Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast! Are you a passive investor or sponsor navigating today’s challenging real estate market? Join host Mike Zlotnik for an insightful conversation with Chad Ackerman, co-founder of Leftfield Investors (now part of Passive Pockets under BiggerPockets) and a Focal Point coach. With years of experience building a platform to educate and connect limited partners (LPs) with sponsors, Chad now coaches both investors and operators to succeed in the alternative investment space. In this episode, recorded in mid-April 2025, Chad shares strategies for LPs to overcome recent market setbacks, emphasizing rigorous due diligence and stress testing deals. For sponsors, he offers guidance on building trust and refining business structures in a post-COVID, high-interest-rate environment.
Whether you’re an LP looking to make smarter investments or a sponsor aiming to strengthen your operations, Chad’s insights will help you learn from past mistakes and seize today’s opportunities.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EPISODE
00:00 – Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast
00:25 – Guest introduction: Chad Ackerman
01:15 – Chad’s journey with Leftfield Investors and Focal Point coaching
03:26 – Coaching sponsors and investors in today’s market
04:52 – Building trust as a sponsor: It’s a relationship business
07:02 – Evolving due diligence: Stress tests and conservative underwriting
10:26 – Finding seasoned operators who survived 2008 and recent downturns
12:41 – Overcoming recency bias in investment decisions
15:24 – Learning from mistakes: A key part of coaching
18:06 – Fixed vs. floating rate debt: Applying lessons learned
21:23 – Boosting LP confidence through education and goal-setting
25:26 – Stress testing deals: Sensitivity analysis essentials
30:22 – How to connect with Chad
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.
CONNECT WITH US:
Website: www.tempofunding.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnJkdVoOsUy85ydkmot9iVA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mzlotnik/
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/TFmanagementgroup/?_rdc=1&_rdr
X: https://twitter.com/management_tf
CONNECT WITH THE GUEST
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-ackerman-8089a8a/
Website: www.chadackerman.focalpointcoaching.com
Chad’s Calendar: https://meetings.hubspot.com/cackerman7/20-mcc
Mobile: 614-467-0377
Email: cackerman@focalpointcoaching.com
Episode Tags
#PassiveInvesting
#RealEstateInvesting
#DueDiligence
#AlternativeInvestments
#InvestorEducation
#Sponsorship
#FinancialCoaching
Full Transcript:
Mike Zlotnik: Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast. I’m the BigMike, Mike Zlotnik, and it is my pleasure and a privilege to welcome back my really good friend, Chad Ackerman.
Chad Ackerman: Good to see you again.
Mike Zlotnik: Great to see you too, Chad. He’s done many things. One of them obviously founding or co-founding left field investors. And then since left Field was acquired by the PassivePockets, BiggerPockets, now it’s called PassivePockets.
And then, Chad is still affiliated with them. At the same time, he’s also a coach with Focal Point. So, welcome back to the show.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, I’ve got a, I’ve got a laundry list in my past of things that I’m involved in, that’s for sure. Never wanna be bored.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, it’s, again, I don’t know the whole history from the beginning of time.
I just know that the left field was an interesting adventure, and you started with a platform that many passive investors needed to, get the right education and now you’re doing coaching. So before it was just educational platform, networking platform for investors to meet, sponsors and to be able to do some collective due diligence.
And, and now it’s coaching. ‘Cause it’s hard. A lot of people need coaching and I guess you’re coaching both the investors and the sponsors.
Chad Ackerman: Absolutely. Anybody that’s running a business and investing this business, a lot of times limited partners have their own business as well. Operators obviously are running a business.
I, the materials at Focal Point allowed me to blend with my experience of being in the industry, running left field for so long. I think it brings some value back to the community and that’s, that was my goal, is to give back. I. To the limited partner investors that were part of left field and part of our community now part of passive pockets, but also to help operators that were you, you’re, you’re engaged in the middle of the, the process yourself.
