 So I lost everything, went back, I was bankrupt, I slept in my car for a year, I hate my job. I just wanna be in real estate full time. When you wake up in the morning, you get up, you work your ass off all day, you go home, you go to bed, you do it all again the next day, right? Your life, your day-to-day is not gonna change at all. What is your piece of advice for those individuals that want to get into real estate with the mindset of I want to be a millionaire? You gotta be willing to adapt, you gotta be willing to listen, and you gotta put your ego aside. That's why the mission of zero to diamond and the reason why it's free is to reduce the failure rate. But we never saw a negative year in appreciation for real estate. Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, come on, get it spicy now, Ricky, come on. So how can you sit here and tell us, nah, don't worry, it's perfect time to get into real estate, man. But you don't know what kind of storm I'm talking about. Ah, you said it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Hey, what's going on, everyone? Welcome to the Respect My Blueprint podcast. This is the show where we highlight the blueprint of successful entrepreneurs across all industries. And today's guest, I have a very wonderful guest here that's going to discuss about, not only the game of real estate, but how to become successful in it, right? And this conversation is gonna be very, very intriguing because unlike previous guests, this guy here actually has receipts. Okay, he has receipts for what he's cooking up, which not many people can say that they have a nearly 99% success rate on the service that they're providing. And this gentleman here, not only is gonna share those secrets, but also the blueprints around to get it as well, too. So I am honored and excited to go ahead and roll out real estate entrepreneur, real estate investor, and also, you know, leader as well as an influencer, Ricky Karuth. How you doing, brother? What's up, bro? All right, how you feeling today? I'm good. Okay, man, love the smile, love the energy, yeah? Yeah, I actually, my flight got canceled yesterday. What? Right coming down. And so I had to book another flight, right? I had direct flights coming and going. And I had to rebook for a connecting flight that was about five times more money on a one-way. Oh my God, bro, I mean, well, listen, you got it done? All they had was a first-class ticket. I said, okay, cool. Then I get to Atlanta. There was a two-hour delay on the second flight. Damn. I finally get to my room and get to sleep about one. I was supposed to land about three. So, but I was still in the gym at six. Then see that, and that right there, you know, because I wanna highlight that, life always throw curveballs at you. You just highlighted that, right? But guess what? You still was like, okay, no matter what, I'm still gonna do me, right? I'm still gonna get my daily workout in, accomplish my goals and things that I've set out for myself and things like that. So, and I see here, you're a father, you're a married man as well too. Before I get into all of the good details, right? If you could go ahead and share with the audience a little bit, who is Ricky Karoof? Man, that's a good question. Yeah, who is? So far in this few minutes, they didn't know you've been dealing with flights right now in your Tarilla state, but go ahead and share with everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I grew up in Alabama. Okay. Right on the Florida, Alabama line. Right there. Right on the beach. Okay, so you're in the central time zone. Okay, all right, all right. That was another thing that got me there. Six o'clock is five o'clock. But anyway, yeah, I grew up right there. And people don't realize the Florida beaches, like Destin, Panama City, Fort Walton. Noosemariner and everything like that. Is that Noosemariner Beach? Is that up there? No, that's probably a little further down. Okay. But Pensacola, Fort Walton, Navar, Pensacola, all that goes into Alabama, right? Right. So, it's about 40 miles of white, sandy, beautiful beaches, palm trees. So, although you're in another state, you're still enjoying the fruits and... I'm still on the beach, right? So, I grew up right there on the beach. Beautiful. Went to Gulf Shores Elementary, Foley High School and all that good stuff. So, grew up roofing houses. So, as soon as me and my brother rolled enough to... Roofing houses? We were actually on job sites at eight years old, seven or eight, cleaning up, right? Cause... Wait a minute. It was this like a family-owned business or something like that? I don't know about it, but I mean, he started it. He started it. He'd been doing it for a long time and stuff. So... Okay. Like, my parents didn't send us the day care and stuff like that. We went to work with mom and dad. So, we were at a home, you know, and then when mom started working, after we got a little older, right, then we went to work with them, right? So, we'd be at work with mom or be at work with dad. And so, it was just kind of natural to start working. Getting your hands dirty, right. At the construction site anyway. Right, okay. Cleaning up the jihad habits, just cleaning up little nails and stuff around the job site and stuff. Learning the essence of work. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, and that was really what started all of this, honestly. Really? Yeah, because the work ethic part. So, it wasn't forget the real estate aspect, that you're just on the roof of the house doing things and end up morphing into your career now, just the fact of, hey, work ethic. Yeah, like fast forwarding a little bit, passed a lot of stuff. Just a touch on that subject. Right. When I got in real estate, it was 2002, the market blew up. I made a million bucks before I'm 23, right? This is before the O8 crash. Right, right. So, before the crash, there was this boom. And that was what. That was leading up to it. That's what caused the bubble. Right, okay. So, when the bubble popped, right, I was mid-20s, didn't know how to handle it, right? I had basically been introduced into the business like that, like into this bride, right? Okay. So, I lost everything, went back, I was bankrupt, I slept in my car for a year. This is when 2008 hit, right? Yeah, what actually hit in 06, 07, 07 was the year that I was sleeping in my car, roofing houses again, serving tables. I was eating out of people's refrigerators. Really hit rock bottom. Yeah, just sleeping on people's couches and stuff. And so, people are like, how did you deal with that? How was your mental health during that time, right? Good question, good question. And it comes back to what we just talked about. For me, I don't care. It doesn't matter to me what I'm doing, right? This is what I tell part-time agents, right? Part-time agents, I like that. I coach thousands of agents. Right, okay. And a lot of part-time agents, right? I hate my job. I just wanna be in real estate full-time. I'm like, okay, okay, well, hold on a second, right? Right now, when you wake up in the morning, you get up, you work your ass off all day, you go home, you go to bed, you do it all again the next day, right? Right. So, when you go full-time real estate, what are you gonna do? You're gonna get up, you're gonna work your ass off all day, you're gonna go home, go to bed, do it again, right? Right, good point. I said, so, how's your life gonna change? Your life, your day-to-day, is not gonna change at all. You're still gonna get up at the same time, work just as hard, and actually, it's gonna be more stressful, because now you're your own boss. Now you gotta go out there, and now you're responsible for the marketing, the expenses, the prospecting, the conversion, the processing, you're responsible. So it's even worse than with the situation you're in now, so you better enjoy what you got while you got it. If you are gonna go full-time, then you're gonna look back and say, man, those were some good old days when I was working part-time, right? That is true, make you appreciate it a little more when you do be able to flip that switch to full-time. That too, but the bigger point is, is that your life doesn't change. Your day-to-day, you're still going through the same motions, working the same hours, doing the same stuff, and so when I lost everything, the day that I decided I had to quit real estate for a second, because I didn't have any money, I couldn't pay bills, I had to go pay bills. The next day, I have a big smile on my face, and I'm on a roof. I literally, the next day, I'm on a roof, roofing the house. I had plenty of people that, and my dad owned a roof in business, we knew every roofer around. All I had to do was just make one phone call and say, because, I mean, I was one of the best roofers out there. So why not roofing, then? Why transition? Number one, hard labor, right? Okay, so you're smart, there you go, all right. One hard labor, but the biggest thing was scalability. How are you gonna become a, how are you gonna make $100 million as a roofer? Now, I know this guy that became a billion-dollar roofer. He was a billionaire as a roofer. What he did was, he roofed until he built his own company, and then he built it out, and had tons of crews and everything, but then what he did to become a billionaire was, he opened up a supply shop, roofing supplies, and then he franchised the supply shops, and so he was a billion-dollar roofer, right? Right, okay. I could do that, okay? True, but the thing is, and you'll learn this about me in the podcast, is I don't want any employees, none. None? None. Too much headache? Yeah. Well, no, no, no, not only the headache. Right, right. Not only the headache, but when I go home and go to sleep at night, I'm not going to bed thinking, are my employees gonna be okay? How is their livelihood? Worried about their lives, you know what I mean? The liability. I don't need that pressure. I don't need that stress. I don't need people depending on me on that level. They can depend on me on other levels, so I'm kinda jumping around, but it's just bringing up some really good stuff so you can kinda understand my point of view on a bunch of different things. I found my place, because when I started coaching agents for free and building my brand, and now I have this large brand, and I'm in a bunch of different avenues. Right, which we're gonna talk on. Right, because I'm in sales, coaching, investing, mortgage, and brokerage, and so my brand feeds all these businesses, right? Right. Well, my thing is, each of these entities, I don't have any employees. I'm partners with other companies that have, that have hundreds of employees, which I get to take advantage of as if they're my own. They have sales. They have marketing. They have everything. The infrastructure already, I see what you're saying. And now I can go in and partner with these companies and make a cut off the top. Mitigate your risk. No expenses. With no worries, no anything. I don't have to have any employees. I can go out here and make my seven figure a month and not with just a solopreneur, right? Wow. This creates a very low stress life, right? I know guys with hundreds of employees, like I know a guy who has 700 employees, they did 120 million in revenue across his seven companies or whatever last year and stuff like that. And I look at that and I think, I don't want nothing to do with it. I mean, a lot of people get defined success by the amount of people within their organization, right? They feel like that's, you know, defined leadership, right? You can. I have a brokerage, right? I'm partnered with a brokerage that allows me to bring in agents and make a cut, a royalty off of those agents. I have a thousand agents, right? And growing all over the country, all over the world, right? Okay. You know, I've got, you know, 30, 40,000 agents in my coaching program that's a free program. However, I have sponsorship deals. Which you have about an almost a 99% success rate. We're gonna talk on that. Go ahead. No. But anyway, my point is, if you want to count bodies in organizations, I got the numbers for that, but I'm not directly related to, it's not, they're not employees of mine. Right. Human capital is not the, is more of the, I guess. Well, it's a different way to think about it, right? It's just a different way because I know guys that teach, make your first hire, go