Welcome to our latest episode. Today, we’re thrilled to have Chad Ackerman, Founder & Chief Operating Officer of Left Field Investors and host of the LFI Spotlight podcast. Chad, a former banking professional with a focus on data analytics, transitioned to full-time involvement with LFI in March 2023, leveraging his passion for real estate and analytical skills to enhance the investment community.
In this insightful discussion, Chad shares his journey from a W2 job in Human Resources to becoming a key player in the passive investing space. He discusses the founding and growth of Left Field Investors, a community dedicated to helping limited partners navigate the complexities of real estate investing. Chad highlights the importance of networking, education, and due diligence in making informed investment decisions. He also shares valuable tools and strategies that LFI offers to help members analyze deals and vet operators.
Tune in now to gain exclusive access to Chad Ackerman’s expertise and discover how to effectively engage in passive investing, leverage community insights, and achieve financial freedom. Don’t miss out on this episode filled with practical advice and inspiring stories!
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EPISODE
00:24 – Chad’s background and transition to full-time investing
02:00 – Founding Left Field Investors and the community’s growth
04:00 – The role of networking and education in passive investing
07:00 – Tools and strategies for deal analysis and vetting operators
10:00 – The importance of collective due diligence in the LFI community
13:00 – Navigating the current economic environment and finding opportunities
17:00 – The value of Pref Equity and risk-adjusted returns
20:00 – How to get involved with Left Field Investors and further resources
22:00 – Final thoughts and book recommendation
If you found this episode substantial and want to dig deeper into real estate, or maybe you want to discover better investment opportunities, be sure to check out www.tempofunding.com.
CONNECTING WITH THE GUEST
Website: https://www.leftfieldinvestors.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-ackerman-8089a8a/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQkUu09N3JTXTh33zdI_c7g
Email: chad@leftfieldinvestors.com
Full Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast, where you’ll learn about advanced wealth building strategies from real estate investing to creating massive ROI and secure retirement profits. So pour yourself a cup of coffee, grab a notepad, and lean in. Because Big Mike has got the mic, starting now.
Mike Zlotnik: Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast. I’m the Big Mike, Mike Zlotnik, and today it is my pleasure and a privilege to welcome Chad Ackerman from Leftfield Investors. Hi, Chad.
Chad Ackerman: Hey, Big Mike, good to see you again. Thanks for having me on today.
Mike Zlotnik: Thank you for coming on our podcast. Chad is a founder and a chief operating officer of the Left Field Investors.
It’s a great community for investors who are looking for due diligence to do combined collective due diligence. Before they write a check into many commercial and other deals. So tell us a little bit about Chad, you, your family, where you live. And then we’ll go about left field investors. What’s the mission, how it works and all that stuff.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, yeah, no, sure. So, yeah, thanks for having me on Chad Ackerman. Based out of Columbus, Ohio. And it’s where four of us six founders are located from, from left field investors. I was a career W2 guy. I was in human resources. Most of my career compensation was my focus and mostly on sales compensation plans.
So a lot of analytical work, a lot of you know, Analysis, spreadsheets, all those kinds of things were my friends. So it, that’s what helped me translate into the investing world that I live in today. But I got started in the investing side because I changed jobs. I ended up with a lot of dashboard time and a friend of mine at work said that she was looking for more income streams and talked about real estate investing.
And I thought, well, that sounds really interesting. I got this time in the car. I’ll start listening to podcasts and podcasts led to books and books led to a lot of analysis. And I was chasing a ton of shiny objects, trying to figure out how I could scale and grow and what really interested me and couldn’t find my thing.
And I struggled through looking at items for years and found a local meetup group that did. Active investing discussions. In the fourth session I went to the speaker happened to be talking about passive investing and how he left his W2 by passive investing. And after I heard him, that was kind of the switch that flipped for me of like, that’s the shiny object I’ve been looking for of, I was still in my W2.
