Episode 1: My Entrepreneurial Journey and Discovery of BBQ

It’s almost like I’ve been teasing everyone that I was going to publish my first podcast on April 1st. I guess it was a good April Fools joke, because I decided to go ahead and publish it today. This is my first one, and although it’s not perfect, I think it has some good stuff! Give it a listen. Don’t forget to ask me questions so we have more topics that you want to hear. And now, The Business and BBQ podcast is off to the races. I hope you enjoy it.

Topics Covered in this Episode:
• Real estate investing
• Entrepreneurship journey
• One-of-a-kind barbecue joints
• Making time for what is important

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Business and BBQ Podcast with host Tim Herriage! Throughout this podcast, Tim will be sharing with listeners what he has learned as a profitable entrepreneur and real estate investor and why that “success” was lacking if it wasn’t properly balanced in his life with the things he loves. He will have guests join him from time to time that can also speak on these topics, and hopefully you will find that this is an informative and encouraging half-hour in your day.

If you’re not happy, the people you love will not be happy.

Tim started his adult life in the Marines as an intelligence analyst. During those 5 years, he learned some valuable lessons and also realized that he did not want someone to dictate how much money he would make. He then got into insurance sales, which was foundational to his understanding of the market and real estate before he made the career shift to real estate investing.

Ideas are only as good as your execution.

Initially, Tim was a project manager for a real estate investing company, prepping homes and keeping things moving along so the company could be productive and successful. From there, he and a business partner started Sprint Partners LP and got into the area of owner financing notes within real estate investing. A few years later, he met the woman who would eventually become his wife and his true entrepreneurial journey began in 2006.

No one else will tell me what my time is worth.

The first 2 years of their endeavor were great, filled with growth and profits, but when the harsh realities of the Great Recession set in, they had to cut their losses and basically eat up any gains they had made in ’06-’07. Tim reinvented himself in 2010 and focused on wholesaling, but he soon realized that he missed the networking opportunities that he had had through HomeVestors. He formed the REI Expo in Dallas in January of 2011, which continued for several years and expanded into regional events across the country.

Through this experience, he got connected to Five Star Expo and was asked to be a speaker on single family real estate investing. One thing led to another and he co-founded B2R Finance and served as the Managing Director for some time before he realized that his heart really wasn’t in it and he needed to get back into entrepreneurship. This led to the creation of the 2020 REI Group, which had good intentions but ultimately missed the mark as well because it kept him away from his true passion: his family.

Tim truly speaks from experience when he tells listeners to find their “why” and pursue it. Do not lose sight of what is really important to you and what makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. Make an effort to prioritize those things and make your business fit around those commitments. For Tim, in addition to just being there for his family, it is finding happiness in looking for that idyllic barbecue joint wherever he is and just enjoying it.

Check out my BBQ Reviews here.

Connect with Tim:

https://timherriage.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/herriage
https://twitter.com/timherriage
https://www.facebook.com/timherriage/
https://www.instagram.com/timherriage/

Full Transcript

[00:00] You are listening to the business and barbecue podcast hosted by Tim Herriage. Tim Herriage is an active entrepreneur who built and sold six companies but the age of 40 and enjoys sharing the ups and downs of business and entrepreneur life. As for the barbecue, that’s just something he has a passion for and likes to share as well. Here’s your host, Tim Herriage.

[00:21] All Right, all right, what’s cooking? Everybody. Tim Herriage here. Thank you for joining me. Today is the day episode one episode one of thousands of future podcast. My name’s Tim Herriage. I am your host today. I am also your guest. Many of these times we’ll be coming to you with a guest several times. I’ll be coming to you by myself. I’ll be dropping quick tips and tricks and things that I learned along the way, so thank you for joining me. We’re going to dive right into the show. So the first thing that’ll happen after we bring on a guest, as we’re going to talk about every week, we’ll talk about being an entrepreneur. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurial entrepreneurial ventures and really just try to understand who the guest is and what they’re up to. So first, as my wife would tell you, I’m going to talk about me, my wife may even tell you that I’m my favorite subject either way.

[01:14] My name’s Tim Herriage. I am 40 years old. I have been buying and selling houses for most of my adult life. I spent five years in the United States Marine Corps. I was an intelligence analyst. I got to travel the world and meet a lot of great people. And during that time I really got exposed to what it was like to work a w two job as a sergeant in the Marine Corps. If we worked 10 hours a week and it was a lazy, week back on the base, we ended up, uh, I got paid $1,810 a month and I went to combat and worked 20 hour days and you know, put my life on the line. I got paid $1,810 a month. Uh, the beautiful thing was we would get an additional hundred and $50 combat pay and the rest of it all was all tax free. So after I left the Marine Corps, I realized that I just wasn’t the type of person that wanted to let someone else tell me what my time was worth.