out, build your company, hire another person, hire another person, hire another person, right? Scale that way. Okay. If that's your, and a lot of people go out and build these massive companies like that, knock yourself out. Well, which the viewers right now, you said a very intriguing line that, you know, raised the spider senses of a lot of individuals. You said, you know, as you were getting into real estate, you ended up making your first million dollars and you know, obviously your successful platform. So let me ask you a question. There's so many mis-assumptions about real estate. So many mis-assumptions. Yeah, right. Times. Hey, you don't need any money. Zero down. You know, you can do this OPM style, such as such, Fix-It-Flips, you know, the birth strategy. You know, but everyone here are, everyone that gets into real estate has the end goal in mind, which you've achieved, which is end up becoming a millionaire or making a million dollars. So what is your, as we just ready to kick off the show, we're gonna take a deep dive into this. You know, what is your piece of advice for those individuals that want to get into real estate with the mindset of, I want to be a millionaire? Well, there's a lot of different ways you do it. Is it really difficult? Depends on your definition of difficult. Well, you've already had the prerequisite of the work ethic, but what else is attached to that, then, in real estate terms? You gotta be, you have to be a really good student. You gotta be willing to flex. You gotta be willing to adapt. You gotta be willing to, you know, listen. And you've gotta put your ego aside. You know, like real estate agents, for example, right? It takes on average six months to get to your first deal. And that's for the 10% that make it. So 90% of agents who get their license never even sell anything, end up quitting. Well, Ricky, I brought you onto the platform to be encouraging, to uplift. You just discouraged a lot of, I'm sorry, go ahead, yeah. And that's why the mission of Zero to Diamond and the reason why it's free is to reduce the failure rate, right? And I've got hundreds and hundreds and probably well into the thousands of agents who have reached out to me over the last six years and said, hey, I would have quit if it wasn't for Zero to Diamond. So, and every time I go speak, not every time, but a lot of times I'll say, how many people here thinks that they wouldn't even be in the business if it wasn't for Zero to Diamond? And there's always maybe, boom, boom, hands, yeah. People, every time somebody tells me I was gonna quit until I ran across your stuff and started implementing and now here we are, I'm crushing it, I'm doing this or that. That's what kinda kept me going because the first two years, when I got to the point where I was making a meal a year in real estate. Now, you're just an agent at this point. Okay, just an agent. And it was 2017 and that was the year I wrote two books, started coaching, writing. So, I got in an O2, made a meal, lost it, got back in an O8, I was working on an oil rig. I got laid off, I got laid off from the oil rig. Damn, okay. Back in real estate in 2008 and it was so easy to sell real estate. Yeah. This is after the O8 crisis and everything, right? This is during O8. This is 2008, January, I got laid off from the oil rig and May, I closed my first deal, I actually closed two on the same day in May. It was like May 31st and just started selling the oil. You just said, oh, that's fun. Oh, just started crushing it, right? And you may say, well, how? Why? When? What? Imagine a market and you're a real estate agent and all of a sudden you're here in Fort Lauderdale and real estate prices go down 50%. Oh, prime territory now, yeah. How easy would it be to sell real estate as a real estate agent if prices went down 50% right now or any time in history? That, I mean, but my challenge would be is why did it drop? Is it across the board or is it just a pocket that's just dropped to Fort Lauderdale? Because if it was just Fort Lauderdale that dropped then I would say maybe I was waiting for it. It wouldn't be a pocket. Oh, okay. It wouldn't be a pocket, yeah. If something, if the market goes, the markets are local, right? And so things are different in markets. Like for example, like as far as the country's concern we're negative year-over-year prices right now. Okay. We're negative year-over-year prices. But Fort Lauderdale hasn't even touched anywhere close. Oh, of course. To negative year-over-year prices, right? Right. And it's crazy because all the crash brothers. The crash brothers. We won't say their names but we know who they are, right? People who put out this stuff about the housing market is gonna crash worse in 2008 and all this. The thing is, is that probably end of January-ish or whatever, prices hit bottom and prices are up. Prices are way up and prices are up from that point. We're positive. So we entered January coming down. Right. Towards the end of January we hit a bottom, right? And now just about every market is up higher than they were in January first. Like we're positive on the year right now, price-wise. We were positive last year from January to January. Okay. Right? We were positive from January to now, right? Now you're referencing, obviously, you're referencing post-pandemic period, right? I'm talking about right now. Right now. So wait a minute, because I know me and you watch the same news channels, right? Fox, MSNBC and everything like that. And there's a lot of fear porn going on right now. They don't talk about this, right? Every time I see- I mean, but we're on a recession right now, right? That's the fear porn that's going on right now. We're in a recession, horrible time to be investing. Go back and look at history, okay? And look at all the recessionary periods. And look at what real estate prices did and what mortgage rates did during recessionary periods. Mortgage rates went down and prices went up. Even back in the late 70s, we had four years of double digit appreciation in that run-up of inflation that caused the 20% mortgage rates in the late 70s, right? Everybody talks about the 20, oh, I remember what was 18%, right? Okay. And look at appreciation every year through that. We had four years of double digit appreciation for years, which means things doubled basically in four years, right? Okay. And then everybody says, what? What goes up must come down, right? It's up, it's up, it's up. Guess what happened? The next year, I think it was 1980 or 81 was the next year that it came back to single digit appreciation. It was 7%. After being double- After double, double, double, double, and then seven. And then it went to three and then it stayed around that 1% to 2% for a while, but we never saw a negative year in appreciation for real estate. That doesn't mean that it didn't dip down during one of the years and then come back up and end positive for the year. I'm not saying that it didn't have any kind of correction, but what I'm saying is from January one to January one to January one to January one, appreciation, a positive, positive, positive, positive through that. And the, let's see, when was it? I think it was in the late 80s or so. There was another, it was a three-year double-digit run. Same thing, people were saying the same thing. What goes up must come down. What happened? Positive, positive, positive. There was a couple years that were even. There was like two, three years that were zero, but it didn't go negative. Then we finally saw a two-year period where it was down 1% and then 0%. That was 90, 91. So over two years collectively, it was down 1% negative. Which is nothing, right? This is going back to 1940. So then you come to 2000 to the 2000s. We had three, I want to say three years of double-digit appreciation before 08. And then we had four years, I want to say it was four years of negative appreciation. After 08. I think it was nine, eight, nine, 10, it might have been nine, 10, 11. I think it was eight, nine, 10, whatever. It might have been seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, whatever. It was right there in that period. It was four, I want to say negative years. Right. And then here lately, we had two double-digit years. We had 2022, 2021 and 2022. We had two double-digit appreciation years. Appreciation. Yeah, we're appreciated double digits, right? 2021, 2022. Right. And now everybody's saying the same thing. What goes up must come down. Well, look at history. Every time it has double-digit appreciations, it hasn't, we haven't seen what's negative. It only dropped one, right? Like you said, those two previous years don't drop 1% and 0% after the four-year run-up. And it wasn't right after. Those 0% years were like five years after the run-up. After the run-up, it stayed like seven, three, two, two. People just have a misconception about real estate because of 08. 08, 08. I mean, 08 was bad, though, it was bad. Because the recession was driven by the mortgage. The way that mortgages were done. It was driven by real estate. Real estate is what brought the recession. But all these other recessions are brought by inflation and the hike of interest rates and world wars and different things like that. Not real estate. Which is what we're experiencing now, you know, interest rate going up. There's a- Exactly. And go back and look at the recessions that were caused by that and look at the behavior of real estate and mortgage rates during those times, right? Right, true. And so what we have now, since we're on the subject, is the perfect storm coming, right? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Come on, get it spicy now, Ricky. Hello. Talk to me. I'll tell you what that is. I saw an article and it said 98% of millennials want to be homeowners, right? 98%. 98%. Because that's the American dream for a long period of time. But, you know, the younger generation, you know, we don't know when a generation is gonna come along and say we just wanna rent or we wanna do this or we wanna camp or we know what people are gonna do, right? Right. 98%, this was a survey done by Zonda and so there's 72 million millennials, right? In the country. The largest demographics right now. Right, and so I started to think, okay, let me, this, it piqued my curiosity. Right, okay. So I said, okay, Google. Tell me what the median age of first time home buyers are, right? Right. So in 2021, I was 33 years old and last year it was 36. Increasing, okay, okay. Well, let's see. I'm thinking, okay, I look at that and I think, okay, the age range of first time home buyers are 33 to 36. Let's just say, right, just based on that. Okay. And that's the age of millennials, okay? Right, okay. You've got a group of 72 million of them that say 98% want to be a homeowner because they wanna build their own equity instead of someone else's. That's the number one reason. Okay, right. So I keep going on this rabbit hole and I think, okay, birth rates. Let me check this out, right? And if you go back 33 years from today, which is 1990, there was a massive, let me repeat, massive spike in birth rates, right? So we have right now, and it goes like this, it's this and here's 1990, right? Here's the birth rates, you know, you know, 85, 86, 87, 80, 90. Just rising up, boom. And then it stays right here for 16 years to 2006 and then it drops off dramatically. Right, okay. So we have the largest group of people turning 33 than we've ever seen in our life this year. Looking at homebuyers. Right, this year. And so 33, in my mind, is the beginning age because it's 33 to 36, is the beginning age of a first time homebuyer. And so I keep on thinking, okay, we have more pent up demand for housing because here's the thing. Which I can agree. Look, but I wanna challenge that. I'm gonna let you finish your thought though. And I can tell you a lot of predictable spots. I'll just mention a couple. In April 28th, 2020, what were you doing? April 28th of 2020. So the pandemic rolled out March 3rd. So this is about a month and a half after the pandemic. I lost my job. I was home. I was basically brainstorming on starting up my mediums to be at home during that time. They shut the economy down. No economy. They shut businesses down. The only thing open was Walmart and Target or whatever. Essential businesses. That's it, right? And we were basically told, hey, you have to stay home till this