#22: How a Physician Assistant House-Hacked to Start His Real Estate Career w/ Bill Goodland

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Transcript

Larson Hicks: Welcome to Branch Out with Sycamore. It's exciting to have Bill Goodland on the show with us today. Thanks for joining us, Bill.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, thanks for having me glad to be here.

Larson Hicks: Yeah, we do this podcast and the whole kind of the whole theme of the podcast. It's called Branch Out with Sycamore. And the idea is we want to hear stories from physicians and medical professionals who have.

Who have branched out from the typical nine to five or standard kind of career path and are doing different things. And we heard from one of our good friends Dr. Paris Lovett about you and some of the cool things that you're doing in your career. And so we'd love to learn more about about your story.

So thanks for coming on and joining us.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, flattered to be here. I feel like I don't have nearly the experience of some of your other guests, but I'm happy to share what I do know. Yeah, to share a little bit about me. I, I grew up in New York was an athletic training student in college. I went to Stony Brook University did a year of that work in outreach sports medicine at a high school, as well as at a hospital went to PA school.

And that was at Salus University, just outside of Philly and got a job in the area, in the Lehigh Valley. And that's where I'm at now working emergency medicine.

Larson Hicks: That's cool. So sports medicine was did you think you were going to end up in doing emergency medicine when you started or did you have a different career math and mind?

Bill Goodland: Yeah. I I did some shadowing in orthopedics. I really enjoyed orthopedics, just the musculoskeletal system, my strong point in school and after shadowing a little bit in both orthopedics, I did a rotation in orthopedics still. Still liked the material, but as far as being a PA is concerned, and this is nothing against, those that love being a PA in it.

For me, I felt like I had a more autonomy working more in a generalist specialty where there's family medicine, emergency medicine. Whereas in surgical subspecialties, I felt as a PA, I was more of an assistant rather than a practitioner which is why I was looking to be, do things that are more general also use a broader array of skills than being in one specialty.

Larson Hicks: Yeah, that makes sense. So I think you're our first PA to have on the show which is fun. We're as a company, we started in emergency medicine, working with physicians and we've expanded from there. So tell me just your sense of the working relationship in the ERs that you've been a part of.

Between the staff and how PA's fit in to the mix. How do you see yourself fitting into the team?

Bill Goodland: Yeah. I'm really lucky to work for a place that really values PA skill sets. I work in a fairly small community ER it's somewhat rural. I would say we're about 30 to 45 minutes outside of the Allentown Bethlehem market. With that we're up in carbon County and we see a lot of like old coal miners with a lot of comorbidities.

So we see sick people and they're fully comfortable with PAC and the sick patients kind of all levels of acuity. Obviously I do still work under the supervision of a physician. Dr. Lovett has been a great role model for me and have a lot of respect and admiration for him.

That's kinda how I got hooked up with you guys. So yeah they let me do a lot and it's been a really great fit.

Larson Hicks: So you ended up getting into emergency medicine because of the rotations and just finding that you liked being more of a practitioner and less of an assistant. That totally makes sense. You've also branched out into some other ventures on the side. Can you tell me a little bit about what led you to to your current side hustle?

Bill Goodland: Yeah I knew I wanted to work in healthcare, but I didn't necessarily want to be an employee my whole life by that a ton of jobs. I feel like I'm a good employee, but that's not really where my heart's at. I more of a business mindset. Just growing up I explored a lot of different investment vehicles.

I started investing in stocks at 18. I did some options trading here and there, but what I really landed on was that real estate was seemed like the ticket to like wealth long-term. It's definitely not a get rich quick scheme and I discovered Bigger Pockets which for those that aren't familiar, it's the largest real estate education community online.

A ton of like podcasts, blogs, things like that came across to them. The end of 2016, when I got out of college, I had a year in between PA schools. I didn't realize how much I liked learning because when you're forced to do it in school, you don't really appreciate it.

But then once I was out of school, I need to obsess about something again. There's only so much I can learn in athletic training. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to learn, but came across real estate. Got obsessed. Books. Podcasts. So that's been my focus for the last, I guess four and a half years is really just diving in deep to real estate. Started on the residential side of things. Now I'm looking into commercial.

Larson Hicks: You said something as your intro to this venture into real estate that I thought was really interesting. You said that you've been an employee at a lot of jobs and you don't want to be an employee anymore. How did you arrive at that decision? What kind of led you to have that realization.