There are people that are starting out as operators that are maybe done it for a year or two that maybe don’t understand the business side as much. And so I like the tools that Focal Point developed me with or you know, gave me background on to be able to bring that to those operators and help them kind of get their business structure set up correctly, let alone worrying about good deals and underwriting and LPs and everything else.
So, I thought it was a good way for me to go back and help out with all the experience I gained at left field with working with limited partners. There was a lot of investor relations kind of assistance I think that I could bring to operators as well. Just because we ran a community of LPs for so long, we heard what they wanted, we heard what they were struggling with.
so I think there’s a lot of good advice I can kind of bring to the operator side of things as well. But, but I wanna work with LPs still too and help them with their business and the business of investing, help kind of educate them more. left field was all about educating passive pockets is still about educating.
So I’ve just found another avenue to bring that to the community members as well.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah. And I appreciate that wisdom. And there are two big angles and they’re very different angles, although they kind of meet in the middle. so how do you, you know what, what, we’re recording this sort of, middle of April, not quick, well, towards the middle of April, 2025.
Obviously the environment is very different now than a few years ago. So in this environment, what are the, the hottest topics to the. Sponsors who need coaching, obviously smaller operators, they’re trying to navigate this, very different landscape versus few years ago. versus existing operators and, and existing sponsors.
So what do you see? ’cause you have specific folks you’re working with. And then on the other side, on the investor side, many investors, have had their challenges. With checks written a few years back because the market condition shifted. Operators were not exactly ideal the way they, they thought they would be.
And so how do you take folks on the other side of the spectrum? Do they experience and how do they adjust on a forward basis? Because people can’t go fix the past, they can only fix the future. And then the coaching work hopefully helps them, with the future decisions and future investments.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, no, absolutely.
On, on the sponsor side of things, I think what we learned. That was the biggest piece of advice that we could give operators, especially newer operators, is help them understand this is a relationship business. Limited partners like to invest with people that they know, like, and trust. And that takes time to build that.
And that’s the structure we’ve built. Passive pockets supports it as well of giving different avenues for operators to be able to meet, LPs in the community. On a frequent basis so that they can build that trust and so forth. And so what I’ve found with Focal Point is the ability to help them, kind of guide them through.
Strategies around building that trust. How do you get known? Well go, go do webinars. Go do lunch and learns, give free content, teach people about the industry, and build your own credibility by doing that. But also it’s, it’s another touch point of, okay, I, I heard them do this. They said these things. That sounds good.
I wanna call ’em up and talk to them and, and get some more information from them and start that process. That’s what we want to help, newer operators understand is it’s not just show up and ask for a check and you’re gonna expect to get a million dollars outta people. It doesn’t work that way, especially in this environment where LPs have been burned over the last few years by operators that didn’t set things up well.
That no like, and trust relationship is even more important now. so that, you know, that’s the big angle with the operator side of things is just kind of help educate ’em of, don’t, don’t think this is a race, this is a marathon. it’s not a sprint. I guess it is a race, but it’s not a sprint. you know, take your time.
Be willing to put in the time to build that relationship. Make yourself available so that the operators can really grow to trust you and know your process, your underwriting, your conservative approach so that they can feel comfortable writing a check to you. That’s a big part of it.
Mike Zlotnik: Have you seen adjustments to underwriting?
And almost the answer is, it must be right. What? What the due diligence was few years ago is now very different. market conditions shifted so much and, the, the factors, the, the, the variables, yeah, the assumptions are very, very different. are, are you coaching folks to, look at different set of variables?
It’s obviously cap rates, interest rates, right? You some, some really basic stuff. The, the other set of questions that have come up with and on both side of the, of the equation operator capability to execute. So we’ve seen a lot of challenges with execution. Folks have have taken on projects being a thousand miles away and not being able to manage, then trying property manager remotely, not being able to manage them, taking things in in-house.
So some of these experiences. Have, demonstrated that it’s hard and whatever the strategy, you, it’s not easy to build that overnight. Yeah. So what, what, what people are doing different today to be able to execute well today versus, you know, I. A few years ago, it almost didn’t matter how well you executed because the market kept solving all the problems.