thing blows over. Or till we figure it out. A lot of uncertainty. You thought your family was, you didn't know if your family would die. If you were gonna die, it wouldn't have been all right. I posted a video on April 28th, 2020. And I said, when the economy reopens, real estate's gonna surge. You predicted this. No predictive analysts or nothing. It's still on YouTube, right? It's that day on April 28th, before the economy opened, right? We're all still in our house scared. And I said, the real estate's about to blow up, y'all, okay? And so how did I know this? Well, number one, I've been around long enough and I went through the previous crash to realize that when transactions retract, it's only building demand. And there's gonna be a boom and when it comes out the other side. And when I saw the pandemic, the shutdown calls a retraction of transactions. I said, oh my God. People are gonna be coming out full-fledged, yeah. I saw stimulus happen. And I said, it's about to be overworked. And guess what happened? Free bands everywhere. Guess what happened? We saw the largest real estate service that we've ever seen in our life that lasted for a year and a half. Multiple offers, more than 100,000 over asking price. People couldn't get listings. We had six million transactions, right? But Ricky, wait a minute. Again, you, you, we've seen the Facebook laying off the hundred, you know, thousands of people, Amazon, big box retailers, right? Unemployment is right around the corner as far as double digit numbers potentially, right? Potentially, yeah. So again, I'm not, we're in the same planet here. Yeah. Okay, right? So you're telling me everything that's been contradictory to what the pundits and the media outlets are saying here that the store, you even said it's yourself. The storm is coming. So how can you sit here and tell us, nah, don't worry. You know, it's perfect time to get into real estate, man. But you don't know what kind of storm I'm talking about. So, so, so, so, so let's fast forward, right? I predicted the surge that happened. Let's fast forward. I also put out videos about when rates go up, we're going to see a huge shift. I mean, that's all just, that's very telegraphed. I mean, if you couldn't see that coming then, that's not even worth saying, oh, I predicted this. Wow, okay. But in the fall, I said, we're going to see multiple offers again. Right? In January, really late December, we started seeing multiple offers again. And now over the last 30 days, we've went from 2.7 offers per listing to 3.2 offers per listing. Slowly growing, man, okay, okay. Like I say, prices bottomed out 60 days ago. We're higher now than we were January 1st, not to mention the bottom. Right, okay. And we're, we have lower inventory. You know, in the 80s, we had two, always in the 80s, the whole time. Right. We had two to three million houses for sale at any given time during the 80s. 80s. Damn. 80s. Okay, 80s. Yeah, that's 30% less population, 30% less houses, right? Two to three million homes for sale at any given time. You know what we have right now? 800,000 maybe. And that's counting pending deals. You take the pending deals out, we're at like 550, we're around 500,000 active listings. So there is a demand. Housing shortage, safe to say. See, it's simple economics, bro. It's simple economics, supply and demand. If you have order demand, if you have supply, it's not hard to figure out. If you look at a chart of inventory, housing inventory, if you look back from 1980, here we are at two to three million, it goes up to four million houses in 08. Right. And then it comes down, and now we are where we are here, well under a million. Teetering. Not even half of the houses we had for sale back in the 80s. Okay? Now, now what? There's more people now. It's so, so, so even if you had half the properties for sale back in the 80s. Right. Like that's one thing, but now we're there, but in today's world where like you say, there's 30, 40% more people, there's more homes that exist. Right, okay. And we have not even close to half of the inventory we had in the 80s, okay? Wow. I predicted that the surge happened in and other predictions, I'm not gonna go into all the different things, but I just wanna talk about this one, because this one's big. We were moving towards this place where we have more 33 year olds than we've ever had. Right. By far. And they're gonna be 35 next year and 36th year after and next year we're gonna have more 33 year olds entering. And then there are more. Okay, I see what you're saying. This is first time home buyers. This doesn't even count people that are relocating, people that are investing, people that just want to buy a house. This is just one little sector of the market that's just part of the way, right? Right, right. People that are, there's 85% of mortgages in a manker are sitting under 4% interest, right? And interest rates are 6.3. Right now. So if you have a house and your interest rate is 3.2, are you gonna sell, even if you kinda want to, are you gonna sell it, move somewhere and buy a house at 6.3? No. You're doubling your... So the mortgage rates going up has killed inventory because these people that are sitting on these low mortgage rates, They're staying in it. They're staying in their house. Right. Even if they want to move, they're not gonna move. Doesn't make any sense. Because they are sitting on such good interest rates. Right. They're not gonna trade that for twice the interest. So that's killing inventory. We'll get into builders. Builders are down 30, 40%, right? They couldn't even keep up before. Not to mention the wave of first time home buyers that are fixing a hit. So here's where the rubber hits the road. Right now, we're getting a lot, like multiple offers are happening all over the country. There are some markets where it's not happening. Right. I mean, it's not all across the board. Like my market, right? I'm not getting multiple offers on my listings in Alabama, right? But I read data, statistics. I talk to all my agents all over the country all the time. I'm boots on the ground. As you should in River State. Like a lot of these guys, they're not boots on the ground, right? They're just trying to come up with, they're trying to twist the data into, oh, prices are negative year over year. Let's do a headline. First time prices go down in 11 years. You know what the Wall Street Journal said? Which we're gonna get into. Go ahead. You know what they said? Go ahead. They said prices go negative for the first, go down for the first time in 11 years, right? Because it went negative year over year, right? And under it, the little subtitle, it said existing home sales increase 14.5% in January or February or whatever month it was. It's like, what are you trying to tell me? The title is prices are down first time in 11 years. The subtitle is sales are up 14.5%. You confusing the hell out of me. I'm about to say which one is it? Is it the left, the right, upper, down or what? I mean, but, you know, this, which you've gone into this Wall Street Journal here, I wanna ask this final question before we get into the meat and potatoes. You, we look, I've looked at this article here. If you can see here, it says the building boom is pro-longing market pain. Okay. Which, again, pushing on what I've just shared with you here, how the building boom has pushed unemployment around to the slowest level in more than 50 years, which is perplexing investors who want to see the Fed switch course on interest rates. Obviously the interest rate's still going up and everything, but construction spending and employment have risen to new records this year as you have just shared with us, right? And it's basically how stating how the market, the construction market is on the rise right now. Because they can't keep up with demand. But we all, you just referenced to the pandemic how there were supply chain issues. We all know about that. We've all experienced it and everything like that. Interest rates going on. So it costs more to build, right? Because supplies cost more and everything like that. And the fact that, again, a lot of jobs are switching to four-day work week, cutting back hours, people are losing a job. So there's even uncertainty. And again, like you've final point, you've mentioned those that have that prime rate, they're staying put. No reason to go into something higher. So, tell them, is this something that the government, because I'm asking the same question in many different ways and I want to get this answer from you, is this something the government is intentionally doing to sort of manipulate the data as far as the information going up? Because we're also in a world where information, because there's misinformation too. So if everything you're sharing with me is positive, but everything they're saying is negative, is it really the institutions that's spreading this fear more intentionally? There's two schools there, right? There's two camps. There's the overall economy, which has its uncertain points, right? As far as layoffs and recession and stuff like that. Because there's a big difference in interest rates and mortgage rates. Interest rates and mortgage rates. Big difference, right? Interest rates, like the Fed fund rate, it affects credit cards, car loans, equity lines of credit, things of that nature, right? But it doesn't affect the 30 year fixed mortgage. Oh, so you gotta separate them. You have to separate them. A lot of people combine them, right? That's what you're saying. And so people think, oh, the Feds are gonna go up on rates, so mortgage rates, no, it's not, right? If you look at history, again, just look at a chart. Pull up a chart that has the 10 year treasury, that has inflation, and that has 30 year fixed. And look at how correlated they are, right? And look at the Fed fund rate and look how uncorrelated it is to the other three. And so the reason why the 30 year fixed is not correlated to the Fed fund, and more correlated to the 10 year treasury, which is tied more to inflation because people, investors wanna make money on their dollar even if the dollar is increasing or decreasing in value. Right, that's why they're calling an investor. Yeah, they wanna put their money in. They don't wanna make less than what the dollar is appreciating itself if they just left it in the bank. Makes sense, right? So same thing with 30 year fixed. If I can put my money in a 10 year treasury and get 3% or buy a mortgage on the second market and get 3% that's riskier than a treasury or a bond, where am I gonna put my money? I'm gonna put my money in the bond or the treasury, right? Where there's no risk, but I'm getting the same return. So that's why the 30 year fixed is more investor driven. And there has to be a spread between the 10 year treasury and 30 year fixed so that the investors get an extra return on their money for risking their money a little bit over here, right? Okay. And so that's why it's tied more to the 10 year treasury than the Fed fund. The inflation is tied to the mortgage rates, I see what you're saying. And so it's kind of tied a little bit because, but it has an adverse effect because when the Fed raises rates, their objective is to bring down inflation. Create deflation, right? Well, when deflation comes down, mortgage rates follow. And so in the beginning, when the feds begin raising rates, mortgage rates go up in the beginning. In the beginning, but. It stabilizes. It stabilizes. And then, you know, they're here and then the Fed rates go up. Well, the mortgage rates go up too because now we realize inflation is higher and the Fed rate goes up and that affects the 10 year treasury. So in the beginning, during one of these periods where they start raising, it goes up. But then once it levels out, then the feds continue raising rates. Well, that raising rates makes inflation come down and the 30 year fixed starts to dwindle down. It started to come down with inflation. So every inflation and CPI report that we've had hasn't been phenomenal, but it's been better. Each time has been a little better, a little better, a little better. And May 10th in 10 days, we're gonna have another one that's gonna be the big one that's gonna show a great year over year improvement in terms of inflation. And that's gonna create downward pressure on the 30 year fixed. So right now we're sitting on 6.3, something like that, as