast. Thanks, Steve.
[54:12.7]
It.