I would say the market bailed everybody out.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Mike Zlotnik: So these conversations are very relevant and as part of coaching on both sides, how do you evaluate? You, you, you, you are talking to, in investors on the other side, right? No, no. How do you know somebody can actually execute today? And, and we, we’ve seen something really interesting.
We’ve seen. People a bit more than they can chew. People have, have run into, issues where, things weren’t, you know, covid related, right? They couldn’t execute, evictions, et cetera. And the rent projections didn’t hold up. The new supply came in into, there’s all kinds of variables that, today need to be edited to the equation, when making investment decisions even to come to the conclusion, is this a strong deal or not?
I’m just curious, any thoughts that you, you’ve seen from conversations on both sides of the spectrum, the sponsor conversations, and then also investor conversations. How do they look at these writing, these fresh checks? what, what criteria, what changes? I mean, I’m engaged with another, member of the community.
I’m not gonna mention this, but he’s, you know, he does a lot of, due diligence work and the, these discussions are, you know, it’s an evolving, changing environment.
Chad Ackerman: Absolutely. No, it’s due diligence has always been important. But you’re right, the market bailed out a lot of limited partners as well, of they could be more passive.
They didn’t have to do as much due diligence if they didn’t want to. And that created promoted kind of some laziness from an LP standpoint. And we’ve always said, you really, we, we. I phrase it as, you need to be an active passive investor. You really, it’s hard to be a truly passive investor in the space because you’ve gotta stay educated.
part of that is due diligence around, you know, deal structure became so important of understanding how mortgages were set up, how loans were structured to see if the operators were being conservative enough and protected enough. you know, minimum rent requirements, information like that, that.
People probably weren’t going to that detail in the ppms a few years ago. Those things became very important to understand. Always were, but you just, they got a spotlight put on them over the last few years. So it’s, I still am a firm believer you can find deals in any environment, and this is a pretty tough environment still right now.
But due diligence is your, your, your king here of going in and understanding, spending more time in that PPM than maybe you used to, to really understand where are the risks and do they align with your own risks on how they’re approaching these deals nowadays. My, my other, side of this, kind of the reverse of it is I feel like there’s no better time to be an LP than right now, because a lot of these operators that were newer, that weren’t really experienced, didn’t understand the space.
Got exposed and so there are fewer operators. To really pay attention to. My suggestion usually is go find operators that survived these last few years and still had deals that, you know, maybe they didn’t even have to stop distributions if they structured well enough or they stopped distributions for the right reason.
Follow that track record through how they managed these last few years. But even better than that, find an operator that survived this environment and find an operator that made it through 2008 2009 as well. That’s a really seasoned operator that’s been through the most trying financial situations we’ve been in in the last 15 years.
If they made it through all of that, that’s a pretty good place to start anyway. Still do your deal, deal due diligence, understand what they’re doing, but those are operators that have a good track record that we’d be worth looking into.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah. Thanks Chad. And I’ll, I’ll add this commentary. So in, in general, this is a sound process, with a couple of sort of thoughts.
One, not too many people were around 2008, just to be, you know, relative to a, yeah. So if you’ve been around this long, you’ve really been in business for a long time. I mean, we’re talking about. Is it 17 years? Right? So 17 years. and you survived that cycle means you had another however many years before.
So you, you’re talking about kind of all dogs of the industry, right? Agreed. This, by this point. The, the other thing that I, I really struggle with, today, sort of my own observation, and I, I’ll tell you this, Recency bias is just too, too strong. We, we, we all overreact to the recent events. Yeah.
Including some of the things that, outside of our control, number one and number two, the. Acting on recency bias would, would tell you, keep buying stocks. Why the hell would you wanna go into these discounted distress multifamily assets? Because you, you’ve done well in the stock market. W why change?