far as the 30 year fixed average for the country right this second. Well, we have more demand. In my mind, we have more pent up demand for a lot of reasons. Number one, just the natural first time home buyer group, bigger than we've ever seen ever. We don't even know, we don't, we, we, we, that's still prime market, right? We've seen nothing yet when it comes to this. Then you've got all these people that have been sitting in these same houses because they have low interest rate and forced to stay in there. And just build an equity. Huh? Build an equity. They're building equity. But the thing is, is they're just dying to move because they've been in the same house. They've been forced to stay in the same house. And they're still forced in a way because the rates are so low. That's what I'm saying. Right, I see what you're saying. But the more time goes by, like these people do want to move, but they don't want to pay 6.3% interest, right? So as inflation continues to dwindle down, 30 year fixed is going to follow. More of the people that go in because now they say, hey, I'll sell at that price at then, right? I'll give up my 4.1 and get into a 5.5%. I can deal with this mortgage payment at 5.5%. I'm not gonna do it at 6.3, but at 5.5, I can deal with it. So what's gonna happen is a perfect storm. Like we think we have demand now because we're getting multiple offers, right? Like there's more properties pending than are active right now, right? In a lot of markets. Right here in Fort Lauderdale, there's three months worth of inventory right now, which means that the amount of properties that are pending that are gonna close and how many closings have happened over the last 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, there's only enough inventory to cover three more months on the market right this second. After that is, I sit, right? Well, what happens is new listings come on the market to kind of keep it going. Right, okay. New listings are lower than like 2021 and 22. Like here's 21 and 22 for new listings coming on the market. Here's 23. Like new listings because nobody's selling. Somebody's selling. Interest rates so high. And so this is where the perfect storm is coming when all this pent up demand and no inventory at all enters into a period when inflation starts to cool and gets down into the fives. It's gonna be like a tsunami of people coming out of the woodwork to buy houses, right? This is when real estate agents eat, huh? It's so my prediction is that we see another double digit year in prices this year. Year over year growth. Year over year. From January one to January one, I predict another double digit year because there's no inventory and we're gonna have the largest amount of demand we've ever seen with decreasing mortgage rates. Now, the fear. Okay. I'll give you some fear. Okay, don't paint all roses for everybody now. Okay. And that is this. As this unfolds and you have all these people come out of the woodworks and real estate prices shoot up. Right. What does that create? A second wave of inflation. Because it- A second wave? Because in essence, that is inflation. That's prices. It's too- Oh, it just automatically spikes up prices, right? It's too few dollars chasing too few dollars. Too many dollars chasing too few goods, right? And so when you have all these people buying these houses, it's gonna make prices are gonna go up. Cause it's a seller's market at this point. Yes, yes. And it's gonna get a lot worse. And so the second wave of inflation does what to mortgage rates? Brings them down? No, when inflation goes up, mortgage rates are gonna go up. Oh, I see what you're saying. See mortgage rates follow inflation. And so- But to a degree, like you mentioned earlier, right? Not necessarily all the way. Yeah, really, really closely correlated. Even more so closely correlated to the 10-year treasury. If you look at like a 40-year chart, you'll see that 1.75 to 2% spread between a 10-year treasury and 30-year fixed. And it's like exact that whole time through like a 30, 40-year period has correlated. They're pretty ramush riding together. So it's very, very correlated to the 10-year treasury, but that's driven by inflation. Because again, investors want a return on their dollar over what they could get if they just left their money in the bank. Right, right. And that's inflation, how much a dollar's worth? Pretty much, right. So I believe that there's a really good chance we're gonna see a second wave of inflation, which is gonna spike mortgage rates back up. And then we're gonna be right back into this vicious cycle that we're playing, this little game that we're playing here with no inventory, people that need houses, builders are gonna slow down building, interest mortgage rates go back up, and then- It's just a perpetual cycle. And then the feds will raise rates to combat inflation again, and then that'll make 30-year fixed come down. Then we'll see another tsunami, right? It's like, here's the thing. We need housing inventory. That's the answer. That's the answer to this whole thing. But you can't even build it. I mean, there's only a certain amount of land, influx of people, and which, you know what? Hold on. I want to, let's get off of real estate for a second here, all right? I want to, because the viewers are now saying, wow, man, you've turned our mindset on real estate. So I wanna go into your community now. You are, I'm assuming, prepping your community and even prepping yourself for this potential storm that's coming, okay? So I wanna talk about your zero-to-diamond community, which you're, you know, which by the way entails, it also includes a 60-day challenge, which correct me if I'm wrong, has a 98.8, almost a 99% success rate. Now, I've taken some courses. I've had people come onto the show. Nobody has been able to go ahead and produce a receipt like that, okay? So with that being said, you know, if you could share a little bit about how were you able to go ahead and have such a very high success rate for your community and also, because of everything you just shared up to this point, is this the prime time for your community or anybody to get into real estate right now? Yeah, so that's good, two questions. So the community itself, just the storyline behind it, right? So I made it, lost it, came back, right? In 2008, I came back and I told you it was easy to sell properties, right? Right, at that point. Made six figure, going from the oil rig to making six figure in an office, air conditioning, all right? He's like, yeah, I'll take this job here, right? I was like, I made it, I can't believe this, right? And then I just made more and more money every year. And by 2014, I had 100 deals for the first year, that year was the number one remax agent in Alabama. And so I sold 100 properties every year since, just single agent, one assistant, right? Right, okay. So I make it, I lose it, I come back, it takes me six years to get to the top, then I'm there for three years in a row. Crushing it. Before I even think about or have the audacity to go write a book or try to teach anybody how to do anything, right? Okay. And so there's a lot of people that have been selling for two years, sold 19 properties and now they've got a course for 500 bucks, right? And they're an expert, right. And so just to take it a step further, I was like, I'm gonna make a course, I'm gonna teach everybody how to do all this, the unique way that I did it for free. And the reason that I did free is because, number one, agents don't wanna pay anything for anything, right? Number one. But, I mean, there's a high failure rate, so I could assume why, but go ahead. But the biggest reason was, is like, for me, the agents that really want coaching and stuff, they're super desperate. They're just struggling, they really want this, this is their dream, but they can't get it going, so. They're just missing the peace that'll get them over to home. I just feel like I would be taking advantage of struggling people, right? Okay. I don't like the way it made me feel, number one. Number two was, is that I know that if I go free and I create something that's better than what people are paying for, then I'm gonna have the biggest name in real estate after a while. And so that was the overall goal. That's the objective, okay. Which was to reduce the failure rate through my unique way of building a real estate business as an agent, and then taking that and exposing it to as many people as possible so that hopefully I can reduce the failure rate. And through that, build a massive brand that feeds other businesses. And so that was the goal, was to create a brand that feeds businesses, right? Not that the brand is a business, that the brand feeds businesses. Feeds businesses, okay. And is that how you came up with the zero to diamond? Diamond is a million bucks a year in the Remax system, right? So that's what I did. I went from zero to diamond, right? So that was the name of the first book. And then I got zero to diamond.com and I just developed a coaching program where I was doing weekly calls for the group. I was doing one-on-ones. And this could be in normal people from like your soccer moms to your dads wanting a part-time hustle or just a young kid wanting to learn real estate. Your community involves all ranges in demographics. Absolutely. And other countries, right? I've got agents from all over the world that have found success with zero to diamond. All free. And so let me ask you a question. And it's now that what you've just shared, which is the second question I just want to reiterate it is that because of the Perk Fix Storm coming right now, are you prepping your community for? Yeah. I had a call this morning at eight o'clock. We start the 60-day challenge every three or four months as a group. So I had the call this morning to start it. This week we're starting it. So I had a call with the group. I did a YouTube market update last week just to give my two cents on this Perk Fix Storm thing coming in. So what's very interesting about just the backstory a little bit is that I was making a million bucks a year. And I started doing zero to diamond, which I've lost 100,000 for two years doing it. Right? Trying to kickstart it and move straight, okay. So like I'm sitting here losing six figure, spending about 30, now I'm spending like 60 plus percent of my time on something that loses six figure. Meanwhile kind of neglecting my seven figure business for two years. Wow. It was tough. Yeah, I can imagine. But I would get messages from agents saying this is working for me. I'm crushing it. I'm getting listings. I'm da-da-da-da-da. So they're giving you the praise and everything. They're giving me the praise and I'm like, okay. If this, like I'm believing this, you know. And I was getting called to speak. I started speaking and stuff like that. Okay, okay. And then everybody would come up after the speeches and stuff and I was like, this is gonna be big. There's no way it's not going to be. Although you're losing money. Losing money. You're like, wait a minute. I found something here. So finally that next year, the third year, I made 500 and I spent 200 that year. So I made 300 and then I made a meal. But I started making a meal every year after that. Yeah, doing the coaching thing. So then that basically replaced my sales income. Okay. I was still selling. I was still selling up to last year. And now I'm still selling. I took one foot out. My dad handles the day to day. Right. The clients, the listings, the showings, all that. He handles all that. So that I can continue building the brand and building all these other ancillary businesses. Coaching and everything like that. Coaching, mortgage, brokerage, sales, investment. Just touch on every avenues of real estate. Yeah. Which now I want to get into, you know, you started off as a roofer, which God bless you. Okay. I can never. My dad was a roofer, right? Right. So when you grow up in it, you don't really know any different. Oh my God, with the tar and the heat. Didn't bother me. Oh God. It didn't bother me. I grew up in it. I loved it. Honestly, I loved roofing. Really? Yeah. Yeah. There's a euphoric feeling, man. You know, when you work really hard and you, you know, you do this masterpiece. You know? Right, okay. You know, you're on the road looking back at the house and you're like, I just did that. You know what