This is Mark Jenny. He is most known for starting the company RV Share, which sold for over $100 million and has an Airbnb business that makes $12 million while only working 30 minutes a week. You have a 20-portfolio property worth eight-figure plus, and you said you spend 30 minutes a week. 30 minutes to an hour a week, usually. But before the money started pouring in, Mark grew up homeless.
The town I grew up in, a lot of... drug problems, not necessarily the best area. We'd go to McDonald's and my dad would buy one hamburger and cut it in half and hamburgers were like 59 cents at the time or something like that. He didn't even have enough money to buy both of us a hamburger. Desperate to change the situation, Mark started over 30 businesses.
Within two months, I went from an idea to a business that was making Over a million dollars a month, I've sold a billion dollars worth of stuff online. However, he found that the businesses he created were extremely unfulfilling. Basically, I felt like a snake oil salesman.
I was selling health supplements that I did not believe in. I didn't want to do it anymore. So how did Mark go from homeless to starting several successful businesses, closing them down, and then creating the business of his dreams? Let's dive deeper into Mark's story. So first off, Mark, Jenny, I got to share, I've used rvshare.com.
You're the founder. I love it. We've come a long way from there.
So let's go back to the beginning of your origin story. Yeah. You grew up homeless.
I did. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how did your family even end up in that situation? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, my dad just was not good at managing money. He was not good at managing money then, not good at managing money now. It's just not been a strong suit of his.
And so we lived in the back. I have a picture of it. I can show it to you. We can put it up on screen.
We can put it up on screen. But I'll show you. So here, that's actually where I lived. It was behind a tire shop. So we weren't out.
Luckily, we were not out on the streets. But we lived behind this tire shop in this little room for about two years. And there was a bathroom, but with a sink. There was no shower. So, like.
We'd get a washcloth and throw some soap on it and kind of wash up. That was how we bathed. But it was, I mean, I would say it was humbling, but I didn't really know much better because I really didn't grow up in the best part of town.
And so it was like I was going from the bottom to the bottom bottom. And so there wasn't a massive leap in lifestyle for me where I was living large and all of a sudden I was living in the back of a tire shop in a little storage room. So, you know, the town I grew up in, a lot of drug problems, you know, not necessarily the best area. My whole upbringing was really kind of coming from nothing, you know, and being homeless was part of that journey. But I think that what that has done for me today is it's probably, you know, it's kept me more grounded and it's really made me appreciate, you know, all the blessings that we have today.
What were some of the moments you noticed between your parents and what was it like with the family when it was these tough times? Yeah, I mean, my parents always fought about money all the time. Like that's, you know, they got divorced when I was younger. And but I that's really all I remember them, you know, the interactions with them is just like fighting about money all the time.
I mean, you know, things were lean and like we'd go to McDonald's and, you know, my dad would buy one hamburger and cut it in half. And. give my brother half of it and me half of it. And hamburgers were like 59 cents at the time or something like that, you know, and he didn't even have enough money to buy both of us a hamburger.
But I, you know, I got super, super lucky very early on. When I was 13 years old, I had some cousins who were relatives of my dad. They were like my second or third cousins, and they lived in Manhattan. they lived in New York city and they had a compound in the Hamptons and they were money managers and they were very, very wealthy, extremely, extremely well off. And I always thought money is happiness because of this experience that I had with them, which I'll tell you about.
But later on in life, I realized money is not happiness. You know, you can be happy money doesn't make you either more happy or less happy. It just kind of allows you to become more of who you are and do more of the things you want to do. makes life easier but circling back to you know when I was 13 this was the most pivotal moment of my life of anything as far as like coming from nothing to actually making something in you know my life is when I was 13 years old I went to New York City my cousins they Paid for an airline ticket to fly me out to New York for a week.
I stayed with them at their penthouse apartment on Park Avenue for the week. And then on the weekend, we went out to their compound in the Hamptons. And it was the first time I ever experienced or saw like wealth.
And to be honest with you, it was really one of the first times I ever saw people who were happy. Because there was just not a lot of happiness between my parents and our household when I was growing up. And so I went and they were super, super happy.
And for me, for many years, I thought that happiness is money because they have money. So that's how you get happiness. And that's really kind of what really got me started.
I wasn't seeking material things. I was seeking a happy household. And the household that I grew up in just didn't have a whole lot of love and happiness between my parents. But what... What happened was when I came back from that trip in New York, my eyes were open to a totally new lifestyle.
You know, I was at that time, we were not homeless, but I was in, you know, an 800 square foot house and on the wrong side of the tracks. And, you know, I just went for a week and experienced basically essentially living like a billionaire's life and like saw how they lived. And it was totally foreign. I'm like, I want that. Whatever that is, I want that.
What I have here at home, I don't want this. I want that. Because I saw happiness. They just seemed, you know, it was like, yes, bigger houses and nicer cars and all that stuff. But the happiness that they had was just like, I was so drawn to that.
So how did this shape your mentality? How did that? You know, they were in finance. And so that's why I thought I was going to make my millions. I always thought I was going to go into the stock market.
I'm going to become wealthy like them, you know in finance. I went back home from that trip. I went to Barnes & Noble.
Whatever little money I had saved up at the time, I bought books on, you know, trading stocks for dummies, stock markets for dummies, etc, etc, etc. I read up on, you know, on the stock market. I, as a 13 year old, you know, read as much as I could. That ended up prompting me to start my first business and I ended up starting my first business on eBay at the time. Not too long after, like the next summer, I ended up going to Merrill Lynch and I just walked into our local Merrill Lynch branch and showed up and I'm like, I'd like a summer internship.
