WARNING: The Market Shift Has Begun. Leverage Will Kill Your Investors

"RAISE CAPITAL LIKE A LEGEND: https://go.fundraisecapital.co/frc2-apply"

Your Real Estate Strategy might be broken!

In this explosive episode of Making Billions, host Ryan Miller dives deep with Dustin Heiner, real estate investor, as he shares his journey from being scammed by a property manager to developing a proprietary system that treats real estate not as an asset class, but as a robust, automated business.

Dustin, with a portfolio of 30+ single-family homes (90% paid off) and nearly 1000 apartment units, emphasizes the mindset shift from being a passive investor to an active real estate business owner.

If you're ready to build an automatic, scalable cash flow machine and create lasting generational wealth, this definitive blueprint starts now!

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[THE GUEST]: Dustin Heiner is a real estate investor who achieved successful unemployment and built a massive, cash-flowing portfolio of single-family homes and apartment complexes.

[THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is a recovering CFO turned angel investor in technology and energy.

Transcript

Dustin Heiner  

So I bought a house, and then I followed what the Guru said, and then my property manager, in six months, started stealing from me. It was terrible, because I didn't know what I was doing, I did not plan everything out. I was just doing what I was told by other people who were just selling things. Well, here is one thing that I tell all my students. In fact, you won't hear any TikTok guru tell you this, this is what I tell everybody.

Ryan Miller  

My name is Ryan Miller, and for the past 15 years, I've helped hundreds of people to raise millions of dollars for their funds and for their startups. If you're serious about raising money, launching your business or taking your life to the next level, this show will give you the answers so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of Making Billions. Let's get into it. 

Ryan Miller  

You think leverage is your greatest asset, it could actually destroy your entire portfolio. If you're a fund manager, deal syndicator or an institutional investor who relies heavily on debt to scale, this conversation will reveal the hidden dangers and what the real pros do to survive and thrive where others fail. All this and more coming right now. Here we go. 

Ryan Miller  

Dustin, welcome to the show, man.

Dustin Heiner  

What's up, Ryan, hey, super blessed to be back on the show. I was on the show a couple years ago, and then now I get to be back on the show The Making Billions show. I think when I heard that title, I was like, Dude, that's legit. I like that title. And then I know your community is awesome. So I'm super blessed to be a part of the show again. Thank you for having me.

Ryan Miller  

Yeah, thanks for being here. Man, I You always stood out before, so let's let's jump in. Man, you have been busy since the last time we spoke, scaling your business, getting involved in a lot of things. Now, you've repeatedly told your audience that piling on leverage is a myth for smart real estate investing. So what happened in your journey, either internal or external, that made you reverse course and just start aggressively paying down those properties rather than piling on more debt. 

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah. So I now with 30 plus properties, single family homes. I also have almost 1000 apartment complexes, and obviously, with 1000 apartment complex you have to have leverage, but the single family homes, that is what my bread and butter. That's where I make all my money to be able to feed my family. We make a lot of money every single month. Just a quick side note, if you buy a min, and this is what I did, I said, if I bought one house that made $500 a month, that's $6,000 a year. 10 properties, that's $60,000 a year. 20 properties is 120,000 and that's just the minimum. And I have some properties making me $3,000 a month in passive income. And the reason why I started paying off all of my properties was a risk, risk tolerance is really what it came down to. So when I was buying real estate, I started back in 2006 before the crash, and I was a little scared, or a lot scared, when everybody in 2008-9 and 10, people who called themselves real estate investors, they were saying that, you know, they're going bankrupt. Well, I was worried, but I didn't. I actually made more money, because sadly, when people lose their homes and foreclosure because they're losing their jobs, then they become renters. And I focus on cash flow, and I have a lot of rental properties, so I made more money, it was just the craziest thing. And then when I was quitting my job, I was talking to my wife, who said, hey, honey, I really feel like I should be able to quit now, because we have plenty of cash flow coming in. I think at the time we had 22-23 properties, or something like that is 2016 and she said, well, it'd be great if you could, but how about we pay off some of those properties? You know, pay off some of the loans so I don't have to, if you ever passed away, I don't have to worry about those. And I was immediately, I was like, oh, then I don't have that money to buy more real estate. That's what I always did, just kept using leverage and which is great buying more and more properties. But then I realized, I was like, you know what, risk tolerance is something that you have to everybody has to agree with, with their spouse or with themselves. And now I started paying those off because I wanted to quit my job and I wanted to have a lot of cash flow coming in. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now, 90% of my properties, all the single family homes, are all paid off. And one thing that I do with my students and so for you listening like you think about, okay, what risk tolerance like should I actually pay off all my properties? It's like, not everybody's gonna be the same. In fact, I've coached 1000s of students now how to invest in real estate, become financially independent, and in the process of getting there, you have to figure out your risk tolerance. Some people hate loans, and they dip their toe in and they barely get and they grow slowly, which is totally fine, that's their risk tolerance. Other people, what I try to do with all my students is encourage them to, I guess, grow a little stronger in their risk tolerance to be able to scale first, you know, because you you buy one, let's say you wait 40 years to buy a house because you're just scared of leverage, then that's 40 years of your life just wasted. Instead, if you use a little bit of leverage, or a lot of bit of leverage, but you start working. But then everybody has to figure out what their goals are, what their financial, I guess, needs are when they quit their job, become financially independent. And then that helps them to figure out what's their path. And so when you figure out your risk tolerance, and one other quick thing, I'll say, with your risk tolerance, for me, my I realized the most risky thing in the world is working for somebody else. 

Dustin Heiner  

And if you remember, on my show, so everybody, you should go back and listen to my past show, because I shared how I and I'll jump right to the punch line, I got laid off, and I was working for the government, doing IT in California, and that is the most stable, secure job you could ever think of. But I got laid off, and if I got laid off, it probably can happen to you. And so for me, it's like, let's figure out what your risk tolerance is, and let's realize that the most risky thing is working for somebody else, then everything else makes it a lot easier. Does that all makes sense?

Ryan Miller  

Yeah, it does. So. So planning that out and having that on one side, you have those assets that put money in your pocket, but the other one is, and I think that's at the core of the question Is it was to de-risk the deal. That's why we reduced the leverage mostly, or if not entirely, but we reduced it to levels much lower. Did that mentality, did that help you after the 2008 crash, where maybe you had some equity buffer in your properties?

Dustin Heiner  

No, it wasn't equity at all. In fact, I lost equity on my properties, which, you know, I was bummed, but I honestly didn't care, because I was still making 3, 4 or 500 bucks a month in passive income, and I knew real estate would go back up. And it's a proven fact, real estate doubles every 15 years. I mean, just think about that, every 15 years it doubles in value. So you buy one house that's $150,000 right now. And yes, if you're living on the coastline, you might be thinking, How do you do that? Yes, there are still houses that are $150,000 well, that house, in 15 years, gonna be 300,000 and then 15 years later, that's gonna be $600,000 and so I just knew, over time, it's gonna take care of itself. I just need to make sure that I was able to feed my family from the cash flow that comes in. 

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. Yeah, I remember I just for fun. I am no real estate investor, but I we had a rental, I think, for like, six years with leverage. I think it was like a 300% 350% and six years, or something like that. Like that was, that was a good one. I was pretty happy with that. So maybe, maybe, maybe you'll convince me to learn the dark arts of real estate but definitely, definitely, has results.