I mean? You have a sense of pride. And I got right. It's like art, honestly. Okay. There's a bit of art to it, which kind of sounds weird talking about the roof. I was gonna say, so it's not come just slapping on the tar or anything? No, no, no, no. Because we didn't do a whole lot. We did do some tar roofs, but even those were, you know, were fun to learn how to do, but the shingle roofs and the metal roofs on the residential houses with architectural, you know what I mean? Right. And all the cuts in the roof and everything that you have to basically lay it out where it looks amazing and it's also not gonna leak. There's an art to that, you know? So, no, it was cool. But I knew I didn't wanna do it forever. Right, like you said, you wanted to scale. It was like, how can I be that $100 million man, you know, outside, within real estate, which I wanna now touch on your blueprint because you've already laid the foundation as far as you entering in the world of real estate, building out your zero to diamond community and everything like that. So, if you could let, you know, what was the plan? Well, the plan in building your blueprint was, like you said, you wanted to be the $100 million man outside of roofing. But my question is, you know, that was the plan. How did you build the blueprint? You know, was it primarily, okay, I'm gonna get into real estate. I'm gonna be a real estate agent, crush it. And after I crush it, I'm going to now branch off into every other field here. Was that the build, no? No, no, no, the idea was, you know, definitely roofing is not my career. Right, that was number one, right? Number one. So that's why I went to college in the first place because I wanted to go try to do something else. So when I went- In real estate or just something- Something else, I didn't know I was gonna do real estate. Okay. I went to college because I had a scholarship and I started learning business and I was just doing my, the beginning classes, whatever it's called. And, but I didn't really know what I wanted to major in. Right? I was just, I just put- Not most college kids. I just put business down. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And then, you know, I went to two schools and then I went to the University of Alabama. I failed a history class. And- I remember you told me that after the offer. And I was like, I'm done with this. I'm like, my mom's spending, I don't remember how much it was. Like two, three grand a semester, housing and everything. I was like, I need to, I don't want to go make money. I don't want to sit here and spend money. I'm here failing classes. That makes sense. So there was a college there, Shelton State. And there was, they had a real estate class. And there was, one of my roommates was like, I'm gonna get my real estate license. I was like, I'll do that too. So when I got my real estate license, when I took the class, I didn't realize what all was involved. Like when you take the class and you pass the class, you've got a year to take your test or you have to start all over. To real estate, right, okay. Your state test once you pass the class. And it's different per state. But then at that point you have so long, it was 90 days once you passed your test to actually sign with the broker. And then you have six months from when you passed your test to take your post license course, a 30 hour post license course. Like a continuing education type of thing. And then you've got continuing ed every two years. And I was in class thinking, man dude, I thought you passed your test and then it was like something stamped like a motorcycle license. Yeah, you're off to the races. On your driver's license. And now you can sell real estate for the rest of your life and make money or whatever. I didn't realize there was all these fees and all these classes and all these responsibilities and timelines. And I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this in this thing. All that was really committing here. So I got out of the, I passed the class. I was like, I don't know if I want to do it. I came home from Tuscaloosa and got a roofed house. I roofed like two days and I was like, all right, I'm going to take the test. I'm going to try to sell a state thing. I'm not going to do this for sure. So the thought going in was I want to help people, right? I want to help first time home buyers. I want to help people with this. So my thing, I remember even when I was like a real little kid, like seven, eight, nine, 10, right? I had this thought like I'm going to grow up. I'm going to make a lot of money, a lot of money. And I'm going to turn around and help a lot of people. Don't know how, but just I'm going to do it. Had no idea how. I just knew that I was going to do something. I was going to work really hard. I was going to make a lot of money because we grew up poor. And like I watched my dad and mom like live paycheck to paycheck and stuff. You know, that affects you. And you start to get into this mindset. And I was like, I'm going to go out there and make a lot of money, like a lot, a lot of money. And then I'm going to turn around and I'm going to help people, right? I had no idea how I was going to do it. So I've always been in this like help people mindset from when I was little. So when I got into real estate, I was like, I'm going to help first time homebuyers. Oh, that was your focus. That was my focus, right? So I got in and I worked with like two first time homebuyers and I was like, I do not want to work with first time homebuyers. Get that. He's like, yeah, I want to help him. I want to do everything from you guys suck. Yeah, I want to work with you, right? Because there's also a level of efficiency to it. Right, okay. And the thing is, is if you're not working efficient, you can't help the most people, right? Right, you got to be the best person. You got to be running on all cylinders. You have to be super efficient or you're not going to get there. Good point, good point, okay. So it wasn't about the helping. It was the, there's going to be plenty of people that want to help people. You know what I mean? As all of you. Plenty of agents to go help you guys. Let me go over here. Let me be the most efficient and sell beachfront condos. So I specialized in go-front, beachfront condos and houses and vacation properties of people that live all over the country that come down to Alabama and buy beachfront properties there. That area in the panhandle, like he was mentioning, okay, I gotcha, gotcha. So like, I'm the condo guy. So like, and that's where the money is at, right? So you niche down. That's what it was. Yeah, I niched it, right? So no commercial, no multifamily, none of that? I buy commercial now, I buy multifamily. I own all that, but I never really got, I sold a little bit, but I focused on go-front condos as far as an agent goes, my real estate agent business. Right, okay. So my thing was to help people. That was the blueprint. And the thing was to make a ton of money and turn around and help people one day with it. But I didn't know, I had no idea that I was gonna make all these million-selling properties and then turn around and help agents. I had no idea that that was gonna be, I had no, all I wanted the whole time was just to make a million dollars a year, right? That was all. If I could just make a million, even if I could just make a million bucks in my bank account, even if it took like four years to save up a million, even if I wasn't making a million a year, just to have a million dollars, right? Because my dad, my mom never saw a million bucks, right? Do you seem to paycheck to paycheck living like you just mentioned, right? And so when I got in in 2002, okay? And I made that mill and then I lost that mill, right? And then I came back and then it took me, so from 02 to 17, that's 15 years. Before I actually made a million dollars in a year. Right, that's a journey. That's a journey, yes. So when I finally did that, then I started, and so the goal was always to make a million a year or to make a million, and then you think, when you do it, it's like, okay. Two, five. Well, guess what? No, no, no, no, no. Once you get there, your life doesn't change. I got up the next day and it didn't even work harder. It's like, wow, you just kick-started something else. And now I got to work even harder that I made it. And so, you know what, hold on, you're detracting a lot more viewers here, but I see the point you're trying to make, no, but. But that's what drove me to get into the coaching world and start doing social media, because I didn't touch social media to build my real estate business. So no YouTube, no Instagram, nothing, just door-to-door, still go all the way up there. Calls and emails. Which, by the way, I want to make a million dollars which, by the way, I want to talk this, which, before I get into the second question of about how did you fund your blueprint, you know, there's very something different about your platform, which anybody who have not had a chance to follow Ricky on his social media, definitely check him out on Instagram. What you do, you go through live demonstrations of sales calls. You know, what started that? Like, you know, not many people would use that tactic. Well, honestly, what other tactics are there? I mean, you have the tactics of, you know, like the e-books, the showing you the post-success of the sale, possibly. You mean you need to build the coaching business? Yeah, and just demonstrating, you know. Well, it's maybe, you know, yeah, I see that kind of stuff, and most of the time you look at the coach and they never even sold real estate. Yeah, because, I mean. I'm in the field. You actually call, you call clients, and they go through the actual sales call. Right, and you show it right there on the platform. Every week I do live calls. Every week I do live calls. So there's no excuses. No, no, no. Every week I do live calls that I don't have to make. I do it for to show people how easy and fun it is. And then I'll clip, it's on YouTube. It stays on there as a live, it's totally live. Right. And then I'll clip those and make other, you know, content out of it or whatever. But. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. But my question is, what else is there? How else do you build your business? It was my question. If you're a real estate agent, how else do you build your business? That's a very good question. I mean, I'm putting myself in the shoes of a real estate agent, right? Networking, marketing, which kind of social media, you'd have to find a way to, you know, I guess find a field or a niche in that, right? I mean, there's many different ways. I've always under the perception that real estate agents would have cards or the little things they playing on the doors, walk around the neighborhoods, they put it on the door and things like that. And, but now just as my mind said, I've never been into real estate game, but you are telling me that, hey, that model is long gone and you have. It's not long gone. See, the thing is, is one-on-one conversations. Real estate is a one-on-one conversation game, right? The only thing between you as a real estate agent and millions of dollars in commissions are thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market. Yeah, and it takes years to do that. Yeah, I mean, it takes years to do that, but okay, you want a million bucks or not? It's just that simple, right? It's that simple, right? I got you. And a lot of people can't go through the years of doing it to actually get where they want to be because they just give up and they go do something else and don't make it either, right? So let me ask you, is there, are you telling me there's no way of being an overnight success in real estate? No way. So you're gonna, you're killing that philosophy right here right now. Right here, I'm not gonna, the dream I want to sell you is that if you bust your ass for three to five years, you can have a business where you don't make any more cold calls but you sell 5,200 properties a year just doing a weekly email for the rest of your life. Wait a minute, hold on, man. I might have, I might switch careers for a second here. Hold on a second. But can you go through the three to five though? See, that's the thing. That's the thing, right? That's what people can't go through, right? They can't wrap their head around that part. They say they want it, but that's like saying you wanna play varsity football when you're a freshman. Yeah. Right? You say you want it. Yeah, that is true. Right? So you come out here and run some wind sprints and get ran over a couple of times and you probably don't want it as bad as you thought you did. Yeah, you know. It's the same thing. So I see that's why there's a nine as such a high failure rate in the industry, right? Bingo, it takes all, anybody can do it in real estate. Anybody. I'm talking every single person can succeed as a real estate agent. 