It was a means for me to invest in real estate, which I loved, but I didn’t have to deal with tenants and termites and all the T’s. That the active side does. So it clicked with me and I liked it a lot. I invested in a couple of things. Started in 2019 with my first investments liked it. I actually liquidated my 401k and I took the penalties, took paid the tax and moved it all over because I thought I was young enough.
I could do more with that money in real estate than I now than I could waiting 15 more years until I turned 65 to start using it. Tax free or penalty free, I should say. Now I didn’t know in 2019 that, you know, the economy would go haywire today, but I’m still pleased with my decision to do that.
But all of that led to a group of us from that local meetup, trying to start a community to talk about passive investing and from there left field was born really, to be honest with you. But I’ll pause there just to give a break.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, I appreciate that. That’s a wonderful journey. It’s a journey I can relate to. I had similar journey in the technology world. One day you wake up and you just want to go and you enjoy passive investments in the way in that one day you want to go active. So how did you connect with other co founders? In other words, to start a business with other folks, you have to be very, very Happy, comfortable with your partners.
So how did you pick your partners or was it the natural decision? All of you and you guys already knew each other. Just curious.
Chad Ackerman: A little bit of all that, that, that speaker that I referred to that talked about passive investing is one of the partners. His name’s Jim Pifer. He was running that local meetup.
Honestly, majority of the founders we met through that local meetup. So we had been together Talking about real estate investing and so forth, Jim and a couple of others started sparking the idea of, of doing a spinoff community to talk about passive investing because the community we were in was very active.
And I raised my hand after that meeting, I met with Jim. And introduce myself and found out we live in the same suburb of town. So we got together for a beer afterwards a couple of weeks later and started talking about our excitement around this and it just organically spiraled from there. And in our intent, we just wanted to build a local meetup and have 10 or 12 people that were passively investing to get like minded people together.
To share stories and kind of vet deals and talk about operators and the economy and how it’s affecting it. So it all started that way. Our very first meeting that we were going to hold was supposed to be March 18th of 2020. The world shut down on March 15th of 2020 and put us on zoom like we’re doing today.
And that’s really where left field took off then. It, it organically grew because we knew others that weren’t local that we could invite to be part of this community or this networking is really what it was about networking and education. And then it grew from there with word of mouth, mostly to where now left field investors has over 2000 people in their community.
And we’ve had. Capital raised through us. We aren’t capital raisers, but money invested from left, the left field community is up over 50 million over the last year and a half, two years. So it’s really grown into this larger organization, big, bigger than we had plans. When we started out, this was a hobby that we wanted to selfishly become better investors ourselves.
And instead it grew into this business that we could help a lot of other people. And that that’s we, we host a couple of, or we’ve hosted a couple of local meetups. And I can’t get over when people come up to me and tell me that I’ve helped change their lives with what we built and what we’ve done that is gave them a place to go find people that were like minded that could share stories with and help them.
understand the business better and make better decisions. So it’s, it’s been a, that’s, that’s been a great journey by itself, let alone what I’ve been through too. But it’s, it’s been fun.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I appreciate your, your, your great details. So sometimes great communities or great businesses are born.
With a small idea and kind of, I guess, COVID disrupted you. And at the same time gave you gave you a boost, but let’s talk a little bit more about how the community functions, because it’s a very powerful community. We certainly are part of many passive investment communities. And the, to me again, As a fund manager and a podcaster communities like that, like us are great friend, so we absolutely love interacting and working within the community like yours because it’s difficult to find many.
Like minded investors, passive investors who are focused on good due diligence, deep due diligence, finding the right folks to invest with, and then ultimately writing a check. So how does the community work? How do you bring in let’s just call them the movers and shakers, the funds or the operators or folks who do deals or have funds.