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah, the amazing thing about real estate is like, well, if you're raising money for an apartment complex and you're buying apartment complex, you have more, more than likely you're going to exit at at some point. With single family homes or residential when I say single FM, it means four units, and below, I love the four units and below. Simple interest rates or mortgages that you can get 30 year fixed, which is fantastic. And once, after 30 years is over, you have it paid off. And I will, and if you see, you're probably listening to the podcast, but I have a picture of my four kids. I have five kids now, but I'm picture of my kids behind me, and I will literally give these properties to my kids in generational wealth, and so I make cash flow to feed them, and then when I pass I will give that to them, and they'll be able to feed their family with it. And we don't have to sell it, because over 30 years, it'll be paid off. And one quick thing, I don't have to get a job to pay off this loan. My tenants pay for the loan, like I don't pay for my taxes, I don't pay for my mortgage, my insurance, my property managers. Meaning I don't have to get a job to pay those the tenants pay for all those expenses. The money comes into me, and I pay out all those bills, and then I make sure I make cash flow or passive income or profit on top of all that rent every single month.

Ryan Miller  

That's brilliant, man. So at 37 when you were started your successful unemployment by building that real estate business first and then buying properties. Walk us through how you structured that business, like operations, cash flow team, just so the property side became secondary rather than the primary driver. 

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah. So what I realized, well, actually, I'll take a step to the very beginning. When I first started investing back in 2006 I was follow those quote, unquote gurus. And so back in the day, there weren't TikTok gurus, now there are, but there were those infomercial gurus, and so I would follow them. I spent lots of money following those courses, but it was all garbage. And so today, people are falling in for these TikTok and Instagram gurus that are just trying to tell you, just buy a property, it all work out. And now people are saying, just buy a business, it'll all work out. I'm like, there's a lot more to it than that. But so what I did was I followed those gurus and I bought my property. I was living in California at the time, California prices were crazy high. I couldn't rent it to make any money, so I started investing in Ohio, of all places. I just picked a spot that, you know, map and just put my finger down. Let's try that. So I bought a house, and then I followed what the Guru said, and then my property manager, in six months, started stealing from me. It was terrible because I didn't know what I was doing. I did not plan everything out. I was just doing what I was told by other people who were just selling things. 

Dustin Heiner  

Well, here is one thing that I tell all my students. In fact, you won't hear any Tiktok guru tell you this, this is what I tell everybody. We need to stop being an investor. Instead, we need to become a business owner. And what that means is, you know, an investor. Let's say you have money, you put in the stock market, you put it in there, and you just really forget about it. You just hope that it goes up over time, and hope is not going to feed your family, so you just hope that it goes up and then you trust somebody you've never met to run a company that's supposed to make more money to make the value up so you can sell it and make money. Well, we don't want to be an investor. We want to be a business owner. We want to be the person that owns the company, that then owns the real estate, that that's our inventory. 

Dustin Heiner  

So what I suggest, and so I tell all my students, I've coached 1000s of students, now. In fact, how it started was, I was in Ohio, eventually built that business, realized that property manager stealing from me, realized I did everything wrong, and then started over from scratch, started interviewing everybody, started to find the right people before I did any moves. And then once you have that business built, that's when you find the inventory that you put into your business. It's not a house that you're going to live in as like a primary residence. You don't fall in love with a house. No, is it a good investment for a inventory, a piece of inventory that puts into your business? And let me give you a quick understanding in analogy of what that looks like. So let's say you're going to build a convenience store, you know, candy bars and soda machines and all that good stuff. Well, you would not sign a lease on a location, open the doors and set a box of candy bars in there on the ground. You wouldn't do that, you'd go out of business in two seconds. But what you would do is you would get the gondolas, those are shelving units that all the candy bars go on, the cold storage countertops, bank accounts, cash registers, insurance employees, like everything in the business before you buy any inventory. And then once you have the entire business built, then you buy the inventory, and then you put it into your business, and then you start generating revenue or income in your business. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now, what I've had a lot of people say, hey, Dustin, I followed those Tiktok gurus, I bought a house. I spent 1000s of dollars to buy it, 1000s of dollars to fix it up, and then I tried to find a tenant. Nobody would want to rent it. I tried to find a property manager. Nobody would want to manage it, because the manager would say, I'm not going to manage it, because I'll get shot there. It's like, well, you no longer have an asset, you now have a liability. So what I suggest instead is, instead of calling a property manager, saying, property manager, already bought this house, will you manage it? They say, no. Instead you say, property manager, I'm looking to buy this property. Given the address, how much will it rent for? What's the vacancy factor? Will you manage it? Like all the like, what's the clientele? Like, all these questions that are going to help you to know if it's a good deal to buy, a good investment, a good piece of inventory to buy. If they say no, you do not waste your time and money buying that house and having a liability. If they say yes, they're gonna give you expert information. 

Dustin Heiner  

So if I were to go all the way back to the beginning, so for what it means for you is if you're investing in real estate, if you're already got started, or if you're brand new and you're just getting started, the key is to find the key people in your business, experts first, before you do anything and what, just imagine you started that convenience store and you said, Hey, I need to have somebody run my business. There's somebody walking across the street, they got a pulse. Hey, you come in here and you just manage my company, manage my employees, manage my money and customer No, you wouldn't do that. You would interview a lot of different people and pick the right person for your business. Could be property manager, relating out of real estate, property managers, contractors, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, inspectors and realtors. They're a little bit less because there's lots of Realtors, but what I'm saying is we build the entire business first. Stop thinking of it as an investor, think of it as a business owner, that you're making money every single month and you have experts do the work for you. 

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. You know, I've come to realize that the difference between being rich and being wealthy, while both have a good amount of money, you could say financially free, it's really easy to get sucked into being the owner operator model, which is the opposite of what you and I are talking about. Better yet, to move from being rich to being wealthy is you have an abundance of time and capital, and the best way to do it is exactly what you said. Is you want to shift from being an owner operator to just being an owner. So you want to own businesses that other people run, even if it's a real estate business or private equity you're buying car washes, whatever it might be. But hopefully in your own perspective, for those who are listening, is that you want to say, I don't want to just be rich. I want to be wealthy, which means I have an abundance of time, and I reinvest that time into meaningful relationships, starting with family, if you have one, if you're blessed to have one. But regardless having those, those reputation, your relationships and your results. So when you are an owner, then you get capital, and you have time and money, and you invest that in reputation, relationships and results, and that's your flywheel for business success that I've been able to find any anything you can add to that?