Bill Goodland: I guess just growing up, I wanted independence. That's something that I value. I don't like the idea of somebody else owning my time. I don't necessarily feel that's the case right now. I have a great job. I'm not dying to leave by any means, but also I just wanted financial freedom.

I wanted someone to not own my schedule the very few times that I said I would work because I'm a hard worker, growing up, I was like, I want money, but then to find out that, Oh, I have something, friend or family thing that came up, but I have to work. From a young age that was just ingrained into me.

Like I never want to have to turn down like an important life event because I had to work.

Larson Hicks: You talked about being an options trader. The opportunity cost of having a job and not having the ability to jump on an opportunity that passes by because your time is completely committed to someone else I feel like is another aspect of of business ownership and independence that is really important.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. That's something I still struggle with now. I work 12 hour shifts. That was what I wanted coming out of school, but just the mental fatigue of the 12 hour shifts, it's tough. Here and there try to get some stuff, just communicating with my broker or with their partners. But it's tough when you're doing a full-time job, trying to have your head in different places at once.

Larson Hicks: Yeah, for sure. 12 hours. I imagine you need the whole next day to recover from that shift. It's not like you get to necessarily jump back into something else easily the next day. It's something that I think a lot about and talk a lot about on the show cause it's a personal hobby horse of mine but the term slavery is a dirty word and in our society and for good reason. But the reality is that if you're somebody who Trades all of your time for subsistence, whether that's a really comfortable subsistence or not, you basically fit the definition of a slave.

It's not something a lot of people think about but what you're talking about is getting to a point to where you can work as much or as little as you want to. Your time is yours because you have  productive property. You have actual assets that are generating revenue.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, that was one of the reasons that I didn't want to go to med school. You'll hear a lot of PAs that say I wanted to go to med school that I didn't want to spend all that time in med school and in residency. That really wasn't the case for me. I thought I was going to be a physical therapist and that I was going to own my own clinics and that was going to be my business venture. 

After working in a clinic and shadowing a PA, I thought: yes, I will be an employee as a PA, but it's a lot easier to have a flexible job, especially in emergency medicine. I can go down to part-time if I want to. I can go down to per diem if I want to. I have that flexibility.

Whereas I felt like if I would have spent all that time to try to go to med school or podiatry school, I would have had the golden handcuffs if you will. They spent all this time, all this energy to make this great living that you get to your early thirties and you're like, I made it - I shouldn't really have to sacrifice anymore.

Whereas now with me being a PA making a good living, I'm not rich by any means, but it's enough where I'm still young and I can still make those sacrifices to try to dig my way out of needing a W2 job.

Larson Hicks: I love the fact that you haven't waited and the golden handcuffs are a real thing. People tend to be short-sighted and they're so eager to get to that point where they arrived in their career and then sit back and just become a consumer and relax and have the big house and the two car garage and settled down into a career they're going to just be able ride for the rest of their career and I'm with you. I think it's a big mistake to settle early. I think when you're young, when you have fewer expenses, you have fewer responsibilities, without necessarily having a bunch of kids and being married and being involved in civic leadership or whatever, it's a great opportunity to take risks, try different things, explore your interests and abilities. I think the people who don't are the ones that have the crazy midlife crisis when they turn 40. 

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. My whole thing is I don't want to look back on my twenties or any part of my life and really regret things. I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything right now. Could I go buy a forever home right now? Sure. I could be comfortable, but that's not really in my DNA.

If I'm sitting still and watching TV, I feel like I just have that itch that I need to be doing something.  

Larson Hicks: We've never had anybody on the show who's really an expert in real estate. I'd love to learn more and just dive deeper into your approach to real estate. You mentioned Bigger Pockets. Tell us the philosophy and how you've approached real estate investing.

Bill Goodland: Sure absolutely. I don't necessarily call myself an expert, but I appreciate that. I've been studying this for years and years. The easiest way to get started is what Brandon Turner of Bigger Pockets coined the term "house hacking" which was stemmed from an article that he wrote saying, here's how you can live for free.

That just drew me in. It's like the perfect way to get started in real estate. People hear that you're investing in real estate. "That must be so risky. Like how do you have the knowledge and the time to do it?" The way I look at it, like once you actually studied is that you can invest in real estate while just buying a house. 