And how do you do the diligence on them? Or is it a collective due diligence by many members? Versus you know, you hire a third party special firm that does due diligence, which I don’t think you’re doing it. It would be very complicated. You would be now in investment banking business. It’d be a very different environment where folks have to do their own due diligence. Just curious, just tell us a little bit about how the community functions.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, no, great question. It we definitely designed left field investors to be a do it yourself kind of community for the limited partner investor. So we build it with the limited partner investor in mind. We build it how we would like to see a community operate that it’s it’s there.
We as founders are not, we, we disclaim this everywhere. We don’t vet operators. We don’t vet deals. We play more of a middleman role almost is how I like to describe it. That we have a community of limited partner investors that are looking for information. We meet new operators, new operators, veteran operators.
Every day we have a group of preferred partners as we call them that are operators that we really like to work with, but we don’t vet those operators. We tell the community, do it yourself. Here are some tools to help you vet, but it’s on you. We aren’t doing any kind of advising around this which really gives us a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility to bring Anybody into the community as long as the operator didn’t seem like they would be a fraud or you know Something we wouldn’t want to introduce to the community It really opens the door and then what has happened again organically inside the community Is there is community vetting that goes on around deals and operators?
We have a forum and in the forum There’s a lot of chatter around operators deals The economy, what’s next, what life insurance, you name it, tools, whatever it is that helps educate the fellow limited partner that’s in the community on making decisions around themselves. We, we’ve always said we, because we aren’t capital raisers.
We don’t really know what our LPs are looking for. We aren’t financial advisors for them. So we don’t know that they want a self storage unit in Indianapolis. You know, we don’t have any specifics like that. So I view our job as leaders of left field is to bring as much diversity to the crowd as we can.
So that they can pick and choose what they do want to get involved in. So I love finding new operators, new asset classes that we can introduce because we don’t know who’s trying to round out their portfolio with something different that we could find for them or help find for them and bring in to let them, that decide for themselves what they want to do.
And then while we’re bringing in those new operators and new asset classes, We get a lot of experience tried and true, well known liked and trusted operators that come in as well when they have a new fund or a new asset available. So we get this mix of maybe people you haven’t heard of, and then the the hitters that you have by all means.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, I appreciate the explanation. Most of communities similar to yours, they’re focused on networking and education, right? Ultimately, that’s what you do. You’re not, investment vetting and investment advice business is a very dangerous business and very difficult business and people who play in that space is very different from most of, you know, you need great expertise and there’s potential liability and responsibility.
Related to picking and choosing kind of people who come into the community or not. But at the same time you got to be gatekeepers because there are shysters and idiots out there. I, I’ve talked about this many times on my podcast, et cetera. There are. Great operators, honest operators.
Sometimes the market is tough. Like you said, you started the whole conversation. This market beaten up some of the great operators. It’s unfortunate and difficult when the fed height rate, they’re hurting a lot of commercial deals. But those folks are good and legit. Yeah, and there are out there comedians who are just trying to take advantage of communities and you have to have Reasonable, I don’t know call it vetting process that these had to decide who is worth Introducing to the community or not.
So I don’t know any comments on this and then the other Quick, quick question is what kind of tools to give investors to help do collective betting or because it’s a lot of these folks in our professions, so you can educate them best practices, but it’s difficult for one individual to do all the due diligence. Just curious. What tools? How do you give them? How do you help them
Chad Ackerman: fill in the, the biggest asset I think we offer the limit partner is the forum itself, actually, because you have veterans in there that have been doing this for years. You have newer people. I love the newer investors that are in here because they ask the questions that a lot of people won’t ask because they’re kind of feel like they should know the answer already.
So that to me is always the biggest place. I Point limited partner members of our community towards is go in, ask the questions, get the feedback and, you know, make your decisions off of that. But beyond that, we do offer some tools. We have a list of sponsors to help people get started of just here are, I think there’s about 50 or so operators that we have on a list just to give them names and numbers to start out with and what asset classes they’re in, what their fee structures are like, how long they’ve been in the business, something to give them.