Dustin Heiner  

 That's 100% right and anything like I've raised capital for my apartment complexes. And the reason why I was able to do it, and very easily, I might add, is because for 10 years, people have known me as a real estate investor, and I have not let anybody down. I'm the same person from 10 years ago to now. You know, with my coaching and everything I do, whatever I say that, people have known me. And so when I just reached out, I said, hey everybody, I'm going to be buying a 355, year apartment complex. If you want to invest in my deal, you can. I got so many people just reaching out right away, because they've been waiting to invest with me. But one quick thing I'll add too. So with we're talking about, just a minute ago, about building a business. And we're not investors, we're business owners. One quick thing that I have to say is that business owners do not go into business to lose money. They do not go into business to lose money every single month. They go into business every single time they sell something to make money from it. Let me give you a quick example. So let's say you had a candy bar business where you can buy it for 50 cents, and every day, all day, you can sell it for $1. You're thinking, man, how do I buy as many candy bars as I can? Because I'll make 50 cents. Well, that's what you do, is you buy something, or you get something that you're going to be your inventory for your properties, but then you also sell it for more. So 50 cents, you buy it for sell it for $1 you make 50 cents, but you would not buy it for $1 when you can sell it for $1 and hope in two, three years you're gonna sell it for $2 you don't do that. No, you go into business knowing that day one you're gonna make money. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now here's one quick, amazing thing about real estate. Imagine you didn't have that 50 cents to buy that candy bar, but it cost you 25 cents to borrow. 50 cents, well, you're out of pocket. 75 cents. You still sell it for $1 you make 25 cents every single candy bar. You're thinking, how do I borrow more money because I could buy more inventory to sell it, same thing. So when you realize, if you build a business, you hire experts, just like you said, you want to make sure that you're the owner, you're not the operator. I don't want to I don't even know my I don't have information for my tenants. I don't want to talk to them. They don't even know who I am, I have other people doing all the work. So I own the business, and then I hire experts who live there on the ground. In fact, I invest in Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee and Indiana. And I've done it so many times, like building a business with the system, like building it over and over and over again that now it's just a rinse and repeat type model. That's what I've been coaching 1000s of students now how to do. But every single time, I make sure that I get the experts, because I don't want to do the work. I want other people do the work. So I, like you said, I now have time with my family. I go on awesome podcasts, like Making Billions podcasts. I go to the gym five days a week, two hours a day, just because I can. I go play golf. I travel the world, because I have time now, because I've hired experts in the business to run the business for me. 

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. So now you're the epitome of the retire young, and now you're able to say, because I'm an owner, not an operator, to some degree, now, I'm able to have the life that most people dream, and you're still young enough to enjoy it. So I love that. Now you've promoted the one minute green light deal analyzer. So for sophisticated fund managers, what are the three strategies that most investors get wrong, and how do you correct those?

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah, so I created and was for myself because I'm an investor, even though I have my podcast with solo show coaching people how to do it to, you know, Instagram or whatever, all the coaching that I do in conferences, it's because I'm an investor, because I'm a business owner that invests in real estate. So clarify, business owner that invests in real estate, even though I just said, do not be an investor be a business owner. So I invest in real estate and I started coaching people, and I started giving away my green light deal analyzer. It's a one minute really green light deal analyzer. So I created it because I needed it for my business. And then I started selling that. Now I think it's like, I don't know, 20 bucks, like, hey, get it for free, or get it for free, get it for 20 bucks, and then use it for however you want. But now when you're looking at when you're getting apartment complexes or just commercial real estate, this one minute green light deal analyzers, little more simple, obviously, for residential for you, it's a blow. And so when you get to and how I look at it is for raising capital for larger apartment complexes, commercial real estate, I realized that there are still principles. Even though the calculator is much more simple, there's still principles that I had to have in everything. 

Dustin Heiner  

The number one thing and so right now, we own almost 1000 units, and in every single one of those properties, we raise capital, and in about like 10 to maybe 15 days, we raise either, let's say this actually, in May, we raised 10, almost 11 million, and we had, in 10 days, we raised $11 million in 10 days, there was three other general partners and myself, and we had to shut off the like say, no more sending in money. We cannot take your money. We're done because it was such an amazing deal. And the reason why is because of capturing equity when we bought it. The seller was distressed and they needed to get out of the property. So we bought it for $60,000 a unit when right and this is Chattanooga, Tennessee, $60,000 a unit when right now, we could literally go around and turn around and sell it for 110 at the bare minimum. Like fire sell $110,000 per unit. And so everybody that they're the investors are like, oh my goodness, just day one, we've got so much equity. So what I love to do is buying assets, single family homes, apartment complex, you name it. I want to capture equity when I buy it. If I don't capture equity, I don't buy it, I love to get either 10, 20, or more percent in equity capture when I buy it, because I love the saying, amazing saying, you make your money when you buy your property. You realize it when you sell it and so when we go and sell it, more than likely, let's say three or four years, maybe five years we go and sell it, it'll probably be like, 130-140,000 I mean, that's a lot of great money coming in. So that's why, when I raise capital, because I'm only investing in amazing deals, my investors are jumping all over because they make a lot of money. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now, the other one or two other ones, you want to make sure that the debt at least, this is what I do. I don't want to get stuck, like if I buy a house with a hard money loan, and it's a 12 month loan, and then I can't refinance because interest rates are higher or some problem, and I can't get out of that 12 month loan, then I'm stuck, and I'm paying a lot of money, like 24-25% in interest, and it juices just keeps going. Same thing with apartment complexes or commercial real estate. I want to make sure that we have really good debt on the property. I like, I personally like, longer duration. If I would never get into a one to maybe three year loan, it should at least be a five year like, I want to make sure at least have five year runway. One of them we bought had five to seven years. Like, the seven year is the how long we can hold it before we have to do something about it. So we have a huge runway at the same time, obviously you want to have lower interest rates. Those are really, really good. But at the same time, for me, I just want to make sure that the debt is so favorable, so that my obviously, when I you buy it lower than the purchase price or market value, then you have less of a mortgage, less of a mortgage, less expense, less mortgage payment every single month, which is more cash in your pocket. And so that's why I also want to make sure that sometimes we even get interest only on the first two years, because we know we're going to turn around and sell it eventually, in, let's say, five years. And so we don't necessarily need to pay down the principal, because we already captured, you know, 50% in equity. And so we get interest only, so we get more cash flow up front. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now the other third one was, we love to buy in the same area of the country or even in the same general area where we've already built. Give you example, we in 24, 2024 we bought a property 355, units near Nashville, great apartment complex. Our investors are loving it. They're absolutely loving this property and this property has two major, I guess, complexes for it, and in the middle of it is separated by a different apartment complex that we did not own. So just imagine three apartment complexes, and one in the middle is not ours. Well, we just got under contract. We've been talking to them for a long time, three or four years, and we said, yeah, if you ever were looking to sell, we're gonna buy it. Well, came on the market because they're they did not follow that number or number two, they did not get good debt. They are actually going to have to lose it to the bank because they got horrible financing on it, and so, and in two weeks we got to close, because they are gonna, it's gonna be a bad for them. So we already raised the money. We're about ready to buy it's gonna be great. But here's the great thing, with economies of scale, we already have that 355 unit apartment complex. This 94 unit will basically turn this into a 450 unit apartment complex and so we have the same property manager. So the economies of scale, more units brings down our cost per unit. You know, let's say just as simple thing as painting the walls, we're gonna use the same paint in all the rooms, there's no reason to just change paint. But we get a lot better discount because we have all these different same units, and we spread out the cost to all the units. So I personally love being able to continually grow in one area and have economies of scale to where my expenses keep coming down because of the investing or the business building that I do.