The way that I did that was buying a multi-unit property. So I still have the same benefits of an owner occupant with low down payment loans, extremely low interest subsidized by the federal government. Say what you will about that, but if you take advantage of it, it could be really powerful.

The way that I did that was I put a three and a half percent down on an FHA loan, which is the same loan that probably the vast majority of first-time home buyers use. Instead of using it on a nice forever home or even a starter home, I use it on a three unit property that I rent out the other two units and they more than cover my mortgage. 

Even coming out of PA school, I didn't have a huge ton of savings. I worked for one year living with my parents and did well on tech stocks investing since I was 18. So I had a decent chunk of savings, but this house only required $11,000 down.

I had the seller cover all of my closing costs. I put some improvements into the building and now the building brings in $2,470 a month on a mortgage of around $2,050 a month. So I'm getting paid to live for free essentially.

Larson Hicks: That's rad. So that's step one for you. What do you tell  somebody who's maybe a little further along in their career. Maybe have a little bit more already invested in a home  and they can't necessarily get out of it.

What would be the strategy for someone in that situation?

Bill Goodland: So I think first and foremost, it's education. There's a million ways to invest in real estate and there's a kind of a time versus headache versus rate of return thing that you have to balance. If you want the highest returns possible sure you can go to D class properties in war zones that are going to be dirt cheap and probably cashflow for you.

If you're a high income earner, that's probably not a headache you want to deal with. Same thing with short term rentals. Short-term rentals can be vastly profitable, but it's how much headache do you want to deal with? So I think the first thing is know what do you actually want out of real estate?

I work with some people that they just want stability and that's perfectly fine. Other people want cashflow to get out of the job. So I'd say first and foremost, know your why and get educated. Like I said, Bigger Pockets is a great place to do that. There's plenty of other good free resources.

But for someone that's further along, has a good job or a business on the side, I would say find a market or an area that makes sense. Real estate: it's never going away. They're not making more land. Get educated and go from there.

Larson Hicks: Have you taken it to a further level? Are you doing more than the single a multi-unit building?

Bill Goodland: I wasn't looking to get rich off one deal. This property has been great for me. It's definitely gone up in value. I have a large chunk of equity and doing the work yourself saves a lot of costs.

So that allowed me to save on living expenses. That was the main goal.  I only have to live in this property for a year. I save on rent or paying my own mortgage which on a PA salary, I'm not rich by any means, but I can save a decent chunk of change. So what that allowed me to do is about six months after I closed on this place, I was able to get another single family under contract. It was during the COVID pandemic. I think I got a great deal on it. It's in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It was only around $70,000. It rents for over a thousand dollars. This is something that I've explained to some docs that are fascinated, "Oh, it's new grad PA's investing in real estate. Should I rent out my house and buy another one?" One thing I try to explain to them, generally the more expensive the real estate, the less likely you are to have the rent, cover the mortgage, to cover the expenses and to be a cashflowing asset. 

After that, managing it myself I haven't had any problems with that property. I was able to save up even more. My most recent deal in December, I closed on another single family close to our large level one trauma center. That's now a short-term rental for me. I headed it on Airbnb and Furnished Finder. I currently have students that are doing rotations at the local hospital, renting it for a few months.

Larson Hicks: It sounds to me there are definitely principles like buying cheap is going to give you a better chance of a cashflowing. My wife and I were really seriously considering buying a house that was out in the country.

We live in Huntsville, Alabama, which the market here is crazy right now. I'd love to get your thoughts on on living in a crazy market. Nothing stays on the market here for more than a week or two at the very most, usually days before it's got an accepted offer. Our house is worth almost double what we paid for it just five or six years ago just with the way that the market has gone. 

We almost bought a house out in the country that had two short-term rental properties on it. Like you said, there's gotta be more than just the properties.

There's gotta be a business deal that works with it. In that case, it was a cool property, cool units. But the real deal was that there was this training facility that was just across the street that had people traveling regularly that stayed for eight weeks or whatever. 

It sounds like you've tapped into a great market for a great location for a short-term rental. How do you find those deals? 

Bill Goodland: So that's for me, it comes down all to education. You got to work with what the market gives you. Ten years ago,   foreclosures worked. They were just on the MLS. So you could just slap down paint carpet and call it. Rent it. Refinance. The property value went up like crazy.

