Looking back I was always a hustler and I’ve always been wired that way.
Chad Brown, @SerialCFO
Josh: Chad, we’re excited to have you back on here for another one-on-one interview episode, today we want to talk about your entrepreneurial journey. So here’s my question, answer if you can, how many businesses have you owned over the years?
Chad: I did actually figure out the answer to that recently. The big number is 22 businesses over 20 years.
Josh: And the thing that’s special about your business journey is the fact that your businesses aren’t confined to any single industry. Most people who are serial entrepreneurs or own multiple businesses tend to stick to one industry, real estate for example.
Chad: Yeah, my business portfolio has been a bit scattered. Most of them fall into the service industry model. There’s been multiple tax and accounting offices, a landscape company, an emergency services company, a construction company, a random chicken farm. Now we have an online retail sign business, at one point there were a couple of used car dealerships, a title pawn, some kind of masonry business, a carpet cleaning business, of course now I have the cleaning company with you.
Funny story, at one point 12 or 13 years ago I had a 9 to 5 job but my wife didn’t really know much about what I did. She was doing something in the office upstairs and came down with 11 different business cards from different things I had been or was still a part of, and she asked if there was something more she needed to know about me.
Josh: So did you grow up in a big entrepreneurial family?
Chad: Absolutely not. I grew up in a small town in South Georgia. My dad was a PE teacher and football coach. If there was an entrepreneur it would’ve been my mom actually, not that she was growing a huge business, she just worked really hard and she had her own hair salon where she managed a few people. And I wasn’t really exposed to that from a behind the scenes side.
But looking back I was always a hustler and I’ve always been wired that way.
Josh: So what made you want to go to college as an accounting major?
Chad: I did not start school wanting to be an accountant. I started in the education field and decided to transfer out to the business school, but I still didn’t know that I was even interested in business, I just wanted to avoid organic chemistry and a foreign language.
One day I met a guy who was friends with my dad and he had everything I wanted in life. And he was an accountant. So I transferred again into the accounting program. Nothing to do with wanting to be an accountant, but I wanted the same life that he had.
Josh: You defined what you wanted and it’s led you into this entrepreneur adventure that you’re on.
Chad: So then I got a summer leadership internship position at an accounting firm in Atlanta and discovered through that process that working in Atlanta was not the life I wanted for myself. I wasn’t interested in doing big five accounting or commuting, I wanted to stay in Athens. So I made a list of the top 10-15 accounting firms in Athens and drove around to visit each of them.
The third stop I made was here to see Ken Lill and his dad at the Tax Shelter. I came on for a seasonal position to work the front desk one semester and ended up staying for the next twenty years. And now I’ve worked my way up to partner.
Josh: Did you do that knowing that you’d want to own your own business someday?
Chad: I knew I needed something on my resume and I needed a job. Plus I wanted to learn about the tax side of being a CPA. The rest is history.
Robert Kiyosaki talks about this principle when you’re starting out. He says, “Don’t work to earn, work to learn.” So where did your entrepreneurial adventure kick back up?
Josh Melton, @sidegigprophet
Chad: If I hadn’t gotten involved with the tax business I think it would’ve taken longer, but here’s what happened. We would work 70-75 hours a week during the tax season, then April 15th is like a switch. At that point we were much more tax focused than general accounting, so it was especially prominent. I’d go from working non-stop to working 20 hours a week but with the conditioning to work 75. So I started looking for things to help me earn money and keep myself busy outside of tax season.
The other side of it was that I’d get a huge bonus check on April 15th and all my expenses were already paid. So I had extra money to go do other things or invest in other businesses. Not only that, Ken and his dad trusted me with decisions, so if I thought we should invest in this rental house or do this office in another town or start a title pawn business, they backed me and allowed me to do it.
Josh: So as a kid and a college student you had this pattern of buy low, sell high. Did that go away at this point or did you keep doing that?
Chad: I’ve always had a desire to learn something and always had the desire to get something out of any effort I put in, so coupling those together you get this flipping tendency that I still have to this day. I’ve flipped tractors, boats, cars, houses, you name it.
I had this pattern of, “buy something, learn how to use it, get paid to use it, then sell it and buy something new.”