[02:10] So I kind of made up my mind then and there that I would no longer allow anyone to tell me what my time was worth. Uh, when I got out of the Marine Corps, I started selling life insurance. I worked for a company called American income life. It was a bit of a boiler room concept. I was recruited, I thought as a sales agent based off of my spectacular resume of my military service. And what it really meant was I was one of the hundred plus resumes. They’d looked at online that day and they’d sucked us all in. And it was a fun job though. It taught me outside sales, if you’ve never worked outside sales, I really do believe that everyone should do it at least once. And if not outside sales multilevel marketing like Robert Kiyosaki says. But no, it was a great experience. After that I became a house buyer for a local investment company and that is when I really learned how to buy houses and learn real estate.

[03:11] My job originally was a project manager. I started out, my job was to, when they bought the houses, I had to go out and get the locks changed, get the house cleaned up, get all the construction bids, get the home marketed for sale and I had to just manage the entire thing from start to finish. And it was just a great experience of learning construction, but also managing timelines and people and cashflow and all the things that go into managing construction. After that they started teaching me the acquisition side and the acquisition side was when you actually went in home to meet with the homeowner and I had a natural knack for it. I think a lot of it had to do with that life insurance sales experience. So we were doing really well, doing really well. And one of the gentlemen that we had bought a bunch of houses from that year.

[03:59] This is 2003 was named Bobby Roan. And Bobby had one day said, if those guys ever make you mad, you come east with the geese. And East with the geese is just, you know, Bobby’s an old Texan. Well, come the next year. I just wasn’t happy with where I was going cause I always wanted to own my own assets. I wanted to have rental property, I wanted to have longterm financial freedom. And I knew that that was obtained through rental property. And so Bobby made me an offer and I went and worked for Bobby in 2003 I bought 111 houses for Bobby and I and I sold 87 of them. And that was the year that I really learned this business. But yet again, come to the end of that year, he had told me after a year we would start buying rental properties and we were number one in the nation and buys and sells.
[04:45] And he didn’t take me to the annual convention. And I got my feelings hurt. Uh, and that’s when I went and met a partner of mine, Scott Horne. Scott at the time, he was a hard money lender. We knew in town through some local networking events and I sat down with Scott at a spring creek barbecue up in north Garland, Texas trying to get him to loan me money. I was going to go find my own houses. I was going to fix them up. I was going to sell them and I was going to make all the money. I was tired of working for someone else. Well, Scott Leans across the table, says, Tim, we liked the way you work. I like your honesty, your integrity, your work ethic. Why don’t we partner and you can just use all of my money and when someone like Scott says that to you, you say yes.

[05:28] Immediately said yes and we formed sprint partners LP and ended up in a year, but I want to say 60 65 houses. Most of them we kept as owner finance notes, which would come to serve me later, but at least I was able to start building my future. I was able to start owning assets for the long term and those assets still pay me today. And it was just a great experience. But after a year there I met my future wife, Jennifer rainy at the time, she had recently bought a HomeVestors franchise and she had just gotten into this wholesaling business. She never really had wholesale before. And so actually kitty cloud at the title company said, well, if you want to wholesale this one house was on Healy call, this Tim Herriage guy. So Jennifer called me. I went and looked at it. I actually turned around and sold it to another investor for more money than Jennifer made selling it to me.

[06:24] So the joke is we got married to keep it all in the family. So that was kind of how we met. And then the year after that, I actually left the partnership with Scott and went full time partnership with my then wife Jennifer. And that’s where really my journey of being an entrepreneur started because I took over the lead and the company and in 2006 I want to say, Yup, 2006 and we rehabbed about 80 houses and that means we had to pay for all the advertising to find them. We had to go get them contracted, we had to pay to buy the house, we had to pay to fix the house, we had to pay to own the house while it was vacant. And then we had to get the marketing and sales done to sell the house and get rid of house. And that’s when we had five six w two employees.