They cashflow like crazy cause all the people that lost their homes needed a place to rent. That was a strategy that worked 10 years ago. In commercial real estate, same thing with self storage facilities. Like at that time, that was the market. Now as markets have gotten hotter, people have to look for different avenues to make it work, whether it's renting by the room, whether it's renting short-term rental.

I think you have to educate yourself, have a lot of tools in your tool belt, and then also know what works with your skillset and work with your competitive advantage. For me, I knew as a student that rotated at that same hospital, that a property that was relatively small, relatively inexpensive would likely have demand.

Also knowing that it was right on the border of an area that doesn't allow short-term rentals. But I happened to be in the area that at least as of right now, there was no restrictions. So just having that in the back of your mind - not only asking yourself, does this deal work, but how can I make the deal work?

It sounds the deal that you were considering had a similar scenario, like you might, if you had to tell yourself, I need to go look for a property that has two short-term rentals near a training facility, you're never going to find it. You have to be out there looking and then say, how can I make this deal work? It's going to take that kind of creativity.

Larson Hicks: Have you read Rich Dad, Poor Dad?

Bill Goodland: Oh, of course. That was the first one I came across Bigger Pockets and then they, the first book everyone talks aboutis Rich Dad, Poor Dad. So I read it in two days and then went down the rabbit hole from there.

Larson Hicks: I'm only 50 or 60 pages into it. My wife's read it several times but I picked it up recently and just started reading through it. 

I've always had this mindset - you're never going to find the perfect deal. I can't remember how he says it but basically, there are so many people who were professional naysayers and problem finders and it's great. But I'm gonna figure out a way to turn this into an opportunity. 

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. The principle of loss aversion holds true. People talk about investing too. They can point out a million reasons why you shouldn't do something because of the off chance, but they underestimate the value of the gain as well. Everyone can make an excuse why they don't invest.

One of the reasons that I stayed in Pennsylvania coming from New York is because I knew that this market was better for rental real estate. It's funny that you bring up Huntsville, Alabama. If you listen to like real estate podcasts, that's one of the very popular markets, at least a few years ago that  makes sense from a rental real estate standpoint. The rents are high enough to justify the price.

Larson Hicks: My father-in-law's got three or four rental properties. He bought a ton of land, a really valuable land that he sat on and lost his butt on for 10 years, just with taxes and fees.

Now this market has just gone crazy and he's basically sold every single lot. Ended up buying another 60 acres or something on this mountain. He's done incredibly well. But he also found a house in a neighborhood that's about to clearly is being gentrified. Old, kind of beat up, geographically very central to our city, but a really rough neighborhood. He bought a house for, I think, $12,000.

Single family house and it's a mess. He gutted the entire inside, just painted the outside. He's just sitting on it and he gets offer after offer to buy it and he's just gonna sit on it.

Bill Goodland: There's a lot of ways to make money in real estate land investing. Isn't something that I personally are necessarily interested in. The principles that I go by is that it should cashflow day one, or at least if you stabilize it within a month or two, let's say there were vacant units that it should cashflow day one.

Some people like the idea of land because they don't really have to do anything. They can sit on it and wait for it to appreciate. If you really know what you're doing, that there are some people that make a living now. I like to stick to the basics, listen to people smarter than me like Warren Buffet and Joe Fairless, who is a very successful like real estate syndicator, which is something I want to do one day.

Buy for cashflow, appreciate things. Our market has seen a lot of appreciation and you can predict it in the sense that, Hey, these are the market trends that drive demand and inventory is low right now. We shouldn't expect the same sort of crash we saw, 10, 12 years ago.

But at the same time, the fundamentals are, if it's cash flowing now, chances are it's going to be cash flowing for a long time. If you can buy with the fundamentals, then it's going to go up in value over time, based on those factors. More focused on things that cashflow day one.

Larson Hicks: I need to ask my father-in-law sometime what sort of drove him to pull the trigger when he did. He probably had a big pile of cash that he wanted to do something with and didn't want to have it sitting in cash and so just put it there. It was a location that he knew very well. 

My father-in-law - he's licensed now as a real estate agent. So you've done that. What was that process like?

Bill Goodland: I did. I had an agent that I was working with that was great. Also with being a great agent - people want your time. In order for me to be as flexible as I want it to be, it really helps have your own license. If a property pops on the market and I had my eye on this market for three years, I get email updates every single day.