I'll work for free. I'll do whatever you want. I want to learn the business and I'll do whatever it takes. And little did I find that actually that experience turned me off of finance because I always thought I wanted to be a stockbroker. And there's a big difference between being a stock broker and actually being a money manager.
And I realized that stock brokers were essentially, you know, used car salesmen, and they weren't doing anything other than like what they were told from, you know, up above of here's what we're selling. And so you go into the local Merrill Lynch office, and you know, everyone's just peddling the same products. They're not actually managing money and like, you know, figuring out where we're going to invest our clients money.
Yes and no, to some extent, but really not what I was looking for. Like, the experience I had was like, you know, I went to my Cousins Wall Street trading firm and they had you know multiple floors and a high-rise and all these you know charts and on the wall and tickers and everyone's like, you know, it's like a real trading desk and That's what I thought local Merrill Lynch was gonna be like and I realized like no They that's not this at all. Like they're making you know, these guys are making you know A hundred thousand dollars a year two hundred thousand dollars a year at the time And but they they weren't doing what I wanted to do and they didn't have that, you know That was not where I was going.
So I learned pretty quickly that, like, you know, becoming a stockbroker was not necessarily my thing after an internship at Merrill Lynch for the summer. And then, you know, really that was, you know, from there on, business after business had 30 different plus businesses over the years. How did you make your first million?
This was before Wix, before Squarespace. This was like basically like almost like GeoCity days. This was like way, way, way back in the day.
So I built a website builder that allowed people to build out sites and promote other people's products or services, you know, as an affiliate and generate commissions. And the model was different. So I didn't charge for it. It was completely free. But in order to get access and use my website builder, you had to sign up for web hosting through my affiliate link.
And that took off. And that basically, you know, I went from an idea to. a business that was You know making over a million dollars a month in a very short duration of time and that Totally totally changed my life, you know So that was that was really the first big success was that and I knew nothing about coding programming. I The first version of this website builder was me going and buying HTML for dummies I was using Dreamweaver and I was like a hack A hack HTML programmer at best.
I mean like really, really bad. I couldn't write scripts or anything to automate anything. And at one point in time, I was either building or editing hundreds of websites a day by hand.
And I was making like a lot of money, but I was literally in front of a computer for like 14 or 15 hours a day. Copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. Because my website builder, my V1 of this website builder was not automated. It was essentially like... modern-day Google form where I had a form and somebody would go and fill out their form and I'd say what is your affiliate link?
What color do you want your website? What do you want your website to be about blah blah blah blah blah? And I would literally then take that info. I mean this was this was back I had people giving me their web hosting Logins and their password and their email passwords and it was very like old-school It was like stuff that like there was no SSL at the time. There was no in any of this stuff at all And so the first version for quite some time was literally like a form that I had online which was a website builder But I was the website builder I was the one literally taking the information off the form that was then getting sent to me And then I was going in and changing the HTML So it wasn't like if you went in and updated your form you had to wait for me to go in and get the information And go manually update your website for you.
That was like for v1 of a website builder I've been working hard on my upcoming book, Million Dollar Weekend, which is coming out early 2024. Stay tuned. Looking through my notes, I found a lost chapter that is not in the final book. Pretty mysterious.
It reveals things like how to double your income without any new customer, how to create complimentary products to generate more income. One solopreneur did this and made an extra $340,000, how to optimize pricing strategy and maximize profits and more. The lost chapter is not online or Amazon. or anywhere else.
It is only for people on my list like you. You can download it for free at noahkagan.com slash lost. That's noahkagan.com slash lost.
It's also below in the description. All right, back to the video. All of a sudden, you're making all that money. What did you spend it on? What did you buy?
Well, when I was young, I mean, when I was young, I just blew it all. I mean, I, you know, I was living. The life of somebody who came from nothing and didn't have good guidance and had no mentors to like try to you know Guide you of like hey, hey, you know you're doing well.
This is an opportunity You know these don't come by every day your and you should invest your money You should I didn't do any of that when I was you like what did you do? What are some of the stories or ways you spend? Yeah?
I mean You know I had this huge mansion with all the cards and you know I had more cars than I could fit in my garage And it's Ferrari Lamborghini Bentley blah It was all that crap and you know Private jet and you know, like you don't private jet. No, I didn't have my own private jet probably I know I didn't make it that much money. Um But no chart, you know go charter a jet and you know have a bunch of friends like hey We're all flying down to Miami or you know Go on elaborate trips and you know, I just I blew money like there was no tomorrow when I was younger.
I didn't know any better. And, you know, and, and whether good or bad or indifferent, you know, I don't regret it. Um, I wish, you know, yeah, I wish I probably would have invested it when I was younger.
Um, my mom always told me like, should be investing. You should save your money. And, you know, me, I think I'm smarter than you.
Like you've never made a lot of money. You don't know, you don't know what it's like mom. And I, in hindsight, I'm like, yeah, mom was right. Like I should have, you know, invested my money and saved my money. Um, but, but hold on.
How was it though? I mean it was awesome, it was cool. I was 21 years old.
I mean I was 21 years old. I was a millionaire. I mean I was a millionaire, I was 21. You know, and so like I literally, it's like I was hood rich. I mean and I can say hood rich because I came from the hood.