[07:18] We had a wrapped truck, this F-150 that was wrapped from my construction manager and we were spending 60 70 $80,000 a month in overhead. And that was great because we were making two, three, four times that because the market was fantastic. But what it did also was spoil me. He said, so this was in 2006 and seven when the real estate market was really just, just, just firing on all cylinders. And what happened was we got way out over our skis. We were building $1 million house to live in. We were just buying more houses and then we can touch and that’s when August of 2007 high, but the bottom dropped out of the subprime market. And then next thing you know, here we are with over 30 vacant houses that were fixing and selling. And that began, oh eight no nine when I say that I could have a paid someone to come to my house, kicked me in the groin, and I could have went back to bed and I would have made more money and been in less pain than what I was going through with my houses.

[08:25] But we were able to work hard and get out of all the houses. We lost a lot of money. We basically paid for the sins of 06 and 07 we gave all the money back and in 08 and 09 and a in 2010 I was forced to reinvent myself. So we had basically shut off all marketing in Oh eight no nine and then in 2010 I started marketing again. I started wholesaling, but I wasn’t a part of the HomeVestors system anymore. Now miss the networking, I missed the, the powerful opportunity to sit down with peers and to gain their wisdom and their insight. And so in late 2010 I decided, hey, I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to start having an annual convention. And so that’s when I formed the REI Expo, I’ll call it Arnie Abramson up and Arnie, I said, I want to do this and I want your help.

[09:19] And he said yes. And the rest, as they say, is history. But we had our first event in January of 2011 had about 200 people there the other day I found some videos that I was just so excited to. Just the energy in the room was just really, really good. And that’s really when I personally broke into the national scene. Well, what happened after that was I was encouraged to grow it and go beyond Dallas. And, and so we had a Houston. And then in 2012 we had another Dallas event. In that year we did it in Richardson and ended up having 400 and some people. So we had doubled in a year. And then later in that year, we had one down in Houston. And that event was okay. I mean, we had about 200, but that was kind of the idea. And then in 2013 we were going to do it even bigger.

[10:09] And so we rented the Hurst Conference Center and at that point, and so we rented the Hurst conference center. And at that point what happened is we were at 800 people. And once you fill out a venue and there’s just no room for parking, that’s when you just decide that you are the smartest entrepreneur ever created and that it is time to go big. So I immediately went out and I said, okay, we’re going to do four regional events every year. The first one’s going to be in Baltimore, April of this year. Mind you, that’s a three month lead time to find a location to find. Uh, the people, the host, everything. But Hey, as an entrepreneur you never slow down, right? So I went to, I took something that was great and something that was growing and doubling and easy to manage and I made it complicated. And so not only were we going to Baltimore in April, we were going to go to Chicago in July and then in late November we were going to go to Anaheim and we were going to, that was, we’re going to be, are we going to put our anchors down?

[11:08] And there are four regional events. And I was going to run a seminar company, which I had no idea how to run, but I did it anyway. And it was fun and we made a lot of money. And through the expo in 2013 in Dallas, I met a lady named Julie Pettit. Julie was an attorney at the time at a title company I was using. Well, Julie gave a speech at the expo. She liked how well it was run and she also ran contracts for the five Star Corporation who hosted the big five star at conference and expo. Every year through the introduction to the president of the company. From Julie’s speaking at the expo, I met Ed Delgado and Ed invited me to give a speech on debt and real estate investors and really just understanding the real estate investment market was a visionary. He saw the future of the single family rental space and by the end the hedge funds were buying.

[12:00] So he saw that it was a multibillion dollar play. So I give this speech and afterwards this gentleman comes up who I won’t say his name comes up to me and in a nice British accent says at team and we’re working on a project and we need your help. Come to find out he had started the largest home buyer in the nation and he had a lot of entrepreneurial experience and it was a fantastic introduction. So the next day after the five star Expo, I end up in a conference room in Dallas. A couple of weeks later, I’m in a conference room on the 40 something floor of Park Avenue at the Blackstone office. And if you’ve never been to a meeting in New York, here’s the way it went. Hey, we want you to come to New York. Okay, great. I don’t hear anything for two weeks on a Tuesday. Hey, can you be in New York on Thursday for a meeting at 10 o’clock?

[12:49] Well yeah, sure. Okay, great. See you there. And that’s it. I take the morning flight, I fly out to New York City, I get in a cab and I get over there and I had the time zones wrong because I really wasn’t that experienced in uh, you know, booking something in another city and time zone business wise. So most of what I had done had been in Texas. Uh, so I show up to the meeting and hour early they’re like, wow, the meeting does car for an hour. And you know, in my world, if somebody showed up an hour early, I’ve got time to sit down and talk with them and their world, like the uh, come to find out everything is run in 15 minute increments. I go around the corner, a text, my friend that lives in New York and the, hey, where can I grab a bite to eat?