100% of humans on earth. Really? Yes. Okay. Blueprint. Because it's that easy, right? The problem is how long it takes to develop. And you don't get paid today on what you do today, right? Delayed gratification. It's so delayed. Right, I see what you said. The seeds you plant today might not come to fruition for a year sometimes, right? Sometimes they come to fruition in a month or two or three, something like that. So how do you convince students that enter your course, that say, hey, you know, this is the perfect industry to get into, but it's going to take some time. Not a lot of people can subscribe to that. They already have a preconceived notion of what this is going to be based on whatever they've seen on TV or YouTube or what their mom told them or whatever. They already have that preconceived notion. All I'm there to do is to try to help guide them through what they need to do day to day to get the ball rolling and help set those expectations that it's not going to happen overnight and you're going to have to grind it out. And a lot of them are like, oh, yeah, I knew it was going to be hard. Well, you know how hard. Yeah, it's a little more harder, right? You think times that by 20, and that's about how hard it's going to be. But I'm like, I'm here for you. When you run into those frustrating moments, call me. When you run into those moments that, you know, you're down or you're frustrated, disappointed or you lost a deal or you feel like you're not going anywhere. Call me and tell me about it, because that's what every single agent goes through. There's not one single agent that's been successful. They didn't go through that disappointing, frustrating moments in the first year or two. Nobody, right? Hmm. So let me ask you a question. You know, how did you fund? As you was going through these trial and tribulations, how did you fund this blueprint of you being a real estate agent? How, how did you go through? Because you're a father, you're married, you have a family, yeah. Oh, so that was... See, my daughter's three, I got married five years ago. So thank God I didn't get married. Right. He's like, thank you, Lord, thank you Jesus. I didn't have a daughter or anything back then. Right. But what do you say for the single moms that, you know, or the ones that do have kids? I love single moms, right? And the thing about it is, is that it may take a little longer for you than other agents to get there. Right. The thing is, is don't give up. If you can, if you can have grandma watch the kids for three hours a week even, to focus on your real estate business. And that's all you got. I was just gonna say, that's all it takes sometimes maybe? No, no, no, but if that's all you got, you take what you got. If you can get six or eight hours a week or 10, whatever you can get, that you can focus 100% and time block that time to build your business, then take it. And just, just continue moving forward. Maybe it takes two or three years to get it really going. Maybe it takes, I know people that it's two or three years and then they finally get going. They finally get going. Right. Some people it's six months. Some people it's three months. Some people it's a year. Everybody's different, right? To get out the gate, yeah. And another part of the problem is all the agents compare themselves to each other. So this agent that hadn't sold anything in eight months, he's comparing himself to this guy that's been in the business for four years who's selling three a month. You can't do that. You can't do that. Yeah, you can't do that. Yeah, you're setting yourself up for failure at that point pretty much, right? Right. But that's tough though, when you see that. And it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just banging on you. You know, like this guy here, he's not even, I'm 10 times smarter, I work harder. And he's crushing it. Yeah, and he's crushing it. And, and he's living the dream and I'm sitting here, you know, working at Popeyes. Hold on, Popeyes is pretty good, man. No, Popeyes is, Popeyes is great. Popeyes is great. So, so, okay. So you, you was able to fund your blueprint because you still maintain your roofing job. Yeah, because, because the thing is, man, is like I let it take a long time, right? 15 years to get to a million dollars a year, right? So I'm just super long game. That's why the free coaching, that's why the free coaching, because I'm looking at 20 years and 20 years, I'll be 62. I'm thinking like, whoa, dude, like I'm interviewing Patrick Bet today. I'm speaking at all, Ryan's stuff. Like I could probably pull a lot of big names and really do some serious collabs and stuff already. And I'm still a little ricky from Alabama. Like you give me some time. Wow, very humble, I love that. You give me some time to get my content right. See, my content's not even right yet and I'm already where I'm at. Yeah, my content's not even on point yet. Wait, with your, with your jumping the gun, I'm, the next question is how did you, how were you able to promote your blueprint? Well, let's go back to the, to the funding, right? Cause I just want to make this point. Like as I'm coaching my agents and all that, my goal is, is to cut all their expenses. Minimize it as much as possible. Minimize it, how do I do that? Right. One is, don't pay for coaching. Right? Wait, can you say that one more time? That is such a profound answer right there. One is, right, don't pay for coaching. Okay? That knocks that expense, that monthly expense. Which is a major expense for a lot of people. A thousand dollars, right off. Right at the gate, right. The second expense, don't buy leads. Don't pay for coaching, don't buy leads. And that's the biggest obstacle for a lot of people that want to get into a field, right? Leads are, I do, what is a lead? A lead is any human in the market. They're everywhere. Humans are everywhere, everywhere I see. Yes, they're human everywhere. I see one right here, I see one right here. I got two leads right here. Well, that's a good point. Are you gonna buy a house in your life? Of course. How many? How many? Do you have an agent you're gonna work with on that? No, I don't, right? Here I am. You're a lead. I see how, right, I see the point you're making. Right, right. And so I can just call property owners that own the exact property I want to sell for a penny, I can get their information. I can call property owners that own the exact property I want to sell and just get to know them. Just build a relationship. And I can do that for basically free. A penny is free to me. So while a lot of real estate agents are people that want to get in an industry don't realize they can get it for free. Literally, not, not can. I mean, you gotta pay for licensing and all this stuff, right? Right, right. But yeah, like, okay, free leads. For sale owners are free. And that's a really good, that's a really, I don't like them, right? But right now with how tight the market is, that's a great avenue right this second. Just to get in at the beginning. And approach them as they approach them and see what they want to buy. They don't pay a commission on the buy side. See what they want to buy, help them on the buy side. 87% end up listing. Who do you think they're going to call? Ricky. Oh, I got it. There's all kinds of things, right? Open houses, free. Events. Doorknob, go to the SO division you want to buy. You can't afford a penny, a contact to call them. Go doorknob them for free. Wow, okay. I mean, there's tons and like, okay, what do you do? Buy leads and spend thousands of dollars on buy leads. End up doing the same thing, just talking to them one at a time. And then you're not even guaranteed of any type of success rate or anything like that, right? Nothing, it'd be about the same because it's the same people, by the way. The same people they're selling you is the same people on the door knocking for free, right? But the difference is I get to target the people I want to talk to versus being at the mercy of whoever you send me for a thousand bucks. Whatever the money that you paid for. Right, it makes sense, okay. So being able to take away the cost of the coaching, so getting the information and also eliminating the cost of your potential clients is a major, major factor on you being able to build your blueprint and fund it as well, not promote your blueprint, right? Exactly because, and that's what I teach agents is, I mean, listen, I've paid for coaching. Everybody, yeah, you need a mentor at the beginning. I'm not saying, if there's somebody you like, you want to get close to them, you want to spend some time with them and learn what they learn, go pay for it. I'm all about that. Right. But I'm just saying, I'm here to help and I'm not going to charge you a dime and I'll give you my entire blueprint. Right, everything that I know is at zero to diamond.com about how to make a million dollars as a real estate agent. Right, it's all right there, black and white. So, you know, if you want that, great, it's there. If you want to go pay for coaching, that's fine. Go do it. But I'm saying this is an option that can save you some money and don't buy leads. How was you able to use social media to promote your brand and actually get it from zero to diamond? You know, that's a very, very fascinating question that the audience is dying to hear about. Yeah, so it is an interesting question. It's an interesting story. So, like I said, I didn't use social media to build my real estate business. Right, okay. So I've made that clear. I was just focused on postcards, phone calls and emails to build it. The conventional way. Yeah, but you know what's so crazy is that I didn't realize that I was actually building a personal brand with my weekly email. And so what people don't really understand is what a social media platform actually is, right? Social media platform is a place where you post original consistent content. Right, okay. So when you go on social media, what do you do? Engage, follow, like this. Well, you're holding your phone like this, right? And you're doing this. Right. You're scrolling, right? Right. Now, when you check your email, what motion are you doing? Holding your phone. Holding your phone. Yeah. Either like this. And then you're going like this. Yeah, going through the thread. Right, right. Same motion, right? And so email is a social media platform. Is it because of the physical motion or just the engagement? And I mean, I guess you have a point there in conjunction with them. It's a place, okay. How many times a day do people check email? Oh my God, yeah. Okay, how many times a day do people check social media? Oh my God. Okay, okay. So it's the same thing. So I say I wasn't using social media to build my real estate business, but. You really was, right? Right, plot twist. Okay, go for it. I actually was and I didn't realize it. I was actually doing the same stuff, right? And just not on social media platforms. And you just wasn't conscientious that she was actually building a personal brand at that point. Exactly, exactly. I was just like, okay, people want this information weekly. I'm gonna give them the information weekly. But then after 10 years of doing it, I built this brand where I basically was famous. Like I was like a celebrity to my clients. Cause they're like Ricky's weekly email. I get it every week. I see it. I look forward to it. It's coming at a certain time. Boom. And so it was literally social media, right? So, but I ignored the platforms per se, the quote unquote social media platforms, but I was doing the work of social media, right? Outside of social media. Well, emails or social, see the thing is, is when you look at different platforms, they do different things. Right. And when you look at like Facebook is different than Instagram is different. Snapchat, right? And have you been on Discord? Yes. Okay. Like totally different. Totally different, right? Totally different platform, right? You know, podcast, you know, those are platforms, right? Email. It's just like, they're all a little different. A way of communicating, right? It's just a little bit different, you know? But it's just another platform that you post original consistent content to build your brand. It's the same thing. So, I wanna ask you then, how in the scale of one to 10, what would you place building a personal brand on as far as if you wanted to be in a real estate agent or any type of online agent? Well, real estate agent, you have to have personal brand, right? So, this is necessary? Yeah, it's necessary, right? Whether you're doing it through email, postcard, smoke signals, whatever, right? But like, you know, on social media platforms, whatever, you know, you have to have a brand. But there's many businesses you don't have to have a personal brand. E-commerce, you could build the E-commerce brand and build the company around the company. The company itself, right? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of businesses you don't have to have a personal brand, but look at today's world and how many people are using their personal brand to blow up non-personal brand type businesses, right? True. And that's kind of the business of the future, is to build your personal brand and then let that brand feed all these other businesses. Everything else you have, right? Which is what my business model is. Build the Ricky Careuth brand, billion dollar brand in the future. Beautiful. Build a billion dollar brand that feeds all these businesses that makes it a billion dollar brand, right? But anyway, back to your question. So in 2017, when I decided to write two books and start trying to really help agents understand how I built my business super uniquely, I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to do social media. This business and that business I have to do because I have to reach a lot of agents and I have to get my message in front of them. And the only way to do that is through social media, right? So then I was like, okay, let me take this monster on because I conquered the real estate world with email, postcards and phone calls. Let me step my game up and learn this new digital age game. And then I've got the best of both worlds. I've built my business like this and now I'm gonna build another business like this. And now I kind of understand all angles. But how was the learning curve when you made that transition say, okay, I need to dive into social media? It's still happening. Still happening. I still haven't got there. I'm still trying to figure it out. Still a student, right? I'm still trying to figure it out. So yeah, I went through a lot of different stages and I was making live calls and doing coaching calls and stuff like that. And I just blew up, right? Just testing different things. Yeah, yeah, like Instagram blew up really fast. I went to 200,000 quick. YouTube, I'm at about 100,000 now. Wow, okay. And it just took a long time. Like I've been doing it six years and I'm just now at 100,000. And if I'm not mistaken, you're very hands-on. If not, you have a little help. I do all my posting. I do all my commenting and DMing and I answer every single DM myself. I spend hours a day on DMs. Is that also a strategy that you personally decided you want to do and say, hey, I want to individually communicate with each other? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the relationships that I build there, just when I respond, people are like, wow, I love this guy forever. Just for responding. And I mean, not to mention whatever, I mean, I'm giving life advice and stuff in there. People are reaching out with serious problems, you know? So it's almost like you're part-time psychologist at a weight therapist, right? A little bit, because a lot of this stuff is perspective, right? It's like I was telling a guy just a second ago on Instagram Live how much, because he's like, what would you tell people that feel like they're stuck? I'm like, well, the first thing, realize that you're not stuck. Yeah, change the mindset. When you look at where you are right now in five years and look back at where you are right now, you're gonna realize you were crushing it. But here you are in the moment, thinking you're stuck. It's like, you're not stuck. It was like a guy last night, he was like, you know, I'll make 100 calls and get a maybe. And he's like, even if that happens, I'm still happy. I'm like, wait a minute, bro. Whoa. I'm like, well, but wait a minute, you made 100 calls and got a maybe, right? Now think about if you did that every day for a year, for 250 working days in a year, and you got 250 maybes, you're gonna sell 10, 15 of those, not to mention the seeds that are gonna be planted of those people that'll do business with you next year and the year after and the year after. And future and everything, right. It's like, man, you're crushing it. That's the thing, like you made 100 calls, you got a maybe, you're killing it. That's it, nothing else, right? But people look at that and they say, I'm stuck. You know, I'm not gonna make it. I'm probably not gonna make it in this business. It's like, wait a minute. And that's why so many people fail as they fall into this, you know, I'm not doing well when they're actually crushing it. So it's a perspective game, right? So anyway, back to your question, I started on Facebook, I started a Facebook group that was my first move. The Facebook group's like 40 grand right now, 40,000 agents. Wow. And that's where I started and started posting on Facebook and stuff, running Facebook ads and kind of messing around with that. Then I started doing Instagram once I felt like I had good momentum, then I focused on Instagram, felt like I had good momentum, then I did YouTube. So it was one platform at a time? I just stair-stepped it. I focused on one platform and then moved to another and then moved to another and then podcast and then just every platform. Okay. And then now like, people are like, how do you post on all these things and answer all these messages and go and sell all these properties and go to these meetings and go to these speeches and still knock off at five spent with the family and the weekends and all this stuff. And I'm like, wait a minute, how long you been doing this? They're like three years. I was like, I've been doing this 21 years, bro. It took me 21 years to stair-step. I said, if you to saw me at four years, like you'd be like, this guy, I don't even know if he's gonna make it, right? If you to saw me at four years. Yeah, cause there was no, you wasn't trying to be omnipresent. You just wanted to hone in on one and take it from there. One, get it down. One, get it down. Like I did real estate for 15 years and nothing else. You know, I got back in the business in 2008 and I didn't even know until 2015 or 16 when I started investing in stocks. I didn't even know that the start market crash in 2008. Because you had all of your focus and energy in real estate at that time. I was focused on one thing, selling properties and making a million dollars. That's how focused I was on getting to the point where I'm making a million dollars. So you're not under the umbrella of the quote unquote, serial entrepreneur. You're more of the, let me go deep into one lane here and fill that out. I'm a serial entrepreneur, but I'm going to, I'm gonna be the master of this. Right, before you. Before I try to stack something else, right? Makes sense, okay. It's the people that jump from thing to thing before they actually get the first thing. They're never, you know, they never succeed at a super high level. I wanna crush this and then like, if I can get this going at a million bucks a year, then okay, I'll go, I'll go stack some other things on top of it. Right. I mean, like I said, I'm in sales, coaching, brokerage, mortgage and investing. Right? On top of my personal brand. And all of this surrounds real estate, obviously, because you was able to hone in and lock down real estate and again, add the parts to it and everything. Okay. So now, and you know, the mindset you went through when you were promoting your personal brand and building one platform at a time. Now, as we wrap up the show, if there's one piece of advice and the mindset of when you built your blueprint, if you could share with the audience, if you can just wound piece of advice as far as what you would tell a new real estate agent in today's age if they wanted to get into the business and build a personal brand within two years, what's the one piece of advice you would give them? Post every day. Post every day. Post every day. Create content and post every day. Yeah, post at least once a day. Don't stop. And then maybe those maybe just end up turning to a yes. Yeah, I mean, listen, here's the thing. If you've got 500 followers and your vision is, is you're gonna have 10,000. Well, you got 9,500 people who aren't gonna see the videos you're making today. This is practice for the future followers. They're not gonna see your videos. You're not gonna see the videos you make today. You think the videos you make today suck? Who cares, right? Other people don't think it suck. Other people appreciate the fact that you made that piece of content even though you think it sucked because you're too judgmental against yourself. What you should be doing is posting, make as great a content as you can, post and get better. Every time you post, you get a little better every time, you know. I know a guy that he batches 100 videos in one setting, right? Three months worth of content. Oh, just sit there and record everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he'll come up with 100 ideas and he'll batch 100 videos, right? For three months worth of content. And I'm like, but man, like if you batch seven a week, if you batch seven a week and post once a week instead of 100 and haven't, you know, three months worth of content, think about each week how much better you're gonna get each week at delivery, at the tone, at the editing and everything, right? You may think of something like a lot happens in three months. You may see something on another piece of content that you think, man, that's good. I'm gonna incorporate that into my content. But you can't because you're already locked in to whatever your skill level was three months ago into today's content. Stopping your growth, right? Like batch, but batch for a week. So like real estate agents always say, make calls all morning and do all your marketing and social media in the afternoon. It's a super simple schedule, right? If you do that long enough, it's just a matter of time. It's not if it's a win, you become a millionaire. If you just make calls all morning and do all your marketing and social media and making your videos and weekly emails and all that stuff in the afternoon, right? You make calls from nine to 12. You make videos from lunch to quitting time. You're going to crush it. There's no question about it. You may not crush it today or next month. I don't know when the breakthrough's gonna happen. It could be years, I don't know, but you will be a millionaire, right? And so, but you could sit down one day after lunch and actually script out and film seven great videos for one short form 60 second video per day, right? And batch out a seven video session, one afternoon a week for your weekly content. And just be consistent on that aspect. Be consistent and just get better every week. Each batch will get a little better, a little better, a little better. You'll understand about hooks. You'll understand about value. You'll understand about call to actions. You'll understand better about editing. You'll start to morph into... Your own brand in a way, yeah. Exactly. Pick your own lane and everything like that. And that's a very profound piece of advice you shared with everybody because, number one, not only people are aware that, hey, social media is a tool, right? Whether you wanna use it for entertainment purposes or marketing purposes. I got something on that real quick before we go. Go ahead. As far as social media being a tool, I teach a class about once a month for a big group that it's a social media coaching program. Right, okay. And they bring me in once a month to just do a session. And