It’s a big Open, vast scary area when you first walk into it. So we wanted to give them some place to start. And then we also have a tool that is a list of our top questions that we’ve come up with to ask a operator to vet about their deal, about themselves, about their business, reach out to resource or references from them and questions for those.
So we give you a list of questions as well, to help you know what to talk to an operator about. And then we also have a deal analyzer tool that we built that you can plug in information from the PPM and the marketing material. And we have suggested ranges that these items, these metrics ought to fit into.
And we flag things that spark outside of our recommended ranges, not to say that you shouldn’t invest in that deal, but it gives you good conversation to have with the operator then to say Hey, I I’ve been told that these fees are usually in this range and yours is outside of why is that? Can you explain it and that helps vet the operator a little bit more as well To see how they respond to that kind of question So that tool kind of gives you a in range out of range and then gives you questions to ask And then the the final tool we just rolled this out actually in the last month or so We built kind of a Call it a Yelp for sponsors to allow our members to rate and summarize feedback on sponsors to help people kind of look at who’s, who’s well thought of in the community, who’s got good ratings.
There’s four or five different questions that we ask that we ask him to star one through five on. And then there’s a free form section where you could type a message about them. That is just rolled out, but it’s getting a great feedback on it. We’ve been trying to get to this for a couple of years, so we’re excited that it’s finally coming to fruition and getting out there now, we just got to get people into populate it.
So we’ve got some good feedback in there, but all of those we built to try to help that limited partner, look at a deal, look at an operator and judge whether they want to make that decision or not.
Thank you, Chad. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll just have a couple of comments on what you just described. So the Yelp is pretty cool. Just, just listening to this.
Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik: It just needs to be also what I call it, hopefully a little bit dynamic. My wife is optometrist and I’ve seen funny comments from not non patients. We’ve actually seen this people come in and they don’t like you or they want to put a bad mark on you. And we’ve had these discussions and you try to remove a Google review or a Yelp review when it’s hard. So my feedback to you, just make sure you have a good mechanism. If a rating comes in, you have an opportunity for the sponsor to respond and understand what’s happening. Obviously five stars is wonderful. When you get a one star. Was it somebody who had a bad day? Just have nothing better to do with a rough review.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, we do. We do put a pause on anything that is submitted so we can review it first to kind of eyeball, is this an outlier? Does this feel like it’s you know, not really on par. And we also require that there are three reviews of they’ll written about an operator. Before we release any of that information for the public so we can kind of watch that it’s not just a one off Saying nasty things trying to slander somebody we we kind of built some tools around trying to prevent that from happening, but it’s good feedback I thank you for that.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, i’ll tell you that and the other really important would be help I mean, it’s very difficult. It’s purely tech business But if it’s a relational business definitely reach out to the the operator and say hey somebody’s he’s saying You guys didn’t take care of the business Give them a chance at least to respond.
It’s very important. I know if you’re trying to do purely technology solution, it’s one thing, but if it’s a more relational community, like you got to have the interaction and then the other quick comment I had, I really liked that, that you guys have years ago, I wrote a book, top 10 questions to ask.
Before investing into any finance indication is still available on amazon And when you have it’s basically tools set of questions That that that folks should be asking and it sounds like you develop this into much more. This was a 30 Page pamphlet that I produced years ago And you could ask probably I’m going to call it 200 questions, but take 10 into 30 questions and giving these ranges is a wonderful idea because at least you’re giving them a framework.
These type of fees are within reason. This is looks way too high and this is too low and in the wild west of sponsors and operators, there are folks out there. That give investors 10 percent pref and keep 90 percent of the upside. Like it’s not 90 10 split, it’s 10 90 split. I’m using this as an extreme example.
So you got to give them some ranges. Listen, 8 8 is reasonable. If you have the reverse, why is the, is it in this direction? Who is taking the risk? Who is getting the reward? So basic common sense like this is very powerful. Because ultimately I can tell you this as a fund manager we operate funds We believe in institutional quality terms and institutional quality waterfall But when you have communities that folks that make it look pretty and they have what I call their mom and pop terms They’re not being fair to investors.