What, what, what has worked? Right? But it’s, it, it’s the exactly the opposite Now, now. We’re recording this with heavy, heavy volatility in, in, in traditional markets and alternatives like, like real estate, commercial real estate is trading. A lot of these assets are trading at a much better value. Yeah. So from that perspective, even looking at the sponsors who have been beaten up and they made mistakes, there’s there, there, there’s something to say about the book.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. I. True experiences, what you get when you don’t get what you want. There’s a Russian old saying that says, people give seven inexperienced fighters for one that’s been beaten down. Why? Because they’ve learned from their, hopefully they’ve learned from their experience.
Yeah. Right. So I, I, I kind of go back and I think about this, the industry is really. Looking for answers or for, for changes, but, but a lot of them is back to real basic fundamentals. One of the things that, most of us missed is we, we adjusted to the days of, investing in 21, 22, where if you don’t take action, somebody else will and you’ll miss the boat.
Yeah. And market cycles were not really looked at. at that time. It, it looked like the market cycle will continue indefinitely. most of investors were not full cycle investors. They were sort of all momentum investors. Now, when the pendulum swung all the way, the other way, people are looking, well, definitely who survived, right?
Who, who, who’s, who seems to have, have survived the, the downturn and they have ability, you know, these deals are not all fallen apart. So there’s some, there’s some, some logic to that. But on the other side, what lessons have been learned? So I almost go back and I don’t know if you’re using this in, in, in sort of in coaching, but one of the most useful tools in coaching is analyzing your own mistakes, then analyzing mistakes of others, right?
And then learning. What lessons have you learned from that experience? I’m just curious if, if the coaching process has any of that,
Chad Ackerman: thought it, it, it does speak to that and it’s absolutely a thing it, in this business. the tricky thing for me, just from advice that we gave to LPs as we went through our, our, one of our goals for LPs was don’t be the Guinea pig.
Don’t be somebody that’s trying out something that the operator’s doing that’s different than they did before. And learning whether they learned from this market or not is kind of a Guinea pig situation of you’re taking that risk of. Okay, you saw what went wrong. Are you managing it differently now?
That’s where you really gotta dig into the due diligence and see if they’re structuring their deals differently than they did three years ago when things went awry on them. so it’s, it’s just go with caution. I, I’m with you. Hopefully, you know, the biggest lessons we learn are from failures, not from succession or succeeding.
So hopefully there’s a lot of operators that come out of this licking their wounds, but learning something and pivoting. Just take extra caution. You saw that they failed with deals before. Make sure they’ve accounted for whatever they needed to adjust. And it’s your comfort level, it’s your risk level of what you would be okay with, from an O operator pivoting to just make sure you have your criteria, what you need.
And you know, there’s other deals around the corner, so don’t be fearful that I’ve gotta jump in this one. Take your time, make sure you’re getting it right for what your risk tolerances are.
Mike Zlotnik: That makes sense and I’ll, I’ll add one comment that sort of, this conversation continues that, that’s, that’s on my mind.
So quite a, quite a lot of folks did exactly what they did before and they still completely failed. This is the crazy part, right? So people did what worked. They continued to do it. Then as an example, they did value add deal with floating rate debt.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik: And then they were turning them fast and, and, and the, the folks with high leverage on top of all that.
Right. And the folks that went into low leverage, fixed rate debt, they had the folks who are surviving, because they, they had the downside protection.
Intro: Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik: Now, if you look at the stuff today. And I have to say this, of course we, we, we’ve seen in a reset in the interest rate environment, so we don’t know whether it’s go up or down.
But again, the, the risk of a massive spikes of interest rates from now are, you know, where they’re relatively small is the question, you know, how, what, what cuts are coming and when we sort of stolen this environment. But the, the point that I’m making is, is that the shift. Was so large and fundamental that you almost need sort of new, applications of the standards.
In other words, do all variable floating rate mortgages are bad? If you could, goly said no.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik: Then which ones are good and they’re good on the deals that you actually. Buying really, really well. And then you, you, you, in the past, the reason people took floating rate mortgage, there’s a, there’s a primary reason, just I’m using this as an example of a very industry standard thing that took place that backfired on a lot of people.