I know this market I know surrounding markets. I know when a good deal pops in the market. You want to be able to see it right away at your convenience. My agent was pretty great with that, but he also had kids on the way and stuff. 

Also buying three deals on the MLS in a year, that's commission that I could have saved. It was very valuable to have someone to walk me through the process. Cause it's scary buying a house, the biggest purchase of your life. But the second one gets easier. The third one gets even easier than that. 

I got to the point where I was like I really just have to take a course, take a test, throw a couple bucks at licensing fees and stuff like that and then I'll have my own MLS access. I can make my own commissions on deals. So it made sense for me, it wasn't very expensive. I did an online course that was about 75 hours that I did over the course of two months or so.

Late summer, early fall took the test, got my license. I also figured, I know that I was only going to stay in my primary residence for a year to two years and that I'm likely going to be buying another house primary residence within the next year. Even one deal's commission, 2.5-3% minus broker fees, is going to pay for my licensing fee.

So it just made sense for me. I'm not really looking to represent other people. I'm having a goal for myself, but I've even been able to help friends and family have some investment properties and happy to say we just got my first one for my best friend growing up under contract.

Larson Hicks: I went to a talk one time and heard a a real estate investor talking about there are ways to buy a property and get a quote for the work that you're going to do to it, to improve it, and then get a loan based on the value the appraised value. Tell me about that. 

Bill Goodland: That is a thing. I will tell you the most common way that people expand a portfolio. I know guys with over a hundred units and I promise you, they didn't get those hundred units by saving up just  20-25% down payment at their W2 job. The way that they scale is by building value in a property, whether it's just buying it very below market or whether it is buying a fixer upper, adding value to the property through renovations or whatever kind of improvements and boosting the value.

Yes, there are ways to purchase it with the rehab costs rolled into the loan generally, what that means is you're buying for an example, let's use a house where the after repaired value of a hundred thousand. I know that's rather low, but it's easy to think from a numbers standpoint.

So let's say after this house is going to be fixed up, it's going to be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Right now it needs about $20,000 worth of work. If I get that property under contract for $50,000, I might be able to go to a lender, whether it's commercial bank that has loans in house, or even if it's just a private lender, I can go to them and say, look at all the comparable sales.

This house, after I'm done with it is going to be worth a $100,000. Now the bank, they just want protection when they are giving a mortgage. They want to know that if I had to fire sale this a $100,000 house, I could get my money back. So generally they want you to have around 20- 25% of equity.

Larson Hicks: Is there a clause in the loan that you actually have to get the work done? 

Bill Goodland: So generally there's different ways to go about it. But the gist of it is that the lender says, yep, you do this work. I will have the rehab in the cost of the loan. I'll let you buy it for $50,000 put in the $20,000 worth of work. At the end of it, you will get a new loan at $75,000 - 70% of the value. Basically that's how people can do deals with none of their own money or very little of their own money. Some people will do is they'll just buy it cash put in the money themselves and then they go to refinance at a much higher valuation of the total money they have left in the deal, and then they can pull that cash back out.

I know it's a difficult concept but essentially you're the same way a flipper builds equity in a property. Let's use nicer property. For example they buy a place for $120,000. They put $30,000 into it. They're all in for $150,000, they sell it for $200,000. They make that,  $50,000 profit gross profit minus their whatever expenses.

It's the same idea as someone buying a rental. They're buying an undervalued asset, improving it, and then it now has greater value. Instead of selling it and making that profit. You're just using that equity as the same thing as a down payment, the bank just wants you to have some sort of equity, whether it's a down payment or whether it's just equity that you're leaving in the property so that where they know if you stop paying your mortgage day one, they could fire sale that $200,000 property at a significant discount and make back the mortgage.

Larson Hicks: That makes a lot of sense. I was explaining that to my wife recently and  I was missing some of the pieces of the puzzle and how to put the deal together.

You mentioned private lenders. I feel like there's definitely a hidden market out there of private lenders. How do you recommend people? We're all just trained  to go straight to the bank anytime we have a financial need. Is that your philosophy? Are you looking for private lenders?

Bill Goodland: I would absolutely love private lenders. So if anyone's looking to lend, feel free to let me know. Most of the successful investors that I know and listen to on podcasts start with bank financing. If you're doing something simple like a owner-occupied loan or you're doing something like just buying a rental with 20% down and you're gonna rent it out, that's pretty simple. 

