People first.

I’ve had an entrepreneur’s itch for as long as I can remember. I ran a little web design company at sixteen, back when the web was brand new — sold a few sites, nothing serious, but it taught me early that I’d rather build something of my own than clock into someone else’s.

My parents did a real estate deal that showed me what was possible, and I knew right away this was the way to build real wealth — the kind a daily IT job could never scale to. But I also saw the trap in it: I watched a mortgage payment hang on whether a tenant came through that month. So I set out to do it differently. Never be one bad month from trouble. Always stay ahead.

In my early twenties I told people I’d retire by forty. They’d laugh. I was serious — though not in the sense of not working. I meant choosing my time, working where and when I want, on what I want. I hit it at forty-one. 2008 cost me the extra year, the same way it cost everybody.

At heart I’m a buy-and-hold investor. The foundation of all of it is the steady stuff — a ten-unit apartment complex and the RV park — income that doesn’t depend on flipping the next house. That base is what lets me be patient everywhere else: I can buy conservative, keep reserves, and never be forced to sell or scramble at the wrong time. Spread the weight across enough that no one tenant, no one month, no one deal can knock the whole thing over.

Because the foundation is solid, I get to choose the rest of my work — the rehabs, and newer things like TradeSchool AI, an AI mentor I built for day traders. I take them on because I want to, not because a paycheck demands it. That freedom is the entire point, and it’s exactly what ‘people first’ means to me: when you’re not desperate, you can do right by the tenants, the buyers, the neighbors, and the partners. That’s the only thing in this business that compounds faster than money.