[13:32] I grabbed some food and have a drink because I’m nervous. I go back and I’m in this two story lobby overlooking Central Park, you know, it’s Mahogany walls, marble floors. I’m pretty sure the hand rails on the stairs are made out of gold and I’m like, what is good? What am I doing here? I mean I, I had to, my dad told me I didn’t go buy a new pair of shoes for the meeting. He said, do not wear boots. And I listened to him. I wore shoes to the me. Anyway, we go into the meeting and I think I’m meeting the gentleman that I met in Dallas and you know, a person or two from Blackstone, why I go in and there’s 15 people around this massive conference table and the guy that they really wanted me to meet wasn’t available. Anyway, we start talking, we’re talking about real estate investing, the single family, real estate investment market and all these other things.

[14:22] And the next thing you know, the guy that was supposed to be in the meeting comes in, he spends like three minutes and the guy that had invited me tells me kind of, hey, tell them about this. Hey, tell him about that. And the guy spends five minutes in the room, says, Hey, I’ve got a bounce. Good to meet you. Hope we can do something. And he leaves. And I’m thinking, wow, I just really mess things up. Well then the guy that invited me said, okay Tim, well thanks for coming. And I look around the room, I’m thinking, oh my goodness, I must be horrible at New York meetings. Anyway, I get on the elevator, I know downstairs I’m thinking I was going to be there for hours, right? I mean they, they had me fly up. Surely I’m going to be here for hours 30 minutes after I tell my wife that I’m at the building, I’m texting her, telling her I’m done.

[15:05] Uh, in, in her answer her response, what did you do wrong? And I’m like, ah, I don’t know. Anyway, long story short, couple of weeks later they called and said, hey, we want you to be a consultant. Help us get this company off the ground. And that’s when I joined B Two r finance and October of 2013 that’s when we named it and that’s when we started it. And that’s when, uh, changed the single family real estate investing business. It was a wild time. A couple months later, they hired me full time as the managing director. I headed up all sales, marketing, business development. We did the first single family rental securitization in April of 2015. Shortly before that, we were part of a project where we hired a CEO that was going to take the company over and grow it beyond our wildest dreams. His name is Jason Hogg. Jason came in, we, uh, acquired lending.com we acquired dwell finance and we were growing and it was about spring break right before the first securitization.

[16:09] I just realized I had betrayed my roots. I had left my entrepreneurial spirit and I was now a salaried employee waiting for my bonus. And I looked at my wife in about May and I said, I can’t do this anymore. And you know, many of you listening may be in this situation now or may have been in this situation in the past. And what I did is I went to the CEO, I asked him to reassign me as a regional president where I didn’t have to travel that much. The travel was killing me. I was on a plane four or five, six times a week. It was going to be a little bit more production based as far as my compensation. But even then I just wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. I answered to someone, I had a job and I didn’t want to have a job and if I want it, if I had a job, I wanted it to be for myself.

[17:12] So in July of 2015 I resigned and I started the 2020 Rei group and I made a classic error of an entrepreneur. I took this big crazy world of being corporate and I tried to push it into my small business that was already making really good money. And instead of drawing up a business plan, we just winged it. And I am like a bull in a China closet. I mean, I just knock everything out of my way and I just keep going and going and going. And next thing you know, we’re spending all of our profit. We’re growing and increasing overhead and growing and increasing overhead and growing and increasing overhead and more, more, more, more, more. And that mentality really did wreck some good friendships. And for that, you know, I’m sorry, I mean that’s, that’s what it takes to be an entrepreneur at times, but it doesn’t, and that’s where we are now.

[18:09] Uh, four years later I’ve sold most of those businesses or shut them down for every one I sold, I probably shut two down. Ideas are only as good as your execution and my execution was flawed and we didn’t do things the right way. And that’s my fault. And that’s really me in a nutshell. I feel like I’ve left some things out, but I’m a crazy entrepreneur that creates more work for myself than I need. And I decided to stop. Uh, when you talk about why I do this, I became an entrepreneur for freedom. I did not like what the Marine Corps did to me. I changed who I was. I sacrificed my health, body, and soul for a paycheck. I had no freedom. I didn’t get to see my family. And at the time I wasn’t married with children, but at that time I love my mom and my brothers and my sisters.