So like but that's how I was living. I mean I didn't know any better. I didn't have guidance. I didn't have, I really didn't have anybody in my life who I could talk to or who I could look up to to like provide. proper guidance which is i think one of the reasons why nowadays you see you know over time you've seen a lot of these like athletes who you know come from nothing they'll get 100 million dollar contract and then all of a sudden it's like you know they blew it all it's like You know, you don't know what you don't know.
One thing about me that I think that has allowed me to kind of have the path that I have had is once I figured out, if I built a business, and even if that business was profitable, and even if that business was making me $100,000, $200,000 a year, you know, way back in the day, if I didn't want to do that business forever, I would literally shut the business down like the next day. I would go cold turkey. I went cold turkey on so many of my businesses. In hindsight, I'm like, oh, man, I was an idiot. I should have hired somebody because a lot of these businesses were sole proprietorships where it was a business, but it was a one-man business that I had going where I could have just hired someone for $50,000 a year to keep operating the business.
And then I could have earned the profits above and beyond that. I wasn't that I didn't understand business well enough that like you could even like go out and like hire people to like replace you And so there were a lot of like companies I had early on where they were successful They were making money and I was doing very well at the time for where I was But as soon as I felt like I don't want to do this for the rest of my life My exit strategy was literally like okay I'm gonna just shut it down tomorrow and figure out what's next and I would live off of the savings I had and You know, I'd usually have some type of savings And I live off the savings until I figured out what's the next business. But I did that several times.
You've done over 30 different businesses to where we are today. Can you walk us through at least some of these different businesses that you've tried over the years? Yeah, yeah. And I actually, I told you, I brought a cheat sheet because a lot of these things, I've just done so many things over the years. I'm like, oh, I forgot about that.
I forgot about that. And multiple digital publishing companies over the years. We did a lot. We had, you know, think of like e-books or courses, things like that. I mean, Some things were, you know, mainstream.
Some things were really random. I mean, we had products on, like, you know, pre-written wedding speeches, things on, like, how to beat a speeding ticket, natural ways to, like, stop snoring, you know, things like, you know, we were teaching affiliate marketing, teaching SEO, AdWords. We probably had north of 20 different, like, product lines within the business of digital publishing. At one point in time, I had, you know, we had a staff of, I want to say... 15 writers, you know, in-house and this was, nobody was outsourced, it was all under one roof.
We had like 300 employees and it was a pretty big digital publishing company with like just everything under the sun. We'd, you know, find product experts in different industries and, you know, bring them in and kind of build products around them. One company I had, which is very timely today because ChatGPT is obviously like a huge thing now.
I had one of the first like... AI companies and it's not real true AI but I had a company called Intellichat which was an AI chatbot this was like the early mid 2000s so I was a you know a big hosting affiliate for a while and then eventually ended up starting my own hosting company had a couple different web hosting brands you know other businesses so I've had you know search optimisation company had multiple health supplement companies sold every health supplement under the sun you could possibly think of Had a business where it was a timeline of your life. So mytimeline.com, a digital timeline of your life.
That was another thing that didn't work. Another company, which was an app company called Daily Pick. So it was like a, you know, just a picture of a day app. That also didn't work.
Started RV Share. Along with RV Share, actually built out like, you know, 10 additional RV-related websites in the space. Ultimately, when I stepped away from that, those other websites didn't become a focus.
So they never really made much of them. And then now today, I have Resort Style Vacation Homes, which is the Airbnb company. There's been a whole bunch of other things that I didn't list off and that are not on my list because that was maybe like 15 things.
But when I have gone through and tallied up everything I've ever done, I mean, I owned part of a nursing home at one point in time. I've done a lot and I've done so many different things and from time to time, like I'll find something in my email and I'm like, oh my, from, you know, I'm searching for something. I'll find something from like 10, 12, 15 years ago.
I'm like, oh my gosh, I totally forgot that business that I built. And it would be like a real business that had like real revenue. It'd have like, you know, something that I, you know, probably maybe had like $30,000 in revenue and just never really got enough traction. So I'd like ultimately like shut it down. But yeah, I've done a whole bunch of different things over the years.
How do you identify opportunities to things that you want to do businesses in? Yeah, I mean, so early on, I was literally just looking for like any way to make money. I mean, I was young, scrappy. I came from.
I was just trying to like escape poverty so to speak and I was just looking for ways to make money I was not look I was not analyzing businesses, you know, like in the early days of like eBay I was literally just like searching eBay for like what can I make? Hmm? What's something that likes is selling on ebic that I can make so here's a good here's a good example of something We're like I was literally just searching eBay for a business idea on eBay and I ended up turning into a six-figure business So some I saw someone selling dollar bills with pictures of celebrities on the dollar bill, on a $1 bill. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
I'm like, couldn't I just get sticker paper and print out a picture of a celebrity and cut it out and put it on a $1 bill and sell it like they're selling? I'm like, there has to be something else to this. So I bought the product on eBay, came to me, and it was literally just a $1 bill with a printed out, with a sticker paper and with a picture of Michael Jordan on it.
So that night I became, I was in the dollar bill business and literally. I built that business up to I was making a couple hundred grand a year selling dollar bills and I was selling dollar bills on average for probably like 15 bucks a piece. And the dollar bill business was very good for a period of time until I decided I didn't want to be in the dollar bill business before.
