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Episode 1 Show notes

Doug and Andrea introduce themselves and talk about the importance of avoiding “analysis paralysis” and taking action. Andrea discuses how she and Doug had a shift in their “mindset” early in their marriage and how they got into business together.

Doug explains the reason that he and Andrea are starting this podcast.  They also inform the listener of a special free gift available on their website https://SpousesFlippingHouses.com.

Episode 1 Transcription

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Doug: Well, hello, hello. Welcome to the very first episode of Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. We are super excited to do this, to bring this podcast to you. My name is Doug Van Soest. My wife across the table from me. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Andrea: Hi, my name is Andrea Van Soest.

Doug: We are married. We flip houses together. And we are really excited to be starting this very first podcast episode here. I’m going to let Andrea tell you a little bit more about us, about kind of what we do, how we met, you know a little bit of history, our background, and take it away Andrea.

Andrea: So Doug and I have been married for fifteen years, and we actually met in college at Point Loma Nazarene University down in San Diego. At that time when we first started dating, and got married, we had this plan for our life, and Doug thought he was going to go to architecture school and I assumed he was going to be an architect. And I planned on being a school counselor. Those were our goals and we set out towards that.

Doug: Not bad goals.

Andrea: No, not bad goals at all. They’re pretty good.

Doug: Normal goals.

Andrea: But thankfully our best friend, Eric Russell, gave us this book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. So we read that book and it honestly completely changed our mindset in a lot of ways, but primarily in our goals for what we wanted to do in our future. We realized we had dreams and goals that we wanted to accomplish and we didn’t want to spend our life working toward building somebody else’s goals and dreams.

So we just thought, “Gosh, what can we do? We’ve got to start a business!”. Some friends of ours were doing really good with a kettle corn business that they had started in San Diego. We thought we’ll ask them if they’ll teach us what they’re doing.

Doug: First of all, if you’ve never had kettle corn, you need to go out to a street fair or Farmers’ Market one of these days. That is some good stuff.

Andrea: You go on the profit margin on popcorn and it’s fantastic.

Doug: Yeah, it’s popcorn.

Andrea: So that’s what we were thinking. We went to them and said, “Hey, would you teach us how you got started in this and then we’ll go somewhere else and do it and not be your competition”. And he said, absolutely. So, we worked for them for free on nights and weekends, and they kind of taught us everything, and we started making phone calls.

We were living in San Diego, still working at our jobs, started making phone calls, out to Colorado to different sporting venues saying, “Hey, we have this kettle corn company. Can we come down?” And sure enough, the World Arena in Colorado Springs said, “Yeah, come on down”.

Doug: We had nothing, by the way, at this point. We had not purchased a single item. We went on vacation at Christmas to Colorado and thought this would be a great place to live. My brother lived there at the time and on the way back, just started to make calls, right?

Andrea: Yeah. Anyways we got a contract and they said come on down, so we moved out there and started our kettle corn business. We decided to go for some of the bigger contracts, so we focused on sporting venues and got our concessions company into the Denver Broncos stadium. That was super exciting! The World Arena. The Pike’s Peak International Raceway, and lots of other fun contracts that we got.

We quickly realized after hours and hours and hours of popping popcorn in a hot garage and schlepping these big, heavy bags everywhere that we had bought ourselves a job. Don’t you think?

Doug: Oh yeah. Definitely.

Andrea: For sure.

Doug: I mean, we were self-employed, but we were the only employees we had, so if we didn’t do the job, we weren’t going to get paid.

Andrea: Yeah. So we kind of shifted our mindset again. We needed a career that could be more passive, so we focused in on real estate. So thankfully with the contracts that we had acquired, we were able to sell that business which was really exciting and we moved back to California and started learning everything we could learn about real estate.

Doug became an appraiser. I got my real estate license. He was an appraiser for several years and kind of watched the market in California blow up and everybody said, “Oh my goodness, the bubble’s going to burst” and sure enough it did.

And we jumped into the market in 2009 as it was tumbling down which was kind of a scary time, but it also, I think, was a really great time for us to start because we realized, man, if we can be successful and do this, in a market that is spiraling downwards so fast, then we can be successful in any market.

Doug: Yeah. Absolutely. So that brings us to today. What are we doing today?

Andrea: Well, we have been real estate investors for the last eight years. We have bought and sold over two hundred houses.

Doug: Yeah, it’s got to be north of two hundred by this point. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s around there.

Andrea: We have 58 doors, rental properties that we’ve acquired. And going.

Doug: And going. We have some help now. We have three or four people that we employ that help us out because we can’t do this all on our own at this point in the volume we’re doing. But we are full time, Andrea and I, involved in our business, and full time parents, and full time married couple. All together. All at once.

That kind of brings us to podcasts. Why are we doing this podcast? Well, this is more of a passion project for us. We’ve been fortunate enough to get our business to the point where we’re not required daily, we’re not required every hour for every decision every second, and we have a little more time and we want to share some of our knowledge that we have acquired.

A lot of times when we go out to speak at clubs or different venues, or just when we’re hanging out with some people, they’ll ask us, “How do you do what you do? How did you get into that? How do you work together?”.

Andrea: Yeah, most importantly they want to know how you do that together, and not kill each other?

Doug:  Exactly. They can’t imagine working with their spouse together running a business, so this is kind of our platform to share how we do it. Now are we perfect? Do we have it all figured out? No, of course not. We’re learning every day. Every day we learn a little bit more on how to do this together better.