Once you get into some of the more complex strategies of buying a place that is, under market that won't qualify for bank financing because let's say it's torn apart or whatever, or let's say you're going to a seller and you say, Hey, I'll close with cash in 14 days.

If you sell me your property at a discount. Cause some people are motivated. They just need to get out for laundry list of reasons. They say, I just need cash now for this place, I don't need to get full market value. Just get me cash. Get me out. The way to do that is to close quickly with cash. Now, whether you're closing with your own cash or somebody else's, it doesn't really matter.

As long as you can close quickly, there's kind of two ways to go about that because bank financing a single take longer either hard money, which these are companies that they. We'll invest in a deal based on the after repair value.. I think that's probably what you were referring to is the hard money lenders, generally an experienced investor that is either investing with their own money or somebody else's that says, yes, I know that this deal is going to be worth a lot more when you're done.

Therefore I'm willing to give you a loan for the rehab costs and  for the purchase price generally with a fairly low down payment depending on your spending on the deal. But that money is very expensive. Going rates right now probably around 12% interest only with points upfront, which is basically a percentage amount of the loan.

If it's a a hundred thousand dollar house and there's two points, that's $2,000, additional loan fees on top of other closing costs and essentially 12% interest. Now, as you get more experienced and that's my goal, as I grow and expand is, if you're borrowing hard money, you tell people, Oh, I made this deal with very little of my own money.

I was able to use this hard money loan cause I got a great deal and then someone else can say Oh, you're willing to pay 12% interest. That's crazy. Like I'd like to make 12% interest and that's how a lot of more experienced guys get into it where they'll have somebody with an IRA with a couple hundred thousand sitting in there.

They would love to make a double digit return with money that's just sitting in their IRA. Or even in a savings account, making 1% interest that they'll lend on the property. So that's the way some people use private money or some people even lend private money because they want a solid return.

It's short term cause generally these projects are only a couple of months but a solid return that is collateralized by a real asset. It's not collateralized by numbers on a piece of paper for some company that you have a stock in.

Larson Hicks: That's the role that I'm in. I've had to raise money and so I've had to network with folks that are investing in startups and then in other things. So you do kind of network your way into communities of people that are looking for different places to put their money other than the bank or their IRA. That's one of the benefits of being a healthcare provider and staying in the healthcare business. Even if your real estate deals become your cashflow to the extent that you could quit your job. There's probably benefit just in staying network to these high net worth people that you can do deals with.

Bill Goodland: When you're talking about figuring out what to do with each deal, some people have interest in real estate. A lot of the doctors I talked to had interest in real estate and part of that is being creative on what makes sense for you.

Some love the idea of owning a property that they rent out and the cash cashflows. Great. Go ahead and do that. But whether you're managing yourself or managing the manager, that comes with some sort of management intensive thing, or even finding the deal and go through the closing process can be a decent amount of work for some of these high income earners.

That might not be the best use of their time, which is why there are different strategies of investing in real estate. Whether it's buying a turnkey place. There are companies that will provide a rehabbed house that they will rent out and just sell to you. You're still owning a piece of real estate.

Oftentimes you're in Midwest markets. That works great for some people. Other people want to buy a deal locally. Some people want to lend on private money which is where you just had debt on a property. Like you're the bank, you're making a good interest rate, but you're the bank. 

Another strategy is investing in syndications, which essentially you're owning a piece of the deal. My ultimate goal of what I want to do is after I proved myself as investor, "Hey, I've done XYZ with my own money, with my own deals." Hopefully I get to the point where I'm able to borrow private money.  I bought this undervalued house. I fixed it up quick or had somebody else fix it up quick, rented it out, refinanced out, paid back my investor at a great interest rate. Now I'm looking at bigger deals. The way to do that is bringing in investors that do get equity in the deal. Often, how that is structured is with a preferred return.

Basically, if I'm raising the money for the deal, which is what I'm looking at now with a partner, is general partners have the experience, they have the lender, the contractor, all those connections. They bring the deal together. They have investors that still want a piece of the deal.

It's still got the same benefits of the real estate- often get a preferred return, meaning they get the first 6-8% that goes to the investors and then anything after that is split up which is another strategy that works great for people that want to pass the investment and work great for people like me that want to do bigger deals that just don't necessarily have the capital to do so.