Yeah. And now people are categorically, I just wanna fixate that as an example, which is not necessarily better at all. But there are drawbacks. You have prepayment penalties, right? If interest rates fall and you’re locked into fixed rate debt, you can’t refinance or exit without penalties on the other side.
Right. If you take floating rate debt today, when the interest rates are high and the interest rates can fall, you have the optionality to refinance if you can actually execute the, the plan. I, I’m just saying that as part of the learning process, at least I go through and I’m, I, I’d be curious, to hear your thoughts.
I, I try not to be categorical on anything. Yeah, especially, if something broke, it used to work and now it, it depends on the swings all the way. You just always gotta lock in, fix rate that low leverage, go as conservative as you can because it is not always the right answer on a forward basis. Agreed.
It’s just more of a, a lot of, the, the, the point of lessons is to. Understand applications of each kind of approach and why it didn’t work or failed or ran into problems, and when is it applicable again, because the technique itself is not necessarily a bad technique, it’s just the When the timing was terrible, then yeah, it did.
It did malfunction terribly. This is that one example related to the interest rates. The other examples could be, you know, in, in the, operations or where identification of location, et cetera. So give me some thoughts. What else are you doing with, with LPs to give them fresh perspective and give them a little more confidence to take action?
’cause the other thing that I see is people are gunshot today way more because they got burned. And when you get burned, you have categorically, literally one of the biggest fears in the industry. You know, Jeremy Roll, he’s, he’s a frequent speaker. Yeah. His biggest fear is a lot of people will walk away prominently from alternatives because they got burned.
And, that’s, that’s the danger of, exactly this environment. So many people, I hear this, if I only was in a stock market, I got rid of my 401k, I converted that 401k and I took the money out of stocks and I put it into these multifamily deals, and look where I’m now, some of these deals are in terrible shape and this absolutely the, you know.
It’s, look at where they are today. They, they now can’t wait to get out and I don’t know what they do, but they, they, they want to get out the worst time and not look at the opportunities ahead.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah. And look at where their stock would be today if they left it in as bad as the market is downturned here over the weekend for crying out loud, you know, how do they feel about multifamily at this point then?
You know, no, I, I think it’s right. Lp, it’s very interesting on the LP side because it’s very situational. Everybody has different goals. Everybody’s at a different point in their life that they can take different risks. They have different risk tolerances and so forth. So there isn’t, to your point, there isn’t a global answer.
It is very situational to each LP of what they can jump into, what they can’t. I think an area of the, the PPM that I didn’t pay much attention to, that I pay more attention to now. Is the stress tests. So understanding, okay, you’re, you’re going in with a variable rate loan. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad all the time.
Like you are, you’re pointing out if the market, you know, if the interest rates are gonna go down, then that variable rate is gonna be helpful to you actually. But what is the risk tolerance that your deal structure can take if the rates do go up by. A percent, 2%, just in case we have that again, do you have that factored into your deal structure and is it still gonna produce money, or at least not create a situation where you need to take capital on or hold distributions to be ideal?
just understanding that, and I think seeing that the operator is going through that. Mental calculation themselves with their pro forma helps me think better about the operator. That, okay, you’re, you are thinking about the same worries that I have of variable race. Maybe not the worst thing in the world at this point in time, but what if, what, what if it does take a different turn?
Obviously there’s a lot going on in the global economy these days that who knows what the impacts out of all these things will be before it’s over with, but. Are you, you know, stress testing your deal enough to allow some fluctuation that still, you know, how, how soon before we’re in trouble, where is the real risk at?
And you know, how comfortable then do I feel of reaching that point and that my, my goal is, I. With LPs is have them map out their goals, their criteria as best they can, so that when they go into deals they can measure against those criteria and be willing to walk away. If it doesn’t meet your specific criteria you need, you’re not gonna be able to talk the operator in a changing things for you less your Jeremy role.
Jeremy does a good job of doing that sometimes, but, but beyond that. You need to be, prepared to take the deal as it’s presented in the proforma. So if it doesn’t meet your criteria, don’t have the fear of missing out, you know, there is another deal around the corner. There will be other deals that come in.