But, that being said, we’ve been married for fifteen years and fourteen and a half of those years we’ve worked together in some capacity or another. All capacities really. So, we do have some experience and some years behind us doing this, and I think we want to share and hopefully, hopefully the listener, you guys, can get something out of this.

Andrea: I think we have a lot to learn too so we have guests that we’re super excited to have and to talk with them and hear their insight as well.

Doug: Yeah, we’re going to have some guests on from time to time and ask them questions, and hopefully plan to learn a lot from them. So that brings us to our main topic that we want to speak about today. Our topic today is “On Your Marks, Go. Get Set”. So Andrea, do you want to explain a little bit about….

Andrea: Well, as your probably heard, this spoken about before, and people usually title it “Ready. Fire. Aim”, and it’s just the idea of taking action really, and you don’t have to know everything. You just need to get started and you can learn as you go.

But everybody talks about the dreaded Analysis Paralysis and that’s really a big deal in real estate investing. We have found that people feel like they have to know every single step in the process before they can get started and the reality is that you don’t.

Doug: You don’t. You don’t. I think that’s more of a control issue. You feel out of control if you don’t know all the intricacies of every little single step of whatever it is that you’re venturing into and the truth of it is, to get going in this business or any business for that matter, you need to take action and you need to take it quickly.

Knowing Steps One is really all you need to know. Have an idea what Step Two is. You don’t need to know Step Five, Six, Seven, Eight down the road. That you can figure out as you go. “Fake it till you make it”. You’ve heard that before. It’s similar. Taking action.

So, what are some reasons, Andrea, that people don’t take action?

Andrea: I think fear is a big motivator, fear of all kinds of different things. Fear of failure. Maybe fear of success. What happens if my business blows up and I actually do well? What then?

Doug: What do you mean? Go into that a little bit more.

Andrea: (laughs) Pretty much just what I said.

Doug: Why would that be scary to somebody?

Andrea: I don’t know. I think it goes back to the whole not having everything figured out. And the lack of control. Obviously, people want to be successful and they want that to happen, but what their life might look like if it does, and, I don’t know…

Doug: Things might change? Kind of like the unknown of change? Okay. Alright. What about fear of failure? Is it just failing that’s scary?

Andrea: Nobody wants to look dumb. Nobody wants to be disappointed. And nobody really wants to fail.

Doug: Right. I think we’re taught so much just in school and in the world that failure is a bad thing. And in many regards, nobody wants to fail. Failure is a negative. There’s a negative connotation around failure. But, really failure is just a learning step.

I don’t know the exact stats, but if you look back at the stats of Babe Ruth, one of the greatest home run hitters of all time, he had X amount of home runs. But he also had astronomically more strikeouts. He failed many, many more times than he succeeded, and that’s just one example.

But that translates into life and into business. Failing is just, okay I’m one step closer to succeeding the next time, but people don’t look at it that way. It can be embarrassing or like you said, they might be disappointed or think that someone is disappointed in them for their failures.

Andrea: Yeah, and another thing I think that holds people back is lack of resources or their perception that they have a lack of resources. And that goes back to the whole not needing the steps before you get started. But that’s something that we hope to provide through different interviews and things on this podcast.

Also on our website and we’ll probably be posting from time to time books that we love, podcasts that we love, educators that we love and trust and that we’ve learned so much from.

Doug: Podcasts and educators have been a huge resource for us getting in this business. Probably one of the main resources, a few of the podcasts out there, which is why we love this platform here. There’s books, seminars, podcasts.

Andrea: The thing I love about podcasts is that you can squeeze it in. Everyone is lacking in time these days. You may have a regular job that you have to go to, but you’re wanting to learn about this, and then you also have a family, and of course we would never recommend you take time away from your family.

But if you listen to podcasts, you can do that while you’re at the gym, while you’re out for a walk, while you’re driving in your car to or from your job. There’s always time that you can squeeze that in. And it’s free.

Doug: It’s on demand. And it’s on something that everybody has these days, a smartphone. I mean it’s right there. There’s so many apps. You just push a button at any time and you can be listening to that. When you’re driving, when you’re working out.

Andrea: Right. And we’ve reached a lot of the goals that we’ve set in real estate investing yet we still listen to podcasts because they just keep us motivated. Super inspiring. Even if somebody is teaching something we already know, to rehear it from their perspective, you can almost always pull out some little piece of information and think of it in a way that you hadn’t thought of it before. So, yeah, it definitely keeps us inspired!

Doug: So I guess that was it, our main topic. Kind of a short episode, this first episode here. We just want to get this thing out there, get it launched and kind of let everybody know what we’re all about. We definitely want to…do you have anything else to say before we wrap it up?

Andrea: No.

Doug: Okay. Cool.

Andrea: So that’s pretty much all we have for you today. We want to invite you to check out our website, spousesflippinghouses.com. You can enter your information in there to stay connected with us and be notified of future episodes. And by doing that, we actually have two gifts for you.

The first one is our guide to successfully working with your spouse. It’s a little thing that you can download. There’s our eleven best tips for working with your spouse on there. I think it’s some great content. So check that out!

And the second one…

Doug: I put together an e-course on deal analyzation in today’s market. Definitely important especially for those who might be beginning in real estate investing. Check out the course free download by putting your info in our website.

Until then, thanks for listening and we will talk to you next week.[/spoiler]

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