I just kind of at one point in time cut that cold turkey and moved on to the next thing. But, you know, I think just keeping your eyes open, looking for opportunities, like what is something that someone else is doing that you could do or what's something that, you know, you can improve upon slightly. Do you have? other stories like the dollar bill one that worked or didn't work because that that i think that's that stuff also inspires people to how they're thinking about opportunities right like people on ebay are buying and selling things all right let me look there to see what else is happening yeah the airbnb business we should get you later you rented it out you did it you built something cool for your kids it's working all right now i have 20 of them yeah what other kind of stories you have from earlier on yeah i mean this is this is like very parallel to the the dollar bill thing but just i guess another example of that is you know i also sold a ton of window clings at the time window clings so basically just like a clear image with a picture printed on it that people would put on a window or a car window or whatever um i didn't know anything about copyright at the time so i'm not like i this is not something i would do today but i was a young kid and um you know i saw somebody selling window clings online of like different celebrities or whatever it may be and i'm like I can just go to the store. I can go to OfficeMax.
They got window cling paper. I can literally buy and I can put it in the printer and print out window clings. And I did that.
And I literally started making a bunch of money, you know, probably sold a couple hundred thousand dollars in window clings. And, you know, they were, you know, like I said, they were probably copywritten, which I probably, you know, shouldn't have done. And at the time I had no idea. I didn't even know what copyright was. I think I got my first like DMCA notice of like, hey, you can't be, it was Toby Keith.
I think I saw the Toby Keith window cling and his real name's not Toby Keith. His real name's Toby Corvell. And I only know that because I got a DMCA notice from his lawyer saying, Hey, you're not allowed to sell a Toby Keith window cling because you don't have the permission. You don't have the, the, the, you know, we have a trademark on this.
And then, so I stopped selling. I'm like, Oh, sorry. I didn't know. I literally had no idea.
Like at the time I was so naive. I didn't even know you weren't allowed to do that. Like I was like, Oh, okay. I can just print this out on my printer and sell it. Like I didn't.
know there was this thing such as copyrights or trademarks or anything and then you find that out and you stop doing it what was a story or experience that was one of the lower moments during these early years i had a business partner who was my best friend like absolute best friend and we lived together in the same building hung out together every day and um he like left the country and left with all of our money and um Yeah, it was, it was, that was, that was tough. That was really tough, really tough because we were doing very well at the time. And, um, one day he left the country and didn't come back.
And there was a, there was a, there was a whole story on how he got the money. And he basically, before he left, kind of pitched me on this. Oh, I got this great investment for us.
It's guaranteed, et cetera, et cetera. I need you to wire money. And I, you know, did so.
Yeah, unfortunately he didn't come back and we weren't business partners anymore. So that was a really, really low point in my life. But I was more distraught, more so than the money, was...
The friendship that I lost and like the emotional impact that I had of like, I had somebody who I thought was like my best friend who like I hung out with every single day. We were in, we had an office together. We were with each other every day. We hung out at night, you know, we hung out on the weekends, we took trips together.
So yeah, that, that was, that was definitely, definitely a low point. You made a lot of money doing affiliate marketing, like internet marketing kind of company, direct marketing. Which there's always like, I would say a gray zone with those. So some of those companies I'm proud of and some of those companies I'm not proud of. Um, you know, it's like, yeah, I, I look back, you know, I had before I did RV share, I had a business that was, you know, I would call it an internet marketing business.
It was a health supplement company, but basically we were just peddling whatever was like the hottest, latest craze that Dr. Oz was pitching, you know, on TV. It was like, oh, this is the miracle weight loss pill or whatever. And, you know.
That business scaled that up literally from zero to $300,000 a day in sales in a couple of days, a day, in two weeks. We were tied in with a lot of traffic sources. It was really driven off of affiliates.
We did almost none of our own media buying for it. So that $300,000 a day, it was all affiliates. That's a business that ultimately I ended up walking away from.
I was making a whole bunch of money and I gave my equity back to my partners. And I just said, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't feel good about it.
I don't believe in the products. I don't believe in the marketing. I'm not proud of this. Like, I literally lose sleep at night, like thinking like, I'm just like, basically, I felt like a snake oil salesman of like, just selling, you know, placebo pills. And I'm like, I don't like this.
This is this is this is this is not good. I was, you know, personally making, you know, 300. thousand two hundred fifty three hundred thousand dollars a month and that was my personal cut take home that I just gave back to my partners I was like you guys can have this um I just I didn't I didn't want to do anymore and that actually was a big pivotal moment in my life because that was when I stepped away and started RV share and had I not done that I might not have started RV share when you were doing RV share did you give up and sell everything you before I should be sharing? You said, I'm only doing one.
What is that? So how does that relate to RV? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, I mean, when I built RV share, it was literally right after the supplement business. Like I decided, so I got one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever received. And this is another piece of advice that has kind of changed my life.
Um, a friend of mine, Perry Belcher, he said to me, look at what you're doing and see, are there any old, happy, rich guys who are doing what you are doing or did what you are doing. And at the time, you know, I was selling health supplements that I did not believe in. You know, I mean, they were fine for people to take.
They were probably more placebo than anything. It was, you know, whatever Dr. Oz's latest diet pill was, you know, but I didn't believe in it. I personally just did not believe in what it was. Prior to RV Share, I had a lot of...
different businesses running simultaneously at the same time. So I was definitely very distracted and scatterbrained. And I had the, you know, the shiny coin syndrome, big time. When I built RV Share, I just made a commitment that like, I'm not doing that again.