So educated empowered investors what we want because Successful, ultimately the good shops will get their attention sooner or later. And then the, let’s just call him a mom and pop a fly by or not good operators ultimately will kind of just disappear. So having a community with the right tools is hugely helpful. That’s my quick comment.
Chad Ackerman: Absolutely. No. And we, we encourage people to be a part of multiple communities. By all means, the more information you can get, the better decisions you’re going to make. We have a community we think is doing pretty well, but we know there are other communities that are very valuable out there as well.
But we tell people all the time, don’t, don’t just join one, join multiple because you’re going to gain that much more knowledge out of all that info share that’s out there. But hopefully what we’ve built is worthwhile to people as they go through as well.
Mike Zlotnik: I’ll tell you this. There are a number of communities, but this finite number of hours and minutes, agreed.
And folks, if they get to like and trust your community, just like there are BiggerPockets, there are other private forums, 5 0 6 group, et cetera, and, and your community. Mm-hmm, you wind up working within whatever community fit fits you most. That that’s kind of my observation.
Chad Ackerman: I do think we’ve built a culture that people seem to gravitate towards more than some of those other communities, which we’re very proud of.
I think it’s because of how we created left field, that it was a hobby with trying to be a local chapter meetup kind of thing. And it grew into this business that we protected the culture as we built the business, because we knew that was valuable. It was valuable to us. So I think that gives us a little different feel, which I think a lot of people respond well to.
But it’s, yeah, I mean, to your point, you, you may join multiple, but you’re going to find what you like in any one of them and gravitate towards one of them more than the others, probably. But, you know, we’re here for people that want to learn. That’s what we were all about trying to just become better LP investors ourselves.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, it makes sense. I have a couple of quick questions. And of course, you don’t go in this territories, but we do this all day long as fund managers. We try to get bigger checks and negotiate better terms. Do you do any of that, which is difficult? Because at the moment you go into that, you have to be careful not to step in the, into investment advice or aggregation business.
But of course you have community strength in numbers. Somehow, if you say, Hey, here’s 10, 20 people, they’re all interested. Yeah. Can you do something for the community that will improve? Again, this is simply the power of a bigger check as a community.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, we really have left that to the operator. We’ve suggested it frequently to newer operators that come in.
We have some veteran operators that we’ve worked with for three or four or two or three years now, they have that standard in their policy. There’s a threshold that if everybody that from left field mentions, they’re with left field when they invest, then we achieve a certain certain threshold. We may get, you know, a better split, a better prep, whatever it is.
But we don’t, we don’t ask for it up front. We kind of leave it to the operator, especially in this economy. It’s been a lot harder for concessions to be given it like that. I feel like, but at the same time, I think operators are looking harder and harder for money because I don’t think investors are spending as much.
So we’re very open to it. We’ve had that in many cases, we do look for that buying power benefit if we can get it. But we don’t push it to the operators. We we generally ask about it. Hey, are you going to offer any? Benefits to left field for a certain threshold some will some won’t and i’d say now it’s probably probably around 50 percent of the time that we’re getting concessions this day and age
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, appreciate couple other quick questions and then kind of so one question.
I am. I am not familiar with the term left field. So why left field investors? I mean, I’m assuming it’s a baseball field. So what’s the left field? That’s not in the right field.
Chad Ackerman: It’s a great question. So. We are not baseball fans. I hate to ruin it for anybody listening, but we are not baseball fans.
Actually left field to us came from when we were active investors and in our W twos and looking at this space, we would talk to our financial advisors about this. And they would tell us to shy away mostly because they weren’t getting commissions for this, but they would say, Oh, you don’t, you don’t want to invest your money in real estate like that.