Here’s an example. I wanted a boat, so my brother and I started looking on Craigslist and we found a bass boat with a motor and a trailer for $1500 in Rome, GA. So we bought it, drove it back, used it for the season, then sold it again for $2800. We bought another one and repeated the pattern and on down the line we ended up with a $15,000 boat that we’ve only got $1500 in.
So those are the early stages of the entrepreneurial spirit coming out in me. It was a desire to learn and touch and do stuff, and also a desire to get to something that I wanted. And in the early days of business it was that same thing. I wanted to learn, I wanted something to occupy my time.
It may sound weird, but I also had a fear of losing the income from my tax job. Not that I expected to be fired, but what if something happened to the tax laws that cut off that income source? So when I started some of these other businesses it was to know that I’d be okay and taken care of if I lost my job. Almost like my backup plan.
Josh: I think one of the strengths that separates you from other people is that you learn and implement. A lot of people learn and learn and learn and never do anything with that knowledge. You’re a phenomenal implementer. You went in, you took a risk, and you won.
Chad: I think that the key is…
I would figure out on the front end that it really wasn’t a risk. If it all went bust I could minimize the risk. If there was a risk, it was really low level.
Josh: So how did you move from side hustling to becoming a partner here at the Tax Shelter?
Chad: That happened because of two things. Number one, just like in my side hustles, I would make really calculated business decisions or have really calculated ideas where I did enough due diligence to mitigate the risk. I had mapped out what’s the best case and what’s the worst case and what’s probably going to happen. That’s just naturally my tendency.
So when I would present something to Ken and his dad, John, I would have all that laid out and they could see the effort I’d put in on the front end. And I had shown a lot of my work ethic on the backend. So there was some trust there to go do some things. And it started in other things, we were partners going into flipping houses or we’re going into some rental houses as 50/50 partners. And then that led to a secondary tax office and then a third tax office.
Backing up a bit, the second thing is that about three years into me working in the tax business, Ken’s dad decided to retire and left me a substantial client list to take over and service. So both those things gave me the space to build trust and relationships inside the business that continued to grow outside the business.
The reason I’ve been able to be a part of so many things is because of the business owners and the teams we have and everything we do. There’s so many amazing people behind the scenes. My business partners, starting with Ken in the beginning, have supported me and given me opportunity and taught me how to approach business and how to do more. And my business partners now run the different businesses we’re involved in.
The people I work with are the ones that allow me to have the freedom to go out, pursue these things and find other opportunities.
Josh: What do you think it was about you that led you to have that confidence or belief that Ken and his dad might say yes to a 23 year old and help fund this entrepreneur adventure?
Chad: I had a lot of confidence, but not because I was certain in what I could do. It wasn’t anything really to do with me, I had just mapped out the research. I had done the work to see the clear path of what could and couldn’t work and what the risk might be. It wasn’t some business knowledge I had or some confidence. I was just willing to research stuff and figure it out. I had nothing else to do with all of my spare time.
Josh: So when you’re doing these businesses, you have Ken and John engaged and involved. You have partners with what you’re doing. How did you get into your first enterprise that you 100% owned yourself?
Chad: I think I have partners in most everything I do. I started the cleaning company on my own, but it wasn’t necessarily intentional, so then you and I ended up in the cleaning business together. I’m a big fan of partners and partnerships. 99% of everything I do involves some sort of partner.
Most people have different experiences to bring to the table. I’ve had some very bad experiences with partners, but I love partnerships. I love having other people involved. I don’t like making all the decisions. I can’t operate another business on my own because my schedule changes so much throughout the year. I need partners to help in the operations. I also love having partners when things are a struggle and we’re facing obstacles. And when things are going really well, you have somebody to celebrate with and you have somebody you’ve built it with.
Josh: I know Dave Ramsey is not a fan of partnerships at all. He speaks against it with lots of strength and emotion, but I’m with you. We have partnered up on multiple projects. Some that have gone phenomenally well, which is awesome. I’ve been really fortunate to have some really solid and good partnerships.
Tell us the story of you buying this property you now live on and how it led to you starting a business.
Chad: Ken and I came up with a plan at the beginning of the recession to buy foreclosure properties with about 30% equity, hold them for two years, then flip them when the economy came back up and they had closer to 50% equity on them. It was going to be awesome. Fast forward, the recession continued and our 30% equity turned to 0%. So we went to plan B and turned them into rental houses. There was always that plan B risk mitigated option we’d have in place.