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. So with those economies of scale and all of the long term debt and making sure the long duration is good, capturing equity in the beginning sounds like really, if someone was in your shoes, it just means that you would need to approach a deal as a long, long term thinking investor, and dare I say, making sure your investors know that making them money is the end game. Can you agree with that, or anything you can add?

Dustin Heiner  

Absolutely, absolutely. And so a lot of our investors, obviously, you know they want, they'd love to get their money double their money in like, two years or three years, but we tell them, no, hey, this is our projection. This is where we're going. And we've also secured financing, so we're actually a little more protected than some others, but yeah, in the end, when I talk to my investors, they look at our our deal deck, and they see everything from the equity capture, they see the return that they're gonna be getting. We also, they also see the cash flow that we're gonna be building up, they see the debt. And so in the end, we structure ours as if we were LPS looking at our deal. Hey, is this a good deal? If I were an LP if it's not, then more than likely our investors aren't going to like it. And so we try to structure it so that our LPs, the limited partners, ones that are investing the money that they are super excited about these properties.

Ryan Miller  

Got it now paying it down, you've done a pretty cool method for paying it down, called the snowball method. So why do you believe this beat rapid scaling in today's market and how should fund managers or syndicators evaluate when to accelerate versus pay down?

Dustin Heiner  

So everybody, like say, the very beginning, everybody has different risk tolerances, but you also have to realize everybody has different goals. Now, I personally loved that I use, it's called the snowball method, where you pay down let's say it's a credit card. Make it a little simpler. Let's say you have five credit cards, and you've charged up each one, but you want to pay them off. Well, I go after the one with the least amount of total principal, so I could knock that credit card out and that entire minimum monthly payment, and the payment I was making to get rid of that credit card, I could then apply to the second one and then get that one paid off as fast fall possible. And then I play next, I guess, I start paying towards the third one and so on. Same thing with real estate. So if somebody has the risk tolerance, they're like, You know what? I would love to have all my properties paid off. That is by far one of the best ways to go, because once you have that entire minimum payment knocked out, that goes right to the second one and that property. And I just definitely case in point when I was paying these off, it was so fast and just like a snowball going down a hill, you make a small snowball. Well, it accelerates and grabs more snow as it goes down, but then it gets heavier, it gets heavier, which makes it go even faster and roll even faster. And the bigger gets, the better it gets and then in the end, I had so much cash flow coming in, because now your big, well, your biggest expense out of any investing or business building you're doing is your mortgage, your your debt. That's the biggest expense. That's why banks, they have all the money. If you instead switch it to where you don't owe any banks, then you have so much money. Now I will say, though, at the same time, what I personally do is, if I see a really good deal and I have a lot of equity, I'll take some of that equity. 

Dustin Heiner  

Give you example. We were buying another 325, unit apartment complex in Chattanooga, Tennessee, about six months ago, and I want to get some capital. So I had a bunch of property, 30 plus properties, I think, like I said, 90 plus of them, percent of them are paid off. And I took out cash out refinance out of six of them, pulled out 550 grand, six and a half percent DSCR loan, so in 30 years, it'll be paid off. It's a fantastic loan, but I put out $550,000 put good chunk of money into our deal, but then I also bought three single family homes with it. Now I got some other loans and everything like that, but what I looked at was, now that I have so much equity, I have access to that capital. Now, and I'm able to buy more real estate now. What I also love to I understand now in 2008 people, they were speculating, the ones that went bankrupt, these real estate investors. In fact, I know a guy. He's got a podcast, I won't say his name, only to say his podcast, but he lost in 2008 $65 million went bankrupt. $65 million because basically, he just bought lots and lots and lots of properties, but he got so over leveraged that he went belly up $65 million. And that's speculating when you are hoping that the value goes up, or anticipating, or whatever you want to call it. I don't let me say it this way, I don't even care if the value goes up. I care if the rents go up, because I want more cash flow. And then when I say I don't care, it's not like I don't want it to go up. To go up. I know it will go up. I'm not hoping. I just know and I'll hold it long enough to eventually be able to capitalize on it. Let's say, pull out that cash, all that equity that I hadn't have in my properties. It's easy for me just to get refinance. In fact, I have lenders now. I for my students and myself. I got lenders in like, I don't know, less than 30 days we can refinance some of my properties, pull the cash out so I can buy more real estate. And so what I don't want to do, and what I for, what it means for you listening, is my suggestion is, instead of speculating, hoping that the value goes up, and thinking, okay, it didn't go up, I'm stuck, and I got to go bankrupt. But if you're making cash flow, then you can also turn that around to then pay off those loans so that in the future, you have more cash flow as well as you can tap into equity whenever you want.

Ryan Miller  

So moving for, cash flow over capital gains, not that, neither is that bad, or either is that bad, but I would say, based on what you're saying, is, look for the cash flow before the capital gains. Is that right?

Dustin Heiner  

Absolutely and well, I mean, the big reason why is because I wanted financial independence. If I'm working 40 plus hours of to somebody else, what does equity do to me? Equity doesn't do anything for me. As soon as I was done and had 40 plus hours of my life back. I mean, imagine people are working 60-70, 80 hours a week. Imagine having 80 hours of your life back every single week. Let me also say this. The most people will always tell you, okay, what's the last question? And the answer usually is the same, what's the most expensive commodity or thing you can ever spend in your life? People say that it's time. I don't disagree, but I'll add one thing to it. It's not time. Time doesn't matter. Time absolutely does not matter. What does matter is life. So when you accumulate your entire life, all the time that you are here on this earth, then that is the culmination of your life. You do not, if you spend your life in a way that's making somebody else rich, taking away from your fun, your happiness, to traveling, hobbies, family, whatever it might be, then that's the most expensive thing you can spend, is your entire life. Imagine being seven years old, having to retire, or sorry, retiring, not having enough money, and then having go back to work at Walmart because you don't have enough money coming in because you're not working for somebody else. So my suggestion is, if you focus on the cash flow money coming in, so you can then have 40, 50-60, plus hours of your life back then you can start an amazing podcast like Making Billions, and help a lot more people.

Ryan Miller  

It's a lot of fun. Well, I appreciate that, man. 

Ryan Miller  

Hey, thanks for listening to Making Billions. If you liked this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review. This helps us to get the podcast to more ears, to help people raise capital, learn fund management strategies, and serve our mission, to help fund managers and deal syndicators to gain greater hope and focus as they build their empire. All right, let's get back to the show. 

Ryan Miller  

So you know, you've you've owned 30 plus single family homes and apartment complexes. So how did you decide when it was time to transition to asset classes and what systems had to change when you did that?

Dustin Heiner  

So I grew up playing Monopoly, it was one of the funnest games that we did growing up. I asked, and we I was very poor, very my family was very poor. We lived in a two bedroom, 900 square foot house, very, very poor and I didn't know I was poor. It's just the way it was and it was great. Life was fantastic. Book. We played Monopoly, and I thought I would love to eventually be able to own hotels or multifamily apartment complexes. So I and this is honestly, a lot of people tell you, oh, jump right into apartment complex because it says same amount of work for residential as they're full of crap. I'm sorry to be crass, but they're full of garbage. It's a lot more work buy an apartment complex than a single family home. If you bought a house to live in that you see how easy it is. It's so simple. There's so little moving parts. 