So, so I’m hearing,
Mike Zlotnik: I’m, I’m hearing you’re teaching folks back to the basics. Know, know thyself, know goals, right? And, and, and you know what’s crazy right there? A lot of people didn’t even have any goals. Bright and shiny objects and. Are you investing free income? Are you investing for tax benefits? Are you investing free income and growth to what kind of distributable income do you need or what do you want?
Yeah. So all, all these are right questions. Time horizon. Right? Right. leverage risk profile and what is, what is for going into the risk. and kind of everything you mentioned. The hilarious part is this. This is not hilarious. This is sad. Sometimes it’s, you could look at this and you could laugh. You could cry.
You could laugh about it,
Chad Ackerman: right?
Mike Zlotnik: A lot of this information was available. Yeah. Sensitivity analysis was always available. You could ask a sponsor if you ask him, have you done sensitivity analysis? If they, if they had no clue what it means, obviously they, they had no clue right
Chad Ackerman: then. Then what?
Mike Zlotnik: And if they had a clue and they could give you a sensitivity analysis.
By the way, I’m reflecting on this because this is educational. Yeah. I’m giving you feedback. The way you, you know, we we’re chatting ppms often didn’t have sensitivity analysis.
Intro: You wouldn’t
Mike Zlotnik: find this stuff in a ppp m and today you don’t find the stuff in the PPM. Where do you find them? Proforma, you can ask sponsor, Hey, have you done sensitive sensitivity analysis?
What if the exit cap rate changes? Right? Some of the basic things you can respond to. What if the ramp figures change to this degree? Right? These are basic, basic stress tests on a given deal that most sponsors should have given you. so I, I, I do concur with the approach that LPs, who never would, achi, never looked at the.
Proma should be looking, Hey, how sensitive are you to the rents being somewhat below the target, to what degree? so all these lessons learn, make a lot of sense. And the interest rate sensitivities of course, is a big one. This is, this is, can, can, can change and break a lot of things, but, but one thing I wanted to pull the point out, most people do it the wrong way.
If you look, when the interest rates were at zero, right? You move the interest rates up. Most people test it, stress test it just to be, you know, kind of reflecting. What I remember, most deals people stress test it. You, you take the fed funds rate from, you know, zero to quarter up to. Two and a half. Yeah.
This, this was thought to be the kind of the upper limit, maybe three. Right. And the reason for this, because for the 20 years, the rates were at zero and the Fed tried to hike and then they hiked to two and a half and then they stopped, if you remember, in the previous cycle.
Intro: Sure.
Mike Zlotnik: So what’s really interesting, a lot of these assumptions, you, you, you develop the norms.
Then what happens? You get a Black swan event and things go way above the norm, and then of course things get massively dislocated. But the, the question, the asking the question is, the right question is how far do you stress today? If you wanted to stress that interest rates rising 5%, people gonna look at you.
Are you insane? I mean, will Fed ever push the Fed funds rate by five percentage from here? What do we need to see in insane inflation? I don’t know what would it take? But it’s kind of interesting how these, conversations are relevant, then you’re trying to do at least some common sense stress testing.
Two years ago, I support the idea. Just, just gotta know what is common sense. Yeah, yeah. Or what is extreme conditions. Yeah.
Chad Ackerman: I mean, two years ago, we never would’ve thought interest rates would’ve jumped as high as they did anyway. So, you know, we, we caught, are we gonna do that again? the chances are pretty low probably.
But again, global economy is pretty mixed up these days that who knows what’ll come out of it. But I, in my mind, and I, I coach LPs on this too, of. I if you’re nervous about it, if it’s still too risky, that’s fine. Now’s the time to educate yourself. Then go meet new operators. Go get their, their history, their track record.
Go learn their process of underwriting and find that next operator that you are gonna be comfortable with when deals start coming back around. So now’s not a time to sit on the bench and not do anything and wait. Now’s the time to educate yourself and go meet new people. Get a part of a community like passive pockets or other communities, any community out there.