That’s out in left field. That’s, it’s a risk. There’s, you know, no, not a lot of people do that. So it’s, it’s that slang term of it’s coming out of left field that we love that idea that, you know what, we’re going to make this work. So we adopted the name And we use a lot of baseball themes in our, in our community, even though we aren’t baseball fans, but technically left field came from that kind of a comment from our financial advisors thinking we were crazy to be doing this kind of thing.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah. And I appreciate that. And I, I just, just want to acknowledge and appreciate, you know, appreciate you and other communities who do this because some folks quote on the wall street. The truth of the matter is exactly what you said. These investment advisors, they get compensated to sell Wall Street products.
So the moment you go outside of what they make commissions on, they have no economic incentives. Of course, they don’t talk the talk. They, they, they walk the wall. I mean, let me go this way. The, what is it called? It’s a, there’s a bias that makes folks like things that they are economically beneficial to them.
And that’s essentially what happens. And being in the left field community, I guess you’re on your own. You have to do a lot of the work with these unvetted or maybe somewhat vetted operators, but they, the potential is. You could rip the benefits that the wall street is not offering. It’s a very different philosophy.
Chad Ackerman: Well, it’s, it’s comical to us almost because it’s called alternative investing. Real estate investing dates back way further than wall street does. So it’s actually the original investing is the way we view it. So we’re just trying to shine a light on that. There, there are other ways of growing your wealth.
Outside of wall street that are safe. They have the risk. Like anything does wall street has its risk too, but it’s an area that there just isn’t a lot of education on. And so we wanted to build what we could to share that a little bit of education that we understood to gain, you know, get people interested in, in help them learn more anyway,
Mike Zlotnik: Great wisdom, real estate investment was there way before, mostly way before that is the
That’s right. That’s the truth. Right? That’s it’s been around way, way longer before wall was started. Way longer. Right. And another very quick question. So we are living in very dynamic times and I just, it’s probably one of the last questions and then we gotta move on. It’s a dynamic environment for, for years, real estate has been stable, predictable, steady at a great investment.
Then the fed went wild in the fight of inflation. We’ve been destabilized. So it’s kind of a very dynamic times and uncertain times uncomfortable times. So what are you doing to educate investors to better understand what has transpired? What’s kind of a sale for example a lot of commercial real estate certain type of deals Assets trading at a discount versus something else maybe trading at a fully full price again I like to call it.
There’s been everything rally wall street bitcoin gold and again I I i’m not that saying anything negative about those things they can go up and up and up Until, you know, there’s no end in sight, but at the same time, certain opportunities in real estate look a lot more attractive on the risk adjusted basis.
I’m curious if you’re doing any of that education because if you are teaching folks, you can go outside of Wall Street. You have to really let folks know that the stock market has done so well. Now is the time to potentially consider diversifying outside of it for the reasons that it’s so overpriced in some ways.
That you may have better bargains and better opportunities in certain sectors of real estate. Just curious.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah. I, I think the biggest thing that we coach on this day and age, because a lot of people are hesitant. A lot of people are scared, holding cash, waiting to see what happens, which I totally understand and can respect.
We coach that if that’s the case, if that’s your strategy, Now’s the time to educate yourself. Now, spend more time talking to operators that you’re either already invested with the, to learn more about their, how they’re managing current strategies, you really can’t do a lot with the investments you’re in already.
You’re kind of locked in. But understand how they’re trying to manage it and what their next is going to be, what their options are, if things continue to be difficult. So you’re prepared and you know what to do, but educate on what their next steps are. Is this somebody you’re going to want to continue to invest with because they’re weathering the storm, they’re making good investment decisions right now, and then go out and meet new operators that maybe you haven’t had the time to talk to as well.
To build that bench strength, have that next one or two operator that you’re feeling comfortable with. Take advantage of that time that you’re maybe not investing in deals, but investing in your education is what we’re really steering people towards these days. But from a deal perspective, pref equity is still getting, I know you and I talked about this on our podcast, pref equity is getting a ton of attention, which I think is smart on that shorter term, higher in the capital stack.