Dustin Heiner  

So same thing with investing, if, if you could jump right into a monopoly? Well, is it, I don't think it's actually even possible to jump, unless you have, like, you started having billions of dollars. Um, you can't jump right to multifamily. You have to go through buying the land and then buying each individual house and then growing and building it up, and demolishing those and putting in the multifamily, the hotels and so what I suggest, and this is what I've done, is I wanted to make sure that I was stable. Stabilizing all of my income from my properties and having cash flow. In fact, I know somebody she has, and she touts that, oh, I have 4000 units that I own. I asked the question, I know the answer. Oh, man, how long have you been financially independent? She goes, I'm not. I still work at job. I'm like, you have 4000 headaches and you're not financially independent, meaning, like, that's not releasing you from your liabilities. Oh, my goodness, that's terrible. I got 30. I got 30 homes, and that made me so much more so. 

Dustin Heiner  

So single family home is bread and butter, and it's so simple to do, and you hire experts. There are so many property managers, so many contractors, so many plumbers like that's the easiest thing. So I personally suggest starting with four units and below single family home, and then when you then have enough for cash flow, for financial independence, you can quit your job. And I like the term successfully unemployed, become successfully unemployed, then you have more time, and then the more time you devote to serving other people. And I, like when I say that, I'm not saying that, like, quickly, I'm gonna jump right back into it. When you serve people, you make more money, and they make more money when you start looking in life as a scarcity mindset, oh, there's not enough to go around. I got to keep it all to myself. You're it's you're gonna have scarcity. It's sorry, you're gonna live scarce, and you're not gonna have as much. When you start thinking of abundance, there's so much abundance for like, instead of the world's out to get me, how about the world's out to help me? And then you find great people to be around because they want to be around you because you're helping them, and they want to help you out. And so what, how I transition or transition, because I still do both. Still do residential, love residential. I will never stop buying those. But then also wanted to get into multifamily, but I did not want to be an expert in multifamily. I didn't, I mean, jumping right into my first property was 355 in apartment complex that was multifamily, and it wasn't me. I didn't find it. I have friends of mine, I've known them for a number of years. I put on a large conference called Real Estate Wealth builders conference, and they came and spoke at my conference a couple years. And we just got to be good friends. And then after a while, they say, hey, Dustin, we've been buying a lot of apartments, and we bought this big one. It's pretty big. We need a little help with raising capital. We think you could do it. I said, really, I've never done it before. Said, yes, you've been podcasting for eight years, and everybody loves you. You should absolutely I said, okay, I'll try. So I put a couple podcast episodes and a couple emails to my newsletter and raise one and a half million dollars in, like, I don't know, a week or two, and then we had closed it down because we had so much money. But what I'm trying to say is, what I love to do is I love getting around amazing people. I don't want to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, I hate being the smartest person in the room. I want to be the dumbest person in the room, so that I'm learning from other people, or we're all working together to help each other out. So getting into multifamily, it was because I got around the right people, awesome people, who are doing this, that they're experts too. Just like I hire experts to manage my single family homes, I get around experts that do multifamily, like I'm the expert for residential. They're the experts in multifamily, and all I got to do is bring what I can bring to the game where I do a little bit Asset Management with them. But the biggest thing they needed help was, was raising capital. And so because they brought me in, and now we're personally like, I'm looking for more multifamily properties myself, because I've been learning off of them. It's just getting around the right people, is how I've done it. 

Ryan Miller  

I love that, you know, we always talk about in my show and the different communities on raising capital. At Fundraise Capital, we say the three most valuable assets in your possession are your reputation, your relationships and your results. And as you invest in those and grow those, it is probably the best thing I've ever seen to make investors and capital come to you, that when you have a good reputation and your partners, so you got capital coming to you, you got deals coming to you, you've got partners coming to you. And that all stems from having a good reputation. By that, I mean integrity. Have great relationships with people who are also empire builders, if we want to call them that, and you produce some results. So it's saying like, hey, not all talk, we can do that. And so I think it sounds like you've leveraged reputation, relationships and results, plus those with partners, and that was a big shift for you. As far as some of the systems, maybe it's a little bit more intangible, but those are some of the things that change for you. Would you agree?

Dustin Heiner  

Absolutely. 

Ryan Miller  

Oh, man, I love that. So you're teaching kids, your kids rental property investing. You mentioned that you're going to leave them some properties. So how do you translate that into multi generational capital vehicle mindset? I know we got a lot of family offices that listen to the show and so legacy is a big, important thing. You don't have to have a family office to have a legacy, but that is an important mandate. So maybe some things that these are some things that family offices may struggle to operationalize. How do you do it?

Dustin Heiner  

How I do it is, number one is, my wife is amazing, and I have the easy job of making money. She has the hard job of homeschooling our kids. So we've been homeschooling we I don't have much to do that. My wife does all that work, but she's been homeschooling, we've been homeschooling our kids for ever since, like, they've never been in a public school. And we realized, actually, no, it was me and she helped me to come to the realization that, honestly, any school, college, university, or whatever they can, nobody in any of those can teach my kids better than I can how to make money, how to produce, how to be a good member of society, at least in my opinion. Now there might be, but I don't care. I know I can produce amazing people. I've got 1000s of students now coaching students, showing them how to invest in real estate. I put on my conferences, 3-4 or 500 people come. So I know how to influence people. I know how to help people to have better, better lives. And I was like, why don't we just do that for our kids? So the number one thing that I first do for my kids, we have five kids now, very blessed at five, is now education. I coach them and train them up in business now, so the beginning of their lives, until they get to, like, middle of high school, they're learning from mommy, and then now I'm they're transitioning to where I'm now coaching them on business, on leadership, entrepreneurship. Everything that they need to be great producers in life. 

Dustin Heiner  

And so number one, education, also, I've got great coach courses. I've created six different courses on real estate, investing, financial independence, even a financial literacy course, because I had a lot of people coming to me say, Dustin, I have bad credit, well, take this course anyways. So my kids are going through those courses as well. So my goal is to educate them. Now, that's number one. Number two, exposing them to everything that I do, from real estate investing to podcasting, to my conferences, my kids come and help run my conference. You know, they'll be passing out badges and all that, all the good stuff. But I want them to be with me every single step of the way so they experience it, not that they read a book and they have to figure out on their own. No, I want them to walk through it as I do and in fact, one thing I've done is just for example. So I want my boys to be able to have a trade that they can if they needed a job, they can have a trade rather than going to college. In fact, I think college is a scam, unless you're a lawyer, engineer or doctor, something that you need a big, lot of knowledge, most people, you don't need that. But anyways, I went and I've remodeled most of my houses myself, I've definitely pretty handy. And so I remodeled our master bathroom. Brought my kids. My boys were there. They helped me. They watched everything and then when we got all done, I said, All right, boys, there's our hall bath. You it's your turn to remodel. And they were like 12 and 13 when they remodeled the first one with me, and they like 13 and 14 when they did it themselves. Now I did all the plumbing, I didn't want it to leak, I made sure that. But like from the demo to the laying of the tile to all they did all of that. And so it's by helping them, not just by reading a book, but do this with me. 

