E03: Cody’s Story: Why He Got Into Real Estate and Why He Stayed

Cody Littlewood wanted to build really durable cash flow for his family. He was also writing really big checks to the IRS and so he wanted to stop doing it. So he originally started investing in real estate for those two reasons. He realized how much he enjoyed it and eventually, he started doing more and more deals. Currently, he has ~$100 million in assets under management and his 2023 goal is to buy another $100 million equivalent to about 1,000 units.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

• The importance of focusing on sales in your organization
• Paying attention to the kind of people you’re hiring
• Why Cody started a real estate private equity firm
• Being smarter about how to build a more sustainable business
• Cody’s real estate portfolio and goals
• What Cody is doing with his health/bio-hacking
• Lessons he wants to teach his children
• The biggest gift wealth has brought him

Episode Highlights:

[10:37] The Importance of Focusing on Sales

Especially, when you have a small business, you don't want to lose having a great service or a great product. But you also have to figure out how to scale it. And that means having a solid understanding of how the sales aspect of an organization works.

Cody says that if he had only one piece of advice that he would have given his younger self, it would be to have focused on having a sales focused organization earlier in his career. Let go of the mentality that you only have to build a great product and customers will come to you. You have to put your product in front of people and be able to communicate and convey its value to them.

[12:25] Pay Attention to the People You’re Hiring

In a smaller organization, it's easy for a founder to hold up the dead weight. But you have to hire people that can grow you to the next stage. Sometimes, the team that you have at a $3-million company is not the team that will take you to a $10-million or a $15-million company.

Don't try to get by on being cheap for too long. It's way better to pay a lot more money to a rockstar than pay a salary for two mediocre people. Get the right rockstar, pay them enough and make them happy, and they will accelerate a business tremendously.

[29:53] Cody’s Current Real Estate Portfolio

Between Cody and his partner, they have about 1,500 doors with six employees. Their investments are all cash flow positive, but as a business, they're not. He and his partner are investing a lot of money into infrastructure, getting the right pieces in place to continue to grow and support more deals. They are also laying the foundation for the right hires and the leads of the different departments.

[42:30] Gut Biome

If you take a look at healthy people, what they generally have in common is their gut biome and a lot of that is around food and what your gut is doing. And there are a lot of interesting connections between a healthy gut and the rest of our health that we're just discovering right now because of our ability to sequence DNA.