There was a property auction held once a month on a Tuesday night at a bar in downtown Athens. And I was there one December and this property came up for sale, 15 acres in Clarke County. And it wasn’t on the list so nobody bid on it. I went up to the organizer after and asked about it and he said it was really good property, but he had to sell it tonight for 70,000. There was no time for financing or research. And I signed the paper right there. Never seen it, barely know where it’s at. I had maybe eight grand to my name and I was living in a trailer, but I had two weeks to come up with 70 grand.
I figured it out because it was such a great buy. And over the next year I hunted the property a few times. Didn’t have a plan for it. But I finally decided that I wanted to build there. So I got a construction loan, called around to a few builders and asked for quotes, and I was blown away by their business model. They had no motivation to build a quality house with good materials, everything about their business was structured to make them profit. So I decided to build it myself.
Fast forward, it was a stressful mess but I did it and it worked well. And I saved a lot of money in the process.
Now I have all this knowledge and I had learned from going through the process, so I decided not to waste any of that and I started doing building projects on the side.
Next thing I knew I had nine people to manage and we were working 365 days a year building houses.
Josh: So you’ve had a lot of success. You’ve been able to finance a good lifestyle, gone on some great trips. You’re very respected in your community. You stand out for your profession on the accounting side because people don’t expect their accountant to be the serial entrepreneur. You offer your strengths to your partnerships, being the CFO and handling the money. But what’s next? What is your entrepreneur adventure going forward?
Chad: Right now I own seven businesses, they’re all profitable. I don’t want to own anything else. Financially I’m in a great place. All of the businesses are operating without me for the most part, I have partners that handle the operations and I stay at the 30,000 foot view with the finances and systems.
A few months ago I didn’t know what was next. But I went to my first business conference and that changed everything. I’ve been very fortunate in my life to be able to do things and take risks and travel and grow businesses and succeed and fail and just get a lot of fulfillment out of everything I’ve done. I’ve done more in 39 years than most people would get to do in their whole life.
And at this conference I realised I’ve got so much more to give and so much more I want to do. I clearly see what I want to do now, which is kind of behind this Instagram and the Serial CFO, all that started because of this conference. I’ve talked about it before when we talked about podcasts, but that kind of put fuel on the fire. I want to take my knowledge and experience in accounting and tax and business and I want to take it on a lot more of a mass scale.
So through what I do I have built a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience. And instead of sharing that one on one in my office with an entrepreneur or a business owner, I can share that on a much larger platform through social media.
My ultimate goal is to do it on stage. I want to be paid to speak to thousands of people and have a message that they can come back and impact their business and their community and their team and their employees.
That is where I clearly see I want to go. It may take me two years to get there. It may take me 12 years to get there. I can still do my day job and do this one day a month or two days a month, or do it at night on Instagram or Facebook or whatever it may be.
Josh: So what’s the best moment you’ve had in your career so far in business, and what is that best moment gonna look like in the future?
Chad: I was just as excited to buy a $1,500 boat and sell it for $2,800 as I was to grow and sell a business for six figures or whatever it may be. Whether it’s small or big, I just enjoy the journey.
I’m a numbers guy, come up with these random things and I chase after them, but they’re just numbers on paper. When I’m paid $10,000 to go speak somewhere. That’s what I drew on the wall. That’s what I’m pursuing right now, along with managing and keeping everything else going. And that means I’m providing a ton of value, making a difference to a lot of people. And I’ve proven myself in that world.
Josh: What advice or counsel or book reference could you give to our listeners as like, “this is where you’re going to want to go and gather some knowledge or some inspiration.”
Chad: The advice I’d give is to read anything you can get your hands on. I have never read a business book, an entrepreneurial book, or any book related to business or even self-improvement that I didn’t find value in. I took something away from every book I’ve ever read involving business.
Just start reading books and start learning from podcasts and books, it will change your life. It will change your business.
And here’s what made me a good business partner. If you’re going to engage in something, if you’re going to start a business, if you’re going to grow your business, spend a tremendous amount of time getting your hands on every possible piece of information. 80% of businesses fail, and that is in part due to the fact that people don’t do the research and their due diligence.
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