Dustin Heiner  

And one quick last one I'll share is I read the Bible multiple times a day, and I love that the Bible says a righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, not just his children, which is great. You should 100% do that's like a bare minimum, but you should continue to grow everything, your wealth, your riches, your your education, your knowledge, everything, so that your children's children also benefit from it as well. And so that's what I'm striving for now, is making sure that everything I have. In fact, I was just thinking today, actually, little today. I don't know why I was thinking about it, but I would love to be able to leave at least $10 million that's just a round number, at least $10 million to my kids. If not, I would love it for each one of my kids to have $10 million that they are able to build up and and grow. But at the same time, here's one quick thing, my daughter, you can't see the picture, but my daughter, she's 16 years old now, she bought her first rental property. She went through my courses, went through my coaching. Now, obviously I helped her, coached her just like that, but she took her life savings. Now you wherever you're listening. What this means for you is wherever you are, you're more than likely at a much better position than my daughter is 16 years old and bought it. It doesn't take a rocket science. It doesn't take a lot of money. It just takes you being able to step out in belief that you can do it. And so if my daughter can do it, I 100% know that you can do it as well.

Ryan Miller  

So family certainly is that heritage. And thank you for quoting scripture that's definitely a Making Billions first and hopefully not the last. So it sounds like building that legacy really comes down to what I would call education, exposure and ethos, right? Education is, don't just give them proper to teach them. The exposure is kind of dovetailing onto that to say, well, not just sit down at the dinner table and let dad teach you, but it's also like, hey, I got a meeting with my lawyer. We're gonna go over some contract stuff. Why don't you come with me or we got to walk through with a property manager, whatever that is, or renovating a bathroom. Let's see if you know your way around an air nailer or whatever that might be, and then ultimately having some overarching ethos, which just says, hey, the reason why I'm doing this is to give my children's children an inheritance that matters to me. That the legacy matters to me. It's not just going to be a flash in the pan, but this is going to be a branch off the family tree that who comes from this is going to be very blessed. I love that. Anything else you can add to that? 

Dustin Heiner  

No, you summed it up really well.

Ryan Miller  

Awesome, man. So what was your internal turning point when you shifted from I'm buying rentals to I own an income producing business? So what were some of those misbeliefs you had to purge? And how did you reframe the change that drove that asset behavior?

Dustin Heiner  

Well, it came out of when I first started investing back in 2006 I read a couple books, I went to one of those infomercial, you know, free things. Hey, we're coming to your town, it's all hype and sales pitch for, you know, 1000, like, 10-20, 30, $100,000 courses. And so I did all that, and I was just following what they were doing and so I didn't know any better. And so my property manager, like I said, a little bit earlier in six months, started stealing from me, because I did not stealing from me because I did not know what I was doing. But at the same time, I started many businesses before, and I thought, okay, if, if I approach this in a business mindset, then I could probably do this better. I was just following what other people say. Oh, you just, like I said earlier, oh, just buy a property and find a property manager, they'll take care of it. Like, no, that's not it. You're, you're gonna get hurt if you do that. I've seen so many people I got hurt doing that. So what I realized when that was the mindset shift, was that I need to actually be the business owner. I can't just invest my money and then let somebody else take care of it. I need to actively be the manager of the business. I wanna say manager owner of the business that's making sure that everything's working right. I don't wanna do the work, but. I have other people to do it, but I also want to quit my job in 10 years. So is 2006, yeah, 2006 and I read, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, great book that basically just teaches you active income is terrible. Passive income, where you work one time, get paid over and over again is amazing. So instead of where I was working, active income, I'd work an hour, get paid for that hour. I was like, I got to do something else. So I bought one rental property and then I realized, my goodness, I need to do this like this needs to be what I do for the rest of my life, is become a business owner investing in real estate. And so what I did was, I said, I'm giving myself 10 years. It's a deadline, it's not a goal, it's deadline. And so even if I don't make it, I'm still going to quit my job. So I better make it, I got a family, and so I realized that I needed to build a business. 

Dustin Heiner  

Now, the great thing was, as I was building the business in the first city that I was investing in, I realized, my goodness, I've got, I don't know, 10-12, properties here, maybe I could, or should, branch out to other cities and get not all my eggs in one basket. Maybe I should have different cities with different property managers, different companies, so in case one dies, or, you know, they do terrible, then I'm not depending on that. I have, you know, the risk kind of mitigated or, you know, spread out. And so I realized that I created a system. After I did it in five different states, I was like, oh my goodness, I have a system that now this is what the mindset, mindset shift to be a business owner, helped me to have the systems, or put systems in place, processes and procedures in place, and then that's now, that's what I coach my students, because I've already proved it to myself that it worked five different times and or five different states, many different cities in the States and then now that's why I coach my students. And honestly, my students are even better at that than I am, because I fast track them. They don't have to unlearn just like if you're playing golf, and you play golf for 10 years and you have the worst swing in the world, and you're making it through, and then you actually kind of get lessons and you're get lessons, and you're like, Okay, show me what to do and the golf instructor is like, oh my goodness, you have to unlearn all the things that are bad in your swing. This is going to take forever. That's where I was now, if I'm now, I'm showing people now, they're they don't have any knowledge. They've never done it and so I'm able to help them from square one, do everything right, and skip all the pain, 1000s of 10-20, $50,000, lost doing it the wrong way.

Ryan Miller  

Man, that is brilliant. It sounds like an absolute wild ride man, yeah. So you know, you talk about being successfully unemployed. I like that arc, but it seems like it's because you reduce risk rather than simply chasing yield. So how do you define risk in this era of higher rates and sticky inflation for real estate investors.

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah, I said this a little bit earlier. It's so much more risky working for somebody else, somebody that can literally lay you off or fire you at any given time. And in fact, one thing that I'm teaching my students, or students my kids, right now is they are worth more than anybody can ever pay them. They're worth so much more than so for you listening, I want you to realize you're worth more than anybody could ever pay you, and this is all you'll know. Your boss is paying you just enough to keep you working without quitting. But not so much money. It takes money out of their pockets. If they paid you what you were worth, they would go, broke. So you realize it's so much more risky, because they could find somebody else to replace you and just fire you for whatever reason they wanted. 