this past week, I went in and they're asking me questions and all this and that. And I was like, here's the thing. I didn't start doing social media to then try to do something, right? I was trying to do something and then realized social media was the tool I was gonna use to do it. I like that, I like that. So my thing was is I wanna get to agents. I wanna reduce the failure rate. I wanna help, I wanna change the world. I wanna show people my unique way of selling real estate. Right. And then I was like, okay, how am I gonna do this? Yeah, what's the tool? Oh, oh, oh, social media. This is what I'm gonna use. Versus I think most people just say, I wanna get, I wanna be successful in social media. And they just, they don't have like a reason. They don't have a game plan. Well, they don't have a reason, right? They're just getting on social. They're creating content around whatever. They're still trying to figure their niche out and all this stuff. It's not strategic and intentional. Yeah, in the beginning. And maybe they find their way or whatever. But my point is that you need to kind of understand why you're doing it. Why you're creating the content. What is the goal? What is your big grand vision of this? And then you use social media to accomplish that. Sort of like begin with the end in mind. Exactly. So like that's like, I didn't get into social media to build a business. I got into the business and then decided social media was gonna be the path. To be able to build a business. Wow. Well, you know what? You was able to definitely share, your blueprint in becoming. You know? It's safe to say, in today's episode, for a lot of the aspiring and even established real estate agents or real estate professionals out there, they was able to garner some great gems from today's conversation and everything like that. And one thing I took, several things I took away from our conversation. Number one, the power of consistency. Number one, number two, also the power of digging in deep into a particular lane before you start morphing out into other lanes as well too. And more importantly, what you demonstrate above everything else, believe it in yourself. We're talking about, ladies and gentlemen, a roofer. A roofer from Alabama to now becoming a multi-millionaire in the real estate game, educating others and everything like that. So more power to you, more blessing. So if there's any final thoughts before we wrap up the show, you wanna leave the audience? Bro, I think we said it all. We covered a lot today, man. It's about an hour to have conversation. I wanna have conversation, but again, even if you're not into real estate, I think a lot of people would appreciate today's conversation as well too, because real estate is one of those generational wealth lanes here. And I believe that every person, every person should own a piece of property. There's no doubt. There's no doubt. Multiple pieces of property. Multiple, let's start with one, right? For sure, for sure. And I know a good agent. Right? They can call me anytime if they need to buy a house. I'm ready to go. Well, listen, if anybody wants to follow you, find out, which by the way, what do you have up next coming, outside of from the growing your zero-to-diamond community? You have a lot of things in your plate. I know you're traveling, engagements and things like that, share with the community. Yeah, I'm traveling three times a month to speak all over. Okay. Let's see, where am I going from here? I'm going to DC, Richmond, Houston, Vegas, Sacramento. Wow. Vegas twice. Who knows where? I got a trip to South Africa. Internationally beautiful. To speak to, there's a company called Private Property that's kind of like the Zillow of South Africa. And so they called me last year. They wanted me to come last year, but it was too short notice. So they put me in the books for this year. Beautiful. So it's like going to be 4,000 South African real estate agents. So that's going to be a lot of fun. It's your first time internationally, by the way. No, no, no, I went to, I was the keynote at R4 in Brazil, the Remax Brazilian National Remax Convention. Dope, dope. It was a really, really, really cool experience. Great experience, I bet, huh? But that was the only one so far. So this will be the second trip out of the country to go speak and stuff. So it's kind of cool. I've got a lot of followers in South Africa, really all over the world. How is international real estate? Is that a whole other animal? It is. I learned that when I went to Brazil. Brazil, I didn't realize this at all. At all, right? When I get there, I'm totally oblivious to their situation, right? And when I get there, the more I started talking to the agents, the more I realized, wait a minute, you guys don't even have an MLS, right? They don't have MLS. And they don't have like county records and comps and stuff, right? So when the agents sell a property, they know the comp because they sold it. And like some of them like won't share that information with the other agents. That's kind of like their- That's an internal thing they keep. Yeah, yeah, that's like their information to use to get more listings and stuff, right? And also because there's no MLS and there's no border realtors and stuff like that, there, it's more of an open listing policy, right? Where the seller will go out and literally list their property with like eight different agents. It'll be like eight different listing agents. And the first one that brings the buyer wins. Wow, it's almost like a first come, first serve anyway. Yeah, and so like here in the state, see, this is one thing agents don't write here. We're so spoiled here. And we didn't realize how good we have it. When we list a property here, we literally list it, we put on MLS and then we go get other listings and we just sit there and let another agent- Let the MLS do its thing. Yeah, we let another agent come in and sell the property and then we get our commission. Doesn't matter who sells it, we get the money. We have an exclusive right. Over there, it's an open listing. No exclusive listings to that one agent. It's open to many agents. Anyone, right, okay. The first one who brings the buyer wins. So like agents here, if you can imagine living in a world where when you list a property, now you gotta hurry up and go find the buyer before another agent finds the buyer for that listing or you're not gonna get the deal at all. You're not gonna get any commission. Wait a minute, I have so many follow up questions on that. I mean. And so it's the same thing in South Africa. They don't have an MLS, right? And so they're behind, I would say, in both of those countries a good 20, 30 years technology-wise. I could push back on that because imagine if we had that system here. When did that increase the success rate of agents because now they're forced to work? They're not relying on the MLS and having, like you say, another agent. I don't know because I don't know because I think maybe the top agents will have such huge databases that when they get the listing they're gonna sell that really quick no matter how many agents. And so the newer agents have smaller databases and have less of a reach. It'll be really tough for them to kind of break in to the market. That's just speculation. I don't know. It could turn out the way you're saying or maybe, maybe not. Who knows? I would crush it in that environment because I would feel like my thing is the same thing I built my business. I would build a huge database of buyers and that would be my thing when I go to listing appointments. Hey, I've got database of buyers, right? I'll send it out to my people and I'll sell it. List it with as many agencies you want to. I'm gonna be the first to bring a buyer. Yeah, cause you got all the database of the buyer. I think what's cool is is people have more listings because the seller will list it with eight different agents. And so it's like, when you know, when you go to a listing appointment, you gonna get the listing. Yeah, it's like, I'm that shit now. Right, because they're gonna list it with a bunch of agents. So you're gonna get the listing but then you gotta find the buyer on the back end. So- So I'm assuming with that system, the cream of the crop would be, almost like crony capitalism here because in America, we always say how the government, they at least are getting everything on the top and the bottom or something. Almost in that realm there. Kind of. It would almost have that effect, I'm assuming. Yeah, kind of, but it's interesting to understand the different dynamics of the different countries and how they operate. Like in India, you don't even have to have a license. In Colombia, you don't even have to have a real estate license. Any average drill can just- Yeah, you can just go and just sign up for Remax or whatever. I'm sure that there's some kind of thing that you have to do to sign like, sign a contract with Remax this, that and the other, but you don't have to go take a class, a test, continue Ned, all that stuff, right? So like the different countries have a lot of different dynamics when it comes to real estate and it's cool to understand the different dynamics and for me to learn the differences and stuff because honestly, there's opportunity, right? There's opportunity to bring technology to some of these countries and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, there's some massive opportunities, you know? So we'll see kind of what happens in the future with that, but yeah, going there and just all over the place, so. That's what's up, that's what's up. Yeah, yeah, just continuing to try to build a brand. Definitely catch Ricky, guys, across all his platforms. There's no telling where he's gonna be. He's almost like Wells Waldo in a way, right? You know what I do most of the time that when I go somewhere, I put on my Instagram story, hey, I'm gonna be at this hotel gym at six, like I did that here, six o'clock every day. I'll be here if anybody wants to meet up. Wow, that transparent. Well, as a real estate agent, you have to have that spirit, you know? That open door policy I'm assuming, right? Yeah, so I'll have followers that just show up at the gym and hey, they just wanna meet or whatever. So definitely, man. Have you ever been fearful of being that transparent or no, like, you know? No, not at all. I mean, I'm in a public place, I'm in a gym, you know, like I got a 10 pound weight in my hands so if they try something. Watch it, guys. You're gonna crack you, man. Pretty strong, that big guy, yeah. I'll tell you this and you're gonna wanna ask a bunch of questions, but I'm not gonna let you, because the show's over. Speaking on all that, I traveled and did dozens and dozens of jiu-jitsu tournaments and I did two MMA fights 10 years ago. So I did martial arts for like a decade and a half. Mixed martial arts, jiu-jitsu, two different kinds of jiu-jitsu, karate, kickboxing, all that stuff. I should call you Ricky, a.k.a. kick-your-ass, right? Yeah. Ricky, thanks for definitely coming to the studio today. Great conversation, great interview. Hopefully we can bring you back. Oh, I love to, man. Absolutely, part two. Part two, yes, okay. Which, by the way, guys, you can catch Ricky on Facebook, Instagram, all his social media platforms, which is at Ricky Carruth, correct, absolutely. And we can't tell you what his upcoming schedule is because he's everywhere, but if you do want to follow where Ricky's going to be at next, you know, his speaking engagements, his coaching classes, or anything real estate, definitely follow him on his social media channels. And as he mentioned, he usually posts prior to his destination where he's going to be at. So with that being said, also you could check out all of the past episodes of Respect My Blueprint on all streaming platforms, Apple iTunes, Spotify, as well as Google Podcasts. And as always, guys, if you want to learn more about your blueprint and, again, how to build, promote, fund, or even plan your blueprint like the discussion we had with Ricky today, definitely check out the past episodes or go ahead and book a consultation with myself or the sales team. We would definitely like to help you get your blueprint to the next level. And as always, as always, great conversation. Have a great day, guys. Smiles are free. Give it away. Have a blessed day. Catch you on the flip side.