I'm this is I'm all in on this, like this, this is this is what I'm doing. And then I did I was selling things. So to fund that business, I owned some long-term traditional rentals.
Okay. Nothing remotely to this scale homes that I had bought for 30,000 to $50,000. Okay.
Nowhere near on, on this level. And, um, I was building RV share off my savings and basically, you know, uh, as the, the business was not generating revenue nearly as quickly as I thought it would. And so I'd bootstrap that business off of my savings and that required for me to make payroll and continue building that business.
Roughly how much you sell RV share for and then why did you decide to sell? Why I decided was I was burnt out at the time. I just had my second child you know I had just my mom had just passed away just lost her. I was working seven days a week working like crazy.
We had a couple different opportunities we were looking at. You know, I wanted to buy my time back at that point in time, and it was going to also allow me to get a meaningful amount of money that, you know, if I invested it and was wise with it, would be, you know, would allow me to not work for it for the rest of my life. As far as how much we sold for, I mean, I think it's public. We had two different rounds where the majority was secondary fundraising rounds.
The most recent one was with KKR at a little bit more than $100 million. But that doesn't mean I personally put $100 million in my bank account. So we had, you know, at that point, I was not a majority shareholder in the business.
You know, I had sold a majority stake to Tritium Partners, the other private equity firm, prior to that. I'm still an equity holder in the business today, so I still have equity. So I've had two bites of the apple so far, probably hopefully a third bite. And who knows, depending on how things go, the third bite could be just as big or bigger than the first two bites. It's cool because, you know, my partners became millionaires.
And so that was really cool and fulfilling, just, you know. Like not only was I able to, you know, do well financially, but, you know, they were able to do well financially from it. We built a lot of jobs, you know, built a good company. I was able to do well and make enough money that, you know, like I said, I'm not, I don't have to, I don't have to worry if, you know, about my electric bill. And I don't have to worry about bills anymore and think about those things.
So that's, that's nice. What did you learn from starting and failing with these 30 different businesses? It's not failure.
It's just learning, you know. It's really only failure if you quit. And I think just having to be persistent, having to grind it out.
You don't have to be the smartest. I mean, I dropped out of high school. I would say I'm probably of like average intelligence.
I'm around a lot of like really smart people these days who are like really a lot smarter than I am and like can be quite intimidating intellectually. And so like I think that. One thing I've learned is like, you don't need to be a genius. You just need to put in a ton of action and just keep plowing forward and pushing forward. And you will learn and learn and learn.
And it'll compound and your learning will compound. As long as every single day you are giving it your all and pushing forward to the next step, too many people just get too discouraged and they just don't give it their all or they give their all for a short duration of time and they don't see immediate feedback. And that feedback loop, the feedback loop is not always immediate. You know.
you got to keep putting that work in and sometimes that feedback loop is not going to hit you for a while and i think the thing i've learned is really like you can really do anything i mean you can do anything i i have a buddy who started um one of my groomsmen who started a company called made in space and they put a 3d printer on the international space station and i remember he and i We were kind of like coaching at the time he started that company. I was starting RV share and we were like each other's coaches and we would have a weekly call with each other, kind of like consulting on each other's businesses and what's going on and just giving each other guidance and feedback. And I remember him telling me, he's like, I know nothing about space.
I know nothing about engineering. I know nothing about any of that, but I can find people who do, you know, and even though I don't know any of this, like I can find people who, who do know how to do this. And like the vision is this, and I can still make that happen, even though I don't. I don't know that and I think that that's one thing is most people think that they need to know everything Before they do anything and I think that's totally opposite You need to know nothing you just need to do a lot and you'll figure a lot along the way How do you know when to push through something versus just maybe like alright?
This is an off-dash and then something else. Yeah, so I mean I think for me RV share was a good example of that where Like I was saying it took a lot longer and a lot more money to get that off the ground and but I saw some positive feedback loops. So even though I wasn't making money for the longest time with that business, it wasn't generating any revenue. We started to see we were getting some traffic. We were getting listings.
We were getting people transacting through the site, even though we weren't in the beginning, we weren't actually party to that transaction. People were just, we were connecting them almost like Craigslist. We were connecting them directly and we would ask people, hey, did you rent?
You know, and we would get feedback. Yes, we rent it. So like we knew like, okay, great. Well, there's transactions. happening, even though we're not making money here, this is still going in the right direction.
And so, I mean, I think you, you know, you do need some type of positive feedback loop, but at the same time, you need to be willing to have delayed gratification. So it's kind of like, you know, you need, you need to kind of, it's more of a, I guess, an art than a science to figure it out on a situational basis. One thing I wish I would have known earlier on in my career, and one thing I would kind of go back and tell a younger version of myself.
is make sure you're playing the right game. And one thing I've learned is it doesn't matter what you do. If you're going to go and build a business, it could be a small business or it could be a massive business.
It's going to take about the same amount of effort and energy to become super successful at anything. And if you're playing the right game, your outcome can be exponentially better than if you're playing the wrong game. You know, if your goal is basically just to open one restaurant, you know, that's you're very limited in like what your upside is versus, you know, if you want to go and build a software company, then obviously, you know, you can have you can build a billion dollar business.
