A Different Game: From Hockey To Real Estate

I want to give you a little intro into just why we're starting this podcast and what we're doing here in Metro Detroit Millennial Real Estate, Money, and Business and just kind of give some context is what will be happening going forward. But I really wanted to tell you some of my stories first. We really haven't talked about it very much and I just want to give you some of it now. I'm not going to go into great, great detail, but I wanted to give you just kind of some context like I said, and who I am, what our team is about and what we do here.

Childhood is all about hockey

I grew up a Michigan boy here in Clarkston, Michigan, and that's where our team is based out of now actually. Our family is still here. Everyone lives in back in the state now. Not all of us did for a long time. But I grew up here, went to school in New Michigan and Clarkston. It was really fortunate as I was able to grow out my entire life, playing hockey growing up. I ended up playing for little CAESARS AAA hockey team for about six years and ended up at the US national team eventually when I was 15 in Ann Arbor at the time. Now it's in Plymouth and playing at USA hockey arena there. But, we were very fortunate that I didn't have to move very far from home. A lot of kids from all over the country had to move to come here. So we were very fortunate in that regard.

Not a fan of the system

From early on, I really was not the best student in the world when I got older. I was a really good student when I was younger actually. But as I got older, I started questioning the system, questioning a lot more. I was really into history and politics, in law and stuff like that, military buff. I really just started, like I said, questioning everything. When are we going to start learning about money, how to make money and things like that? And a lot of those questions that you hear from those random kids in class sometimes. I remember in high school getting in fights when I was in and everybody gets in fights with a couple of teachers about politics and history and stuff like that. It was fun. I love that. I love debating people. I love talking about history, the constitution, the declaration of independence, all these things and even real estate. Real estate was a lot, a big part of that as well and just kind of being intertwined in all of that, in money and how it all works, how to invest, just all those things. Again, the school has its place and unfortunately, we aren't taught very much about that when it comes to money investing, how to take care of ourselves, our family. That's another talk for another day. But that was kind of my childhood growing up. As I said, I was a really good student growing up and I was always ahead of everything. And then as I got older, really in the middle school and then especially in high school, certainly into college when I was at Michigan State, I really just was questioning things big time and ended up, fortunately, graduated everything and still did well. But I just was not as plugged in as I was when I was a young kid and I probably didn't have respect for the school system like I should have.

Proud USA Represent

It's interesting when you kind of look back and kind of review everything. But as I said, I ended up at the US National Team playing there for two years, my junior and senior year of high school. It's the hat that I wear all the time that you see me wearing a lot, the USA hat. Just really proud to represent our country and play for our country. Had some incredible times there and ended up winning a world championship beating Canada, which is always nice, in the finals and a world under 18 championships. Then eventually I really hurt myself actually right before that championship, ended up playing in it still, but really hurt my groins both sides. It really hindered my career going forward after that, unfortunately. But I still was able to play in college, played at Michigan State and went there, played there for four years and won a national championship, which is unbelievable in 2007. Some of the best times of my life. So I was able to do a lot of things and see a lot, which is incredible. Go travel all over the world, which is amazing at such a young age. So very grateful for that, beyond grateful.

But really kind of where this story gets into what I'm doing now, what we're all doing now and what you see me doing now a lot, what we're talking about here in this podcast, and doing videos about all the time is money and real estate investing in Metro Detroit and what we're doing here. It was 2008 and it was the collapse of the markets and real estate then, the printing of money, etc. Just how hard everything was hitting here, especially in Michigan in Metro Detroit. I was a senior at Michigan State at the time, and I remember just watching the market go down and down and down and down. It was really fascinating to me and it was hard to watch. But I remember vividly thinking, "Boy, there is something that we just aren't taught in school." That's why I touched on school so much earlier. There's something that we're not taught in school and there's something that I'm missing, we're missing, people are missing.

Ever since then in 2008, it was a journey to find answers and it led me to things like Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump's books before he was running for president and things like that. Napoleon Hill's 'Think and Grow Rich' and all these different personal development books. Jim Roan and all these people, money, personal development, investing, finance, Mike Maloney, studying gold and silver, studying the monetary history and fiscal policy and things like that, things that don't seem very fun when you were rattling them off. But history is so incredible because history just repeats and once you start knowing the patterns, how things repeat, then you can start positioning yourself appropriately and setting yourself up to win. That's what my focus solely has been the last 10 or 11 years. It's been an incredible journey, an incredible ride.