A little more protected money, if you will. None of it is, but a little more secure kind of investment that seems to be catching a lot of attention in our community that we tell people, look into this, study this area, learn more about private equity, this rescue money and take a look at this space because it, it has a lot of validity right now.
And take advantage of it in this economy because it’s not going to be here forever. But it’s also a little more secure than jumping in with a new operator that you maybe don’t know that doesn’t know how to do the work as much that gives you a space. If you have an operator that knows what they’re doing with pref equity to do your vetting, do your due diligence.
But, but those are kind of the two big things that we seem to be steering people towards outside of, you know, look Look at where you might want to store cash. If you want to store cash, that is still fairly liquid, but maybe it’s getting you somewhat of a return, you know, more than your savings count, if you will.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah. Appreciate that. Chad, a lot of great wisdoms. I have this expression, you have spoken many times, so you, you are encouraging folks to learn from their own investment. This is very important. I love to ask this question. Are you learning to invest in investing to learn?
Chad Ackerman: Yeah,
Mike Zlotnik: hopefully both all the time, right? Because you’ve invested now you got to learn from your experience and then Before you make the next investment, you better learn first and then make the investment So that that is a continuous journey on both fronts. Yeah, I agree with you on Preferred equity, mass financing. That’s the hottest thing today.
So it’s the best opportunity. And also what’s really important. I look at the past all the time and past really tells you, of course, a story. Sometimes it’s a wonderful book or a wonderful story, but what’s the most important thing is to be able to look into the future and you’re not in the game of predicting.
Predicting or projecting or you know, crystal ball type of an exercise, right?
Chad Ackerman: Right, right.
Mike Zlotnik: It’s more of a, what lessons can you learn from the past to be able to make investments better in the future? And of course, many of us learn the very basic lessons of better diversification. better risk mitigation, etc, etc. But I’ll make this one comment and one, one final thought, and then you can just tell folks how to reach out.
Chad Ackerman: Sure.
Mike Zlotnik: That sometimes you go through experience that’s difficult and painful, and you immediately respond by saying, well, I took all this risk when the risk was, when the environment was very risk friendly, but not really anticipating the black swan events and not really pricing in the risk properly.
And then now it’s the reverse, right? The risk, people are afraid of the risk. They’re fearful of the risk and they’re shying away from the risk because they will lose some money on the deals that were at higher risk. Now, my message to everyone. Is to consider sometimes the pendulum swings all the way the other way and we may be missing on great opportunities with phenomenal risk adjusted or turn when you are completely risk averse just because you took risk somewhere and it didn’t work out.
Yeah, just learning from the experience not to go through extremes. But what’s the final two questions? You have a great book recommendation. And how would folks reach out? What’s the best way to get ahold of you or just learn more about left field investors?
Chad Ackerman: Sure. So one of our founders actually wrote a book for the communities called avoiding rookie errors.
Investing with left field investors. It’s his lessons learned book that he wrote over lessons. He’s learned over the last 14 years that he’s been doing investing. It’s great. It’s quick books, quick read. It’s short. But it’s a great little read just to give people food for thought of things. They ought to watch for as they’re getting into this space. Forgive me. I forgot what you asked
Mike Zlotnik: the next question. How do folks reach out to you? Yeah, I feel the investors. com or what’s the website.
Chad Ackerman: Yep. Leftfieldinvestors. com will work, or you can email me at chad at leftfieldinvestors. com as well. Both will work.
Mike Zlotnik: Chad, it’s been awesome to have you. Appreciate your wisdom. Appreciate your sharing. I think it’s going to be an awesome episode and love the progress Leftfield is making. I’m a big fan and you guys Rock and roll.
Chad Ackerman: Thank you. No, this is great. I really enjoyed talking to you again. So thanks for having me on.
Mike Zlotnik: Thank you.
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