Both of those. The owner of the restaurant and the owner of the software company, they're both going to work really hard. They're both going to put all of their energy, all of their effort into their business to make it as successful as they can. But they're going to have very different outcomes.
You know, if they're both successful, you know, one is going to have life-changing, you know, amount of, you know, income. And they're going to probably become very, very wealthy from it. And it could be even generational wealth. And the other one, they might have worked themselves into, you know.
a successful job that maybe allows them to pay for the pay for pay the bills but it doesn't have the same type of outcome and i think that like if i were to look back at my life and teach my my earlier younger version of myself something is don't do things that re that have a longer time horizon i was really focused on things that would make money tomorrow like what is something i can do today that'll make money tomorrow And I wasn't really willing to like put in the work to see the return more long term. And I think I shortcutted myself on quite a few things. And I think there was a few businesses I built that if I would have stuck with it longer, they would have become very, very successful.
So that's one thing is just kind of like have a longer time horizon and really look at like a five year chunk. Like if I'm going to go and build something, I'm investing five years of time into this. And I have to be able to, you know, expect that I'm probably not going to have like a massive payday for five years, you know.
And then, you know, the other the other thing is really just making like I said, making sure you're picking the right game. I see so many people going into business and wanting to do something and they say like they want a lifestyle that's here. But the business they're going into, if they're the most successful at that business. their lifestyle is only going to be here. And the game they're playing doesn't match with the lifestyle they're trying to achieve.
How did it feel to finally make it? You have the money, eventually you're not homeless. Like, were you happy? Did it give you the happiness you wanted? I feel to make it.
Yeah. I mean, I think you find out, I think a lot of people find this out. Like, you know, you, you put in all this hard work and you think like, oh, I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it and then go sit on the beach and life will be great.
And it's like that for a while. I've always, I've always been happy. So like money has, I think. allowed me to like do more things and you know um have more experiences and help more people and do things like that so that's great i mean that's that's great about the quote money um but i would say for me like literally the biggest thing for me as far as like when i made it had nothing to do with money had 100 to do with time i own my time i own my time and that is the biggest thing you Like if you own your time and you own your calendar and you own your schedule, like if you own your time and you're making a hundred grand a year, you have a better life than a guy who's making $5 million a year, but doesn't own his time.
How much money did you have when you finally felt time rich? It wasn't about a certain dollar amount. It was about passive income.
And so what happened was when I exited RV share, I made enough money that I could just put that capital. into passive, 100% passive investments that I'd be set for life. Okay?
Now, my lifestyle might not have been what I wanted it. I wouldn't have been able to charter a private jet purely off the passive income alone. But I would have, all my bills would pay, a nice house, have, you know, a really good lifestyle. I had two levels. I would say I had two levels of time freedom.
The first... In financial freedom and just like just free that feeling of freedom freedom one was right when I Exited our be sure and there was like a lump sum of money. Okay, but I didn't touch that money I didn't go out and buy things with it.
I bought two things. I spent money I invested almost all of it except for two things we bought my wife a fancy coffee maker for like six or seven hundred dollars and We went on a trip I took My wife, my kids, and my wife's parents, and we went to Europe for the summer. Outside of that, I didn't touch any of the principal.
I invested 100% of it. And that, so that is when my lifestyle, like, started improving as far as, like, me being more comfortable to spend money was actually once my passive income started kicking in from investments. And so once that money started kicking in, then I was more comfortable with, like, okay, then, you know.
fly nicer, then, you know, go to nicer restaurants, then go to nicer vacations. It was really kind of at that point in time where I started to become a lot more comfortable with spending money because I was fortunate of making a lot of money when I was younger, but blowing it all. And I knew that like the amount of money I made was enough money that if I was a good steward of this capital, I could be set for life. But it was also the same amount I could go blow it pretty quickly as well.
And so, I mean, it's like Mike Tyson made $500 million and blew all of it. Like, I didn't make anywhere near $500 million, but I made enough that was like, if I was a good steward of that capital, I would never have to work again. And I could do whatever I wanted, really, for the most part. I couldn't buy a yacht or a jet, but like, you know, I could live great, live a great life.
What do you think the business opportunities are today? Can I start? An Airbnb luxury business, what are the areas that you're like, if you were starting business today, you're like, oh, these are categories I'm interested in, or I think there's, you can make a million dollars or more doing it. Airbnb is not going anywhere. I don't think that there's opportunity there today, there's going to be opportunity there tomorrow, there was opportunity five years ago.
I think that this is here for the long term. People are always going to want to rent a vacation home, you know, if you're traveling with a large group. Not everybody, but lots of times it's just more optimal if you're traveling with a large group versus staying in a hotel. So I think that that opportunity is here today. It'll always be here.
I don't see it really disappearing. I think the opportunity within that space really just comes down to building something unique, building something different, really standing out from the crowd and not just being another me too. Yeah, in general. As far as like other opportunities, if I were to go back in time today and I was 20 years old, I would be spending a lot of time on trying to learn about AI, which obviously is the big craze today.
But I think it's, that's a, it's a very real thing that's going to have meaningful impacts, you know, over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. And then I, I'm, I'm super bullish on YouTube. I am so bullish on YouTube and maybe it's just because I know a couple people who have, you know, kind of built up a nice little business and nice life for themselves off of YouTube. But just being a content creator and kind of building your own platform today and around any subject matter and doesn't even really matter. I think I think that if you can become like the top one percent in any topic matter.
you can build a great business for yourself and a great life. Can you tell us your investment thesis for Airbnb? Because it's not, I think what's interesting with the Airbnb thing that you're doing versus everyone else is everyone knows about it, but you're playing a game that seems different than you're winning.