[19:05] But I was gone all the time. And I think really when you break Tim Herriage down about why I do the things I do, it’s because of family. And I’m not always perfect. And I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’ve started this podcast to help you. And not because I’m perfect. I’ve started the podcast to help you because I know the mistakes I’ve made and I’ve wrecked some friendships and I sacrifice my children have sacrifice my marriage. I’ve sacrificed myself and my happiness. And I’m telling you, if you’re not happy, the people you love will not be happy. And that is what I hope to bring to you on a weekly basis. And one day, maybe daily. We’ll see. So that’s me in a nutshell. You know, the thing that I’m here to do is to help you find your why and make sure that your business revolves around your why and make sure that you don’t sacrifice the things that matter for the things that don’t.

[20:15] So I’ll tell you about what happened to me last year and kind of my wake up call. I had created 2020 Rei in 2015 I wrecked my friendship with Jason Riney, and Ryan Harper over the next 18 months because I was at possessed entrepreneur. And in 2017 I really just just went crazy. I mean, I hired so many people, I got my overhead back up to $63,000 a month. We were starting companies left and right. Companies were failing left and right. We weren’t managing the business. We were just growing because man, that’s what we were here to do. And we were going to grow. We started this real estate investor club with my partner George Roddy, April 9th we had the DFW Investors Club meeting and that night we had had 500 and something people register and we were excited and I was having drinks with people and I was the life of the Party and my son’s coach called.

[21:19] And at that time I was busy. I’d been, I’d had a couple of things to drink, you know, I was having fun and the coach says, Alex hurt his knee and he can’t move it. You need to come get him. And I made one of the worst decisions of my life. I said, ah, he’ll be fine. And I called my wife and said, hey, I need you to get Alex. Coach said he hurt his knee. And then I stayed for hours thinking that what I was doing was important and I got home and I’m telling him how you’re going to be fun. You’re going to be fine. Your knee is locked up before you’re going to be fine. The next week he’s on the operating table. He had had what you call a bucket handle tear of his meniscus and this kid lives for football and it looked like he may miss his senior season.

[22:11] He was being recruited to play college football and it looked like that dream was dying. They were afraid it was the ACL and that meant he may never even play sports again. Sports is how he identifies his life and I wasn’t there for him. I wasn’t there and as I sat in the waiting room waiting to hear the doctor come out and tell us it wasn’t the ACL and waiting to hear the doctor come out and tell us that he was going to be fine so that when he woke up I could tell him he was fine and that he would not miss a senior football season. It dawned on me, I have spent way too much time on my ego, on my vision, on my desires, and not enough time focusing on what really matters, which is my children and my wife and my family, and my own happiness, going hunting, spending time with family, eating barbecue.

[23:12] And that’s where barbecue comes in because it’s part of my self awareness is I’ve always loved the barbecue. I’ve always loved to cook and I’m not a good cook, but I love smoking a brisket and having a cold beer and hanging out with friends. And I never do it. I never had, I never did time for it. And so what happened is I started, since I had to be out looking at houses, I started looking for good barbecue joints, not Dickies or Spring Creek. Okay. I mean, that’s not good barbecue in my opinion. I mean like one location owned by a guy or gal or a family that pours their heart and soul into their meat and barbecue. I don’t know what it is. It’s that it takes hours. It takes days. It takes focus and determination and desire to do it right. I just love it.

[24:05] And so I started eating barbecue more, which, um, my mom says it’s going to kill me and my wife says it makes me fat, but I don’t care. It makes me happy. I like eating barbecue. And so I share that passion and that passion, just connecting with, I bring it home to my kids and my youngest, he wants to smoke Turkey, my oldest, he wants me to bring him brisket and my wife wants me to bring chicken and it’s just become this awesome thing in my family that I spend time on that is, makes me happy and makes my family happy. And other people seem to connect on it as well. So to me, barbecue is a metaphor for doing what makes you happy and prioritizing it. So that’s me in a nutshell. That’s what we’re doing here on this podcast every week I hope to bring you stories and people’s stories of great entrepreneurs that are doing it right or that have done it wrong and realized what they should do different.

[25:15] Because I’m here to tell you, if you’re building a business that is all about being bigger and there’s not a real reason behind what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong. And I heard Dave Ramsey say, and I’m going to leave you on this. There is a difference between passion and talent. And you may have talent in something and you may do that every day and it may make you miserable. Go find your passion. Go find something you’re passionate about and you have a talent for. Once you do that, I guarantee you you’ll be happy. And that’s the name of the game. So until next time, keep cooking.

[26:01] We’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the barbecue podcast. Make sure you check out our other episodes and stopped by 10 Herriage dot. Come to say hi. We want to hear from you. Until next time, keep cooking.