’cause there’s value in having that community experience to vet operators, deals, the economy, whatever, to help educate you to make a better decision on your next deal, whether it’s right now or if you wanna wait a little while before you get in or other asset class. You know, a lot of people jumped into debt over the last couple years because that was, seemed much better, was structured better for everybody.
it was better than just parking your money in a savings account in most cases. So go learn about debt. If you haven’t gotten involved with debt before, you know, get out. There’s other things you can do that has your money working for you, rather than just having your money sit and wait until you feel comfortable for the next big deal.
I’m not gonna try to talk you into, you know, getting outta your comfort zone, but while you’re being uncomfortable, go get educated. That’s, that’s what right now seems to be about to me. I’m outta capital, so I can’t invest in anything right now anyway, so, I’m going out to meet some more operators that I haven’t worked with before.
How did they survive through the last couple years? What are they doing differently? What lessons did they learn? Those are great questions to ask an operator, and that helps vet that operator. ’cause if they don’t answer those questions to your liking, well then that’s, you know, kind of a red flag to you.
So go from there. But it’s your own risk tolerance. What, what are you willing to accept from an operator at that point?
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, great, great wisdoms. it’s funny. A lot of people inequity. Not even realizing that existed when equity was, was a hot topic. And when the equity became, a painful topic, then the pendulum swung all the way and people started running into hard money, lending funds and looking, being, you know, lender providing, debt capital.
And by the way, still, still very attractive asset class. yeah, absolutely. But knowingly knowing both and be being able to make decisions. to participate potentially in both with your risk tolerance and, and, and goals
Chad Ackerman: Yeah.
Mike Zlotnik: Can be very, rewarding.
Chad Ackerman: Absolutely.
Mike Zlotnik: But at the end of the day, the, the, the biggest in best investment you can make is into you your own education.
Yes. So that’s why ’cause working folks who will listening to the podcast, working with Chad would be a great experience as you, as you hear, having a coach is important. I’ve worked with a coach, many coaches over the years and. Having a good coach can make a, a big difference in, in your journey. How would folks reach out?
Chad, what’s the best way to, talk to you? Email, website.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, so you can track me down on LinkedIn, Chad Ackerman, and I’m a Focal Point coach, you’ll see there. Or I’ve got a website that is chadackerman.focalpointcoaching.com, that you can look me up. Either of those places are the best place to track me down.
But hopefully come find me. I, you know, always happy to help, love talking about the industry and see what lessons learned I’ve had, as well as I lick my own wounds on some things, but shows we aren’t always right. So, but we learn a lot from our, our miscues. Hopefully, hopefully. You, anyway.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, it’s also a mindset, right?
We, we only talked about, sort of physical, learning, right? But the mindset is, is the most important thing is ultimately fix the mind. It’s, it’s without the mindset, it’s very difficult to proceed. And if you could fix how you think about things, take very, very positive, learning experience from any negative experience you have.
You could, you could succeed. And, and that’s very important. Any, any other, the advice on a book? So any other book that comes to mind that, people know how to find you? Is that a good book that. You kind of read reading or have read recently that you would recommend,
Chad Ackerman: Biggest book for the industry?
I’ll tout Brian Burke’s book The Hands-Off Investor that, is so solid if you are getting into this space as a limited partner. That’s a good book to start with, to really get an understanding of the underwriting, how to analyze deals and so forth. Brian did a really nice job with what he put together in the hands-off investor.
Mike Zlotnik: Thank you, Chad. Appreciate you coming on a podcast. Really enjoyed our conversation and, we’ll keep chatting. We intersect enough at these events and conferences and, that’s right. Appreciate your wisdom.
Chad Ackerman: Yeah, no, thank you Mike. I appreciate the time again, always a pleasure to get on and talk with you.
_______________________
Thank you for listening to The BigMikeFund Podcast. To receive your copy of Mike’s how to choose a smart real estate fund book, head to BigMikeFund.Com or visit Amazon and type Mike Zlotnik.
Keep listening and keep investing, Big Mike style. See you in the next episode.