Dustin Heiner  

Instead, if you realize that the risk is mitigated because you build a business, because you know your business, and then you hire experts to run that business, and then you buy inventory that you know, just like that candy bar analogy, I know without a shadow of a doubt, any property that I buy that's going to make me cash flow every single month or I don't buy it. Give you example. I suggest for all my students you want to buy a house that makes you over $500 every single month. Well, how do you do that? How do you make sure you mitigate those risks? Well, it's very, very simple. You add up all your expenses, taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA or homeowner association, a property manager, like vacancy, repairs, like you add up all of these expenses, and you get a total but you do not stop there. That's not your only expenses. Or those aren't your own expenses, there's one more expense, that other expense is your profit. You want to make sure, let's say all my expenses, including mortgage and everything, is $1,000 well, I know I need to make $500 on this property I add on an expense line item, meaning I'm not guessing if I'm going to make it. I'm making sure that $500 is an expense line item. So all of my expenses are $1,500 on this property. If I could rent it for 1600 bucks, then great, I'm making $600 in passive income because there's $100 extra. But if I could only rent it for 1400 then I'm kind of wondering, whoa, am I overpaying for this property? If I can only rent it for 1100 I'm like, I'm not buying it because I'm not making enough money. And so that's what I love to look at, is we mitigate or manage the risk. In fact, it's almost where I don't have risk, because real estate goes up over time, we know that every 15 years it doubles, and rents go up all the time. In fact, I don't even worry about inflation anymore, because my rents go up with inflation. I make more money. And when I realize I've mitigated all these risks, it's so much easier because just like riding a bike. When you ride a bike for the first time, you've never done it before, you're gonna crash and hurt yourself, because you know what you're doing. But let's say you have somebody, an expert teacher, that's always taught everybody and knows how to get you riding right away. You start riding the bike. You start riding you're like, oh my goodness, I'm going and it's awesome. Then you never forget. That's what I do with my students. I help them every single step of the way, do it right the first time, because I've made every single mistake you can think of after investing for 20 years now, I made every single mistake I could think of, or you can think of, as well as I've got experts around me. I've got rid of bad companies that I used to work with, bad experts or whatever, and I got the right people around me. And then now my students get on the bike, or, you know, investing, once they buy their first property, they're like, oh my goodness, Dustin, you're right. This was not as hard as it as I thought it was gonna be? Because you fear the unknown. Unknown is very easy to fear, but when you have somebody that's walked that path, that's done it before, especially somebody's coached 1000s of people now, my students are so happy that now I don't they don't have to worry about any of that risk, because I've already helped them mitigate that one. 

Dustin Heiner  

The other, quick last one was, I actually want interest rates to go higher, which you'll never hear any Tiktok guru tell you that. You know, they'll say, oh, interest rates are coming down, now it's time to buy I'm like, no, no, no. I want interest rates to go up. I've been waiting for interest rates to go up for a very long time. And you may think, well, Dustin, are you crazy? Well, here you got to think about this. Well, people ask me, well, Dustin, you coach 1000s of people. Are you coaching your competition? Like, aren't the properties going to be gone? Aren't you worried about them? No, there's so many properties. In the world, especially in America. There's so many properties in America that my competition are not investors. There's so few of them compared to how many are my competition homeowners. They're the ones that overpay for the property. They're the ones that fall in love with it. They're the ones that get terrible mortgages because they love the property. Those are my competition. When interest rates go up, that means they are priced out. Prices come back down. Now here's the great thing, I don't care about interest rates because I do not have to get a job to pay that interest. My tenants pay that interest. Now the Money comes to me and I pay all the bills, but I all that interest is taken care of, it's the cost of doing business. Same thing, my cash flow. So I don't care with market swings. I don't care with interest rates. I don't care about answer, actually, no, here's another walk. Quickly. Say one more thing. If the market goes up, I make money. If the market goes down, I make money. If the market goes sideways, I make money. And why do I make money? Because I invest for cash flow. The equity will always be there, and I'll tap into it buy more real estate, but it's the cash flow that feeds my family.

Ryan Miller  

Cash is king man. I absolutely love it. Now, you mentioned about some of your students, and I know you teach how to turn those rental properties into, we'll say, automatic businesses. So for someone managing syndications, what are the three most overlooked systemizing steps to turn their operation into an automatic cash flow machine.

Dustin Heiner  

What it really comes down to is the people around you, especially, I mean, single family homes, there's a fewer amount of people that you need around your mortgage broker, maybe a title company, realtor, property manager, contractor. There's a fewer people that you need in there. But when you're doing something that you're managing some sort of commercial real estate, you need a lot more of the right people that you can remove yourself from the operations. Now, we've toyed with the idea we have over almost 1000 units. Now, toyed with the idea of starting our own property management company, because we, I mean, that's a lot of money going out to a property manager, and we know we were take care of our properties even more, but at the same time, our property manager that we have now, they're amazing. We cannot get our expense as low as they are currently charging us, because we have so many, I think we have so I have 1000 with my partners, but they have some other units, and so all together, I think they own, or we all own 1500 to 1800. And this one property manager handles, handles ours and a lot of others. So their expense is so minuscule. 

Dustin Heiner  

So here's my suggestion, if you get around the right people like me, I am not the operator of the apartment complexes. My two general partners, they're amazing. At the same time, I'm not the property manager. We hire the right property managers, and with the economies of scale, are their expenses? Are our expenses so low because they have got their business so dialed in that makes us so much money. And so that's number one, you got to get around the right people, especially when you're doing multifamily or commercial, because there's so many more moving parts. But also I love having CRM or like, like, software, AI and everything like that. Those are great, but at the same time. Well, let me before I say, say something about AI, what I want everybody to realize. 

Dustin Heiner  

So you need to realize that real estate is not about properties. Business is not about products, and life is not about experiences. Real estate is about people. Business is about people, and life is about people. If you make your focus on people, your life will get better. So if you try to remove everything out of your life and just go with AI, trust me, you're gonna have a very lonely life. We're not made to be alone in a room with AI, that's not gonna work. But at the same time, it's also gonna help you. It's also gonna help you streamline things, like when I'm talking to my all that my investors, we do have a portal that they're able to log in, that all the paperwork is, all the their their information, so and most most company or most syndicators or most apartment complexes owners, they're going to have this software, but software has been huge help. But also, here's a great thing that I when I raise capital, it's very simple, like, I don't it doesn't take me a lot of work. And the big reason why is because for the last 10 years, I've been putting out organic evergreen content. Like, I'm not buying ads for any of this stuff. I've been putting out so much content for 10 years just sharing how I invest in real estate. Like my podcast, I think we're at 2.2 million downloads now, and it's basically a Solo show, I just teach. That's all I do, is I just keep teaching. And because I've been putting out for shoot almost 10 years now, with my podcast, with my YouTube, with my books and everything like that, people have seen me for so long that they trust me. And then all I needed to do was to put it out there that I have a property that I'm buying. If you want to invest with me, you can. And I got in like, the first, like, I don't know, two weeks, I got like 20 people fill out this form. Yes, I'm an accredited investor. Yes, I have money. Yes, I've been waiting for you to invest. I want to invest in your deals. And so what I love is having everyone again, when I say evergreen content, it's like I'm putting out things out there that people can eventually find, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, all that sort of stuff, showing that I know what I'm talking about. And then they also, like, also, another quick thing my personality might turn people off. Like, I'm excited. I love talking about real estate. I'm an extrovert, and so that might turn people off. That's great, there are other people for you. But the great thing about having your content out there is that the people that it works for that like it, they're gonna stick around. And so it's self weeding of people that aren't gonna be work well with me, then they weed themselves out. They weed themselves out. They can work with somebody else. And so that's what I love, is I create these systems that help me to continue my investing business.

Ryan Miller  

Man, that's brilliant. So it sounds like really the main thing is just focus on building your credibility, your trustworthiness in the market, that people can rely on you, not just for like you're not giving financial advice, but just say, yeah, let me share my experience, the things that have worked for me, things that might work for you. I don't know, but I think building that and just becoming reliable and putting out that evergreen content, it sounds like that has been supremely helpful for you now.