Larson Hicks: I'm struck by often when talking to folks on this podcast, especially is the amount of knowledge that you can acquire through business ownership and independence, running your own business as a school for virtue, for discipline, for life, and you become forced by the virtue of the fact that you now have real skin in the game. If you've read any of Nassim Taleb's books, I think his latest book was called Skin in the Game. He talks about this idea that they're just parts of your brain that you can't access until you actually have skin in the game.

It's like the problem with consultants. A lot of times, like you hire a consultant in a business. They've got all these great ideas and strategies that have worked in other businesses but because they don't have skin in the game, it's not there butt on the line, if their idea's wrong it just ends up being a lot of good advice that you kinda like at the end of the day, you hold up and go. I don't really know if this makes sense. And there's a kind of learning where you can sit there and study online for something and read the same thing a hundred times and it never stick. But as soon as it's your business and it's your skin in the game, it's your butt on the line, all of a sudden you access a different part of your brain. 

It seems almost more creative, more inclined to like actually absorb the information. You go to school or you work in business and you hear all these different business terms thrown around, but it's really not until you're an owner of a business where you're forced to really fully understand it.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. I haven't read that book. That sounds interesting, but it makes a lot of sense. I see that in medicine too. In medicine, business, whatever the case may be, you can be on the outside looking in, say do X, Y, Z, but until you're in it, it's definitely a different mindset. So that's very interesting.

Larson Hicks: You'd love Nassim Taleb. He was an options trader. Made a ton of money on the financial crash. Predicted 9/11. He's definitely one of my heroes. Black Swan was one of his books. My favorite is Antifragile and a lot of the stuff really about optionality and the failure of scientism and experts.

It's a lot of good stuff, a lot of fun rabbit trails to go down but all totally related to this stuff. As you were talking about preferred returns and and those kinds of syndicated deals, I'm thinking about our company,  investors, and our operating agreement and all of this stuff that I had a vague notion of prior to being in the role that I'm in.

But it wasn't until it was my business, our investors and our profit that we had to figure out how to do something with that. It was like, okay, now this stuff actually is starting to make sense. Like it's conceptually made sense but it wasn't until we actually had to get down and do something about it that starts to really take hold. Now I fully appreciate and understand this and I think I can do this again. 

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely.

Larson Hicks: So real estate, it sounds like syndication is the next horizon for you. And in the medical world, is your hope that you'll be able to phase out or do you have any other aspirations to explore different specialties or work in different settings? How are you thinking about that these days?

Bill Goodland: Yeah. I still enjoy what I do. I feel like I learned something new every day. I always say that you are humble every day because you find out what you don't know and you figure it out as long as you go. So I still enjoy being in the ER. You get to come home and I have decision fatigue just even on my off days.

I definitely understand how people get burned out during COVID when I had nothing else to do. Besides real estate, I was working a lot of extra shifts and I was just like, Oh, I'm never going to get burnt out. But even in my first year just working extra shifts, it definitely catches up to you.

I'm scaling back a little bit in that I'm not picking up as much extra shifts. I'm using a little bit more paid time off and stuff like that to allow me to have more time in real estate. Ultimately I do see myself transitioning to part-time eventually. I would prefer maybe in the future shorter shifts so I can get other stuff done  on the days that I work. 

Maybe floating around to different campuses, whether I do per diem, part-time, I don't see myself being a full-time employee for forever, but  it's not like I'm dying to get out because I still like what I do. I would consider other settings. I like family medicine. I like the idea of urgent care as well. If I did go to those settings, I would likely want it to be a practice that I have equity in.

Whether I'm owning the real estate or running a lot of the day-to-day in the practice under the supervision of a doc. That's something I would consider transitioning settings if I had equity in the place. I want to do more real estate on the side, still building my own portfolio, helping friends and family build theirs. 

I'm excited to be exploring bigger deals with a partner right now and raising money. I still feel like I'm still fairly new and not a ton of experience to be asking people to invest with me. When people express their interest and I see bigger deals on the market, it's kinda hard to not still look towards the future in bigger stuff.

Larson Hicks: That's awesome, man. It sounds like you're off to a really great start- way ahead of the game. You're thinking about all this stuff in a great way. I think it's inspiring to me and I think it will be to those who listen to our podcast and  just the mindset of this is Rich Dad, Poor Dad thing: don't work for money, have money work for you. 