So how did you first identify the opportunity? And then I think the other thing that's interesting about your strategy is that you didn't just do it once. You've done it now almost 20 times.
So maybe tell us a little about those two things. I have a more artistic strategy than a mathematical strategy with this business. I'm probably totally opposite from most real estate investors.
Most people I know are looking at spreadsheets and doing pro formas and I'm doing back of the napkin. Here's how much it's going to cost. Here's how much I think I can rent the place for. Here's how much the improvements are going to cost. I think for me, it really just comes down to building cool experiences.
And I feel like if I build a cool experience and if I stick within somewhat of a range of a budget, that the return will be good. And that's kind of how I've approached it. Probably not the best way to approach it, but for me, it's worked. Well, the first one, you added like the pickleball court, you added like shuffleboard, outdoor bowling, and it worked really well.
I think what a lot of investors do is like, oh, this is cool. I'm making money. Great. What's your thought process?
And you're like, no, I'm going to get 20 of these. My thesis on that property was buy a property that's a little bit outside of town for a small fraction of what it would cost in town. Add the special amenities. And I should be able to get returns comparable or better than the properties in town that cost three times as much.
And that played out. And yeah, so, I mean, it made a lot of sense. I'm like, okay, well, let's keep doing this.
Not all the properties were that exact strategy of buy outside of town, add amenities, and get in-town returns. But people started doing the same thing. And that's when we really transitioned to these more large estate properties that we're at today. that are a lot harder to duplicate.
I wanted properties that were not just going to perform well when I bought them in a year or two years, three years later. I wanted properties that were going to perform well five, 10, 15, 20 years later, because even if you went 10, 15, 20 years down the road, you don't have a whole lot of them. Places like this, this is 15 acres in Southern California.
You know, there's not a whole lot. of even land available of this size to be able to like do something like this and so you really like unique assets is really where i've transitioned to today of like how can we buy or build something that no one else either can or will do can we walk through the economics uh of this you know this airbnb stuff i think people would be curious like how much does it cost to buy how much to cost from enemies what do you target your returns at Was it cost to run just at a high level? Yeah.
I mean, at the highest level, the metric that I focus on is the unlevered yield. So assuming you bought a property, let's just say-Let's just take this one. Let's take this property, for example.
So this property, let's just say, around two and a half million acquisition, around a million and a half in upgrades. So total capital into the property, four million. Assume there's no- mortgage on that, whether there is or not.
I just kind of make the assumption for the calculations and the way I look at it is if there's no mortgage on your property, which that's not the case, but that's for my calculations. And then I want to see a 10% return. So if there was $4 million into this property, I want to see a net income on an annual basis of $400,000. And that's really across the board on all of our properties.
That's the number that's been the baseline. Now today's That's not where I would baseline them today. That number would actually be a lot higher today because the cost of capital today is a lot more and interest rates are a lot higher.
It sounds like they're generating, based on my back of the envelope calculation, million dollars a month profit for yourself or some ballpark of that. But the craziest part is not even that. I think you work how much a week on this business?
My involvement is a half an hour a week to an hour a week call, and that's it. And so this business is really, for me, it's a... it's a passive business. It's not a passive business at all, but for me, it's a passive business because I've set the business up and built the business in that way that I have awesome people who are able to not only, you know, operate the business, but help the business grow, improve processes, procedures, and really optimize the business without my involvement. What advice do you have for people watching or just getting started and they want to make their first million?
If it was easy enough to tell anybody, hey, here's exactly what you need to do to go get to your first million, everybody would be a freaking millionaire. It's not like that. For people who are looking for the blueprint of what is the A, B, C, all the way to Z blueprint of how do I get to one million, it doesn't exist. Because if that actually existed, everyone would just go and do that exact, exact formula.
The world is dynamic. Things change. You've got to learn along the way.
And I think that, you know, the person who you're going to learn from, like if I wanted to learn from you, or let's just say I wanted to, you know, learn to be a real estate developer, and that was my thing. I'm going to go out and I'm going to contact all the most successful real estate developers in my area who I could go like and physically be with them and work with them, not just, you know, remotely, some positions. it is appropriate to work remote, but this position I'd want to, I want to actually be with them.
So how can I go and, and essentially shadow them and help them and work, work with them and do whatever they need me to do. I'm going to get an education that you could not purchase anywhere else because it's like, you're seeing the inner workings behind the scenes of a, of a successful business or a successful person and what they're actually doing. And you know, you and I, can sit here and talk about things today and like you know i can reminisce on like oh yeah i did x y or z you know back when we were building this and we did a b and c but it's very very different from actually being there on the ground like right next to somebody when they're actually doing it and i think that's the biggest thing is you need to be with someone when they're actually doing it and like help them in whatever form or fashion you can so you can just soak in as much as you can from whatever they're doing you know and For the people that I know who've done that, there's not a lot of people who've taken that approach in life to try to use this cheat code that's available to literally everybody.
But the ones that I know who've done that have done extremely well. I have a friend who did this and he started with nothing and now he's worth like $400 million. And that's all.
He's of average intellect. Super nice guy. I mean he's smart but he's not like a rocket scientist or anything like that. He's just like you and I. And he went out and he sought out somebody who was...