Dustin Heiner  

That's, if I were to yes, if I were to point anything to how I got better. In fact, I talked about a little bit about scarcity versus abundance mindset. Back when I first started investing in 2006 I had a scarcity mindset, like I can't talk to anybody about it, because I don't want them to be my competition, everything like that. But then I there's a switch in me. When I first started coaching people, I realized that my students are not my competition. Other real estate investors not my competition. In fact, I realized that my students were getting so much more success when they were around other students, and everybody was winning. And then that got me to realize this, I need to have an abundance mindset. Like even though I was coaching people, which was great, because that's what I want to do, is help people, but I even started getting part of their deals, and like helping them out and sort so honestly, like the mindset shift of abundance, and how do I serve more people? And then having that evergreen content gets out there, people think I trust. This person. I like how they say. I like what they say. Let me start working with them.

Ryan Miller  

That was brilliant, man. So if you were starting your investment career in 2026 with, say, just 2 million bucks of deployable capital, no properties, what would be your first three moves, and what would you avoid at all cost? 

Dustin Heiner  

Wow. Okay, so the first, the first, my first goal. And I'm assume that this person, like, if it was me starting over, and I was starting over from scratch, I had a business or a job, I had a job that I had, I call it a job, it's you're working just over broke. That's what J, O, B stands for. You're living just over broke and I realized that if I had more time that all of my value was not going to somebody else, but if I had more time and my capacity to build my own business, to invest in my own things and do everything that I want, that's going to be worth so much more. Plus, like I said earlier, time doesn't matter, only life. Life matters. So your life, if you spend your life working for somebody else, your life's wasted. My suggestion is as soon as you can get to the point where you're not working for somebody else, so take that $2 million let's say I have $2 million in deployable capital and no properties. I personally was so focused on cash flow, so that I did not have my expenses worried, my household expenses, food and, you know, mortgage, all that sort of stuff, depending on somebody else that needs to give me a job. I want to buy property. So that's what I first would do, is I would buy cash flowing real estate that I then covered my expenses so I can quit my job. 

Dustin Heiner  

Then once I quit my job, I would have time and energy and resources to do so much more. And next one, we go into what I just talked about a little bit earlier. I build up so much content. I would do this all over again, because it's been so amazing. In fact, my social media, I wasn't a big fan of social media until I really started getting kind of used to it, but now I've grown my Instagram to 250,000 followers organically, no, no bots, no, nothing. It's literally hard work in a year and a year I built it up, but then I get people wanting to invest in my deals just by me posting on social media. So let me say, in building up your content, and if you're trying to raise capital, how would you like to get for free, no ad money, 30,000 views on your deal, on your property, on your deal. Well, because I've been doing this for so long, I only put out one reel, because I have lots of followers, because I've been doing for so long, podcast, all that sort of stuff. I put out one reel, one reel that says, hey, I'm buying this house or this property right here. We own this one, I tell the entire story, and I say, comment the word cove on the reel. Comment the word Cove, and I will send you a DM to get you see if you want to invest in my deal and get all the information from you. I've got 30,000 people, if we're free, looking at this, and I've got dozens and dozens of people replying and saying, hey, I'm. I'm an accredited investor. I want to invest in your deal. I'm like, man, that was so easy. So that is another thing I would do, is start building up credibility and content, or content to show your credible, and then credible becomes reliable, and then trustworthy, and the people want to invest with you. But at the same time, I love not having mortgages on my property. So I would also build up enough cash flow to start paying off the property, so my cash flow grows even more. But that's what I would do if I had that deployable capital. But I mean, in the end, if you're thinking, would I rather own 1000, a 1000 unit apartment complex, or never have to work a job again, like pick one of the two, I still have to work a job and own 1000 units? No, no, you don't want the apartment. You want your freedom. You want your life and then go buy those things.

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. And what would you avoid?

Dustin Heiner  

I would avoid hoping that values go up. I would avoid that because I know they're going to go up. Don't get me wrong, they will go up, but you don't know if there's ever going to be a correction. In fact, I know there are some big name podcasters that got into apartment complexes that were raising capital that are really hurting, and their investors are really hurting. They're doing capital calls, definitely stopping distribution. They got in, in fact, one of them, I'm not gonna say his name, but specifically, put out a real saying, hey, just gotta talk to you guys about what's going on right now. I got these, these bad loans, and there's only a year loan, and I thought we were gonna get out and refinance, but this X, Y and Z, I'm like, yeah, yeah, you were just hoping that the value would go up. I don't want to speculate. I don't want to hope that it goes up. I know it's going to go up, but in time. I want to, from day one, always be making money another thing. I don't want to do anything myself. I don't want to run the business myself. I don't want to call tenants. I don't want any of that stuff, I want to be around people. Remember, like I said, real estate's not about properties. Real estate is about people. If you focus on people, even your tenants, focus on your tenants. If you focus on serving people, your life will get better. Their life will get better. You'll make more money. They'll make more money. Everything is so much better. 

Ryan Miller  

Classic. Okay, so before we wrap things up, final thoughts, anything else, anything that you'd want our fans to know. Ways to reach out to you, anything at all?

Dustin Heiner  

Yeah, well, definitely reach out to me. You can find me on Instagram. I love getting DMS the Dustin Heiner, so T, H E, Dustin Heiner, you'll find me on there. Like I said, over 250,000 I'll usually pop up pretty quick, but at the same time, would you mind if I gave everybody a free course, just for just for listening?

Ryan Miller  

I would not mind that at all, you go right ahead.

Dustin Heiner  

Awesome, because you are a part of the Making Billions community, I love this community, I'm so glad you're part of it. And this community is amazing, but I want to give it to you completely for free, and I'll show you how to build the business anywhere in the country. Make cash flow to be able to quit your job. If you text the word rental, R, E N, T, A L, text the word rental to 33777, rental to 33777. Or you can go to master passiveincome.com/freecourse, and I'll give it to you right away, all one word /freecourse, but I'll show you how to do all this stuff. And one quick last thing, so my podcast, The Master Passive Income Podcast, like I said, I mean, we're 400 plus episodes now, 2.2 million downloads. That's just a solo show, I've been telling people, this is how I invest, this is what I'm doing, and this is how I get people in, like, a side note, this is why people trust me, because they've been listening to me for 10 years podcasting. They've been listening for 400 plus episodes, and they're like, huh, I like this Dustin character, let me start investing with him. So it works out great. But no, I love the community. I'm so glad to be a part of the Making Billions community.

Ryan Miller  

You sure are, brother. So just to summarize everything, Dustin and I spoke about, focus on being wealthy and not just another rich person. Both are okay, but if you truly want to reach the pinnacle, like Dustin did, is you want to have time and money, and that typically comes from being an owner more than an operator. Second thing is focus on cash flow and de-risk your deals by paying down debt, being over leveraged makes you focus more on a hope and you hope this happens and that doesn't happen, or you just focus on paying down, which is another fancy way of saying, pay down and de-risk the deal. And finally, build your reputation, relationships and results, so that you can have capital and deals come to you. You do these things, and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit of Making Billions.

Ryan Miller  

Wow, what a show, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Now, if you haven't done so already, be sure to leave a comment and review on new ideas and guests you want me to bring on for future episodes, plus, why don't you head over to YouTube and see extra takes while you get to know our guests even better. And make sure to come back for our next episode where we dive even deeper into the people, the process and the perspectives of both investors and founders. Until then, my friends, stay hungry, focus on your goals and keep grinding towards your dream of Making Billions.