Have a mindset that a job as a means to an end, it's not an end in and of itself. If you're settling in, instead of using your job as a launchpad for you to continue to build your portfolio, build your career, build your your empire then then I think you're setting yourself up for being burned out and unfortunately we just see so much of that and people that find themselves, 20 years into their career and going, I've got the golden handcuffs. I don't really think I can do anything else with my life.

I've sunk all this cost and time into this anyway. I need the money. I need the lifestyle.  I depend upon an employer to provide it to me. It's a a sad state of affairs for a lot of folks, but the good news, it's never too late to start building. You've done it very quickly it sounds like you've only just did a couple of years here. You've been able to build a portfolio that many people never acquire. We talk to physicians all the time who are financially clearly a mess, are just living paycheck to paycheck. 

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes to show saving and investing- it's a muscle that you have to work out. If your paycheck expands, some people their lifestyle is going to expand to meet that paycheck. There are plenty of wealthy people that don't make a great income, but they they just have that muscle that says set this money aside, invest it.

Other people might make great income, but they don't invest . That's why I think having these conversations and making it more okay to talk about these things openly. I feel like our previous generation didn't want to talk about money at all. Whereas you realize it's a tool to get to the life you want, I think it's really powerful.

Larson Hicks: It sounds like you've got this bug, like it's almost addictive and I think that's where we want to be right? I think the corporations and society wants us to be addicted to consumption and just spending money on entertainment and pleasure and frivolous stuff, epheme ral stuff.

And it sounds like there's a way to get addicted to the thrill of acquiring an asset, a successful asset that becomes valuable and generates cashflow and then having the ability to go and do it again. You feel like that's happened for you, like you've got a bug?

Bill Goodland: Yeah. I mean that definitely I feel like most of the most successful investors you listened to, whether it's the whether it's Warren buffet or  my local guy at a real estate meetup that has dozens of units. When you look at it as a game of what can I build?

That's when it gets you out of the mindset of this problem. Oh, that's annoying that I had to deal with it .When you're in a job, I feel like it's, "Oh, I have to deal with this." Whereas like when you're having a business or investing and you put yourself into the mindset of, "Oh, this is all I have to put up with in order to get the life I want."

It makes the downs the stuff that isn't as much fun, it makes it a lot more easy to endure because you look at it as a game. Oh, I'm glad that it's hard because it was easy. Everyone would be doing it. Therefore I must be doing something of value.

Larson Hicks: I think people get the cart before the horse when they're pursuing a job. The idea that do what you love is the mantra, a common mantra these days and follow your passion, et cetera, et cetera. Mike Rowe , the Dirty Jobs guy,  I think I've heard say you don't necessarily have to pursue your passion, but you can definitely bring your passion to anything, and everything you do.

When you do that, it has this strange effect of making it become a passion  and I think the skin in the game piece is a huge part of it. I just think if it's just a job, it's hard to get to that point to where you're excited about the growth of the business. It's because it's not yours. So that's the fun thing about using a job as a tool to build your own portfolio and then that becomes a lot of fun.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, I like I like waking up every day, whether I'm going to work to better myself as an employee or whether I'm getting real estate stuff done. I always feel like I'm building something so I don't get bored.

Larson Hicks: This has been a lot of fun, man. I appreciate you making time for us today to talk about your about your real estate ventures. I'm excited to hear how things develop. If people want to get in touch with you or learn more, it sounds like Bigger Pockets is a place to go.

What other things would you point people to?

Bill Goodland: As far as for learning about real estate or connecting with me?

Larson Hicks: Either one, it sounds like you're looking for investors for some of these syndicate deals. 

Bill Goodland: Yeah. I'm happy to talk to anybody that's interested once again, I am not the most experienced guy out there, but if anyone's looking to looking to talk real estate or even just talk business, whatever, I'm happy to chat. I feel like it's tough to find like-minded people.

Yeah. I have profile on Bigger Pockets. If anybody else's on there and interested in real estate, they can feel free to message me there. Probably easiest way to get in touch with me is on Instagram: bill_ goodland. 

There's just a ton of stuff out there, whether it's YouTube, whether it's books, there's so much free info out there. I learned more from free books, audio books, from the library and podcasts and YouTube that I ever did in school. 

Larson Hicks: That's awesome, man. Good for you. Keep up the great work and look forward to catching up in maybe in a year or so and just hearing where things are at and what you're onto next.

Bill Goodland: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for having me on.