Much further down the career pathway than he was and far more successful financially and When he showed up and he said hey, I want to work for you for free I'll do whatever you want I want but the thing is I want to learn from you and I want to work directly with you and I want you to Give me as many difficult hard tasks to that I can that I can solve for you as possible I will do whatever you want. I'm gonna be your best worker and You're not going to have to pay me a dime. The only thing I want in return is I want to learn from you. Because if one day I want to be where you're at. And the guy said no.
And so he came back to him the next week and said the same thing. And he said no. And he came back to him the next week and he said the same thing.
He took four tries. He got told no by the same person four different times. Where he went to him, he said, hey, I'm going to work for you for free.
I'll do whatever you want. And the guy's like, no, sorry, kid, not interested. After the fourth try, finally the guy was like, okay, you're persistent. You're persistent.
I'll give you a shot here. Come help me out with X, Y, and Z. And then little did he know, or little did what came to fruition from that was within less than a year, he was doing a deal that this guy didn't want to do. He's like, this is a too small of a deal for me, but Hey kid, you may want to do this deal.
And that was his first deal. And that's what set him off on his path to success was having those inroads with the right person, being the right place at the right time and understanding not only like access to the deal, but what do you do with the deal and having the mentor and having the guidance and now having somebody who like understands it, but it's like too small of a deal for him. And he passed it along to him. So I think just proximity and putting yourself in proximity, it's all proximity. It's all people.
Everything's people in business and proximity is hugely important. You know, it's like. putting yourself in the proximity and being able to learn from the people you know who've done what you want to do and just go and offer to work for them and show value like you can't like you know i'm sure someone's gonna watch this and and hit us up um someone hit me up and make it through yes if they make it through that's awesome but don't just like you know don't send the message and be like hey can i work for you for free i'll do whatever you want like You've got to stand out because like now that we're talking about this if you know who I don't know how many people will watch this video but it'd be a bunch and you know there's going to be a bunch of people will probably shoot you a message or shoot me a message and just with nothing more than like you know hey uh can I work for you for free and like that's not showing any real initiative like you've got to go above and beyond and really like you know if you're trying to reach somebody who has any type of like serious inbound um You got to go above and beyond. But in general, like you and I are probably not the best people. Like I'm sure, yeah, you want to.
I do too. Like if there's, you know, the right person out there who could be, who you could guide and mentor and who ultimately ends up being a huge asset for you and they're able to learn a lot. It helps excel their career.
Like that's amazing. But I feel like, you know, if people are going to do this, they should go after people that are not popular. They're not famous. Go after those people, you're going to be much more likely to get a yes. You're going to be much more likely, you know, if you're interested in a certain business, you know, go find the most successful business owners in your area in that particular niche.
Not the most successful person who is, you know, on a magazine or on TV or, you know, has a big YouTube following or has a massive podcast. Find the people who are more under the radar but super successful and go ask them. Those are the people who you're probably going to be more likely to get a yes from.
What regrets do you have from your career and was the money worth it? So I don't I don't really have any regrets business-wise. I mean I've had a lot of failures. There's a lot of things I've done that I wouldn't do again but I business-wise specifically I've learned a lot from everything I've done whether it was good or bad whether the outcome was positive or negative. I feel like I've been able to have a learning lesson from everything throughout my journey.
So I don't really have any great regrets business-wise. I really only have one regret in life and that was just not being able to spend more time with my mom, you know, at the end of her life. That's really the only regret I have ever and I tried to spend as much time with her as I could.
But towards the end, she became pretty negative. And I would leave, you know, hanging out with her. And I just feel really bad because there was so much negativity.
And in hindsight, I wish I would have realized like none of that negativity was about me. It was about her. Being scared.
She was scared. She didn't have much time left and she didn't know how to communicate it. And it just came out in a really negative way. And I wish I could have gone back in time and realized all this negativity is not about me.
She's scared and she doesn't know how to communicate. And I wish I wouldn't have taken it so personal. What's most important in life for you now? Family.
Family and friends. And it's amazing because you're building these Airbnbs that are really family-oriented. You've got jungle gyms and playgrounds and like a kid's paradise.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the vision behind these, you know, it's basically would I want to take my family to these properties? Would I want to share these properties with friends? Would I want to share these, you know, have experiences at these properties? That's, that's...
how I build them out kind of with that vision in mind. So I think that's kind of what I was thinking earlier. That is the final life cheat code. Yeah. Which is, you know, as much as we can have a lot of money.
And I think one thing to maybe we take for granted is how much grind and suffering there was early on and how many reps and practice we all have to get in in business. I feel like my 20s were pretty sad time for me. Whereas trying a lot of things, feeling frustrated a lot of time, feeling doubted, getting fired a lot. But it was like ultimately, okay, well, what's the cheat code of life?
And it's like, all right, how do I really enjoy this life? And building things ideally maybe you want for yourself and also doing it with the people, family, and friends that matter to you. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely, yeah. And if you can build, I've been fortunate to be able to, like what we're doing now with the Airbnbs is just building something for myself and sharing it with others. And ultimately, it's a win-win situation all around. If you liked hearing Mark's story, you are going to love this video right up here.
We talked to a private jet billionaire to hear his story, and we hitchhiked on his plane. Uncle Noah loves you. Make sure you subscribe to the channel if you're not already, and I'll see you out there. Pew, pew.