College years at MSU

I went to Michigan State. I always loved real estate. I don't exactly know why. I just always loved Michigan State. I was actually in building construction management at Michigan State. I ended up getting out of it and graduating, actually then moved to political sciences and then got out of that. Got into pre-law and economic, graduated with that. As well as you can tell, all the majors I was in are all the things I've already mentioned I was very passionate about obviously. I just didn't feel there's a lot of people in the building structure management program, which were awesome people, but I just didn't feel like it was my crowd. I wanted to kind of do something different. Same thing as politics or political studies. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to be a politician or something like that. So I got a little nervous I think, and got out of that, ended up in pre-law and economics. The last 10 years has been a lot of that studying economics, studying monetary and fiscal policy. That's why I talk about it so much. That's why we're going to talk about so much here going forward. I'm super excited to do it cause I think that, uh, I just have a real passion for teaching and learning, learning number one, and then teaching number two, teaching the things I know. I'm not some incredible expert. I'm not the richest man in the world, but I know that I have a ton to give in that realm, a ton of different things that we're going to learn and grow together, do together over time, which is cool because my mom always said that was going to be a teacher and I never wanted to be a teacher because I wasn't a huge fan of the traditional school system.

I know and love many teachers that we have in our family and other families, all my friends' families, my family's families, things like that. They're all great people. It's just the system, the school system that we're all in or that they're in is an old system, just like many systems, like the real estate system that we're into, the very old antiquated system. And I think many of those systems in different occupations don't have to change and just caught up with the times.

When the passion burns out

I really look forward to doing all that together. As I said, I graduated and I played in the minors for a few years. I was very fortunate to play professional hockey for a number of years. Ended up getting hurt a few more times and just really started thinking, "What am I going to do in my life? What do I really truly want to do?" Ended up doing a lot of praying and just thinking about what exactly my life was gonna look like and what I wanted to do, ended up deciding at 24 or 25 that I wanted to stop doing that. It was really the hardest decision of my life. It was something that I'd done for 20 years and it's all I knew. It's what I had spent my vacations thinking about and working out on vacations, shooting pucks and bringing puck buckets on vacation because I was so committed to that job my entire life of hockey. It was the hardest decision I ever made and I'm sure someday, 50 years from now I'm going to look back and be like, "Yeah, I wish I could have or would have played longer." My body, the way I needed to play and what I need to do, I just could not go forward anymore with how I know I needed to play. It really is interesting because I think really probably the time that I hit the US national team, my passion started waning actually a little bit and I just did it. It took me years to kind of figure out what was actually happening and where my thoughts and my mind were. Being a kid, you really don't know any better.

A little bit story for a different day and it'll get into that definitely at some point. I want to give you context for where we're going and what we're doing. The 2008 collapse was really a pivotal point in my life. Being a millennial, seeing that and thinking, "You know what, I know there's more for myself. I know that was more for all of us. We need to learn the system, clearly, something's going on." It doesn't seem to be working for many of us. So what is the answer? What are the answers? How can we find that? What can we do? How can we position ourselves differently? That's been my goal. That's been my strategy, that's been my game for the last 10 years. Fortunately, it's served me well. It's served me very well. I'm excited because the best is by far to come and I'm so excited about that. I think about the opportunity that's coming. We've had an amazing run the last 10 years of the market going up. There's going to be a downturn at some point. There's going to be things that happen because that's just life, that's life cycles, that's history. It's positioning yourself for that and waiting for those opportunities as well that is really exciting.

Towards real estate

So, I left. I ended up leaving hockey and I knew I wanted to be in real estate. I love real estate and really one of the books that changed my life was actually 'Why We Want You To Be Rich' by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. So that was really a defining book of my life. I bought a few copies of it because I want the original to have, 50 years from now, to have it and be like, "Wow, this is the book that changed the course of my life and the direction of my life." It's an amazing book if you haven't picked it up. It's a great read and it's an easy read. It's laid out in very simple terms and there was no politics in there or anything like that. It's just very to the point, very simple in its concepts, but it really just kind of opens your mind to just different thoughts. Maybe a lot of thoughts, frankly, that you've had in your life like leveraging your time, leveraging your money and having your money work for you, etc. That is the premise of the book. Those are the concepts that I wish we were taught in school. I remember reading that book and getting angry just thinking why did I not learn this? The ten or fifteen years of school I had or whatever it was, why am I hearing about this now when I'm 20, 22, 24 years old? That's the premise of everything.

A new journey

I knew I wanted to get into real estate, I wanted to be a real estate investor and really do that as a young kid. With the guidance of my then-girlfriend and my now-wife and my mother just, "Hey, you know, you might as well get into real estate and be a real estate agent, build a real estate team. If you want to be a real estate investor anyway, you want to be in the money and finance and do all these things, you might as well be in that arena all day long." So I took a little time to fair what I wanted to do. And then I ended up getting into real estate, meeting some incredible people right in the beginning, going to a ton of investor meetups in the Metro Detroit area, finding some amazing people that we will eventually bring on here and you'll hear from, incredible, incredible people. They guided me in the right direction, started my real estate career. The last six years have led up to this point now that we're at now, doing some incredible stuff. We're not even near where we're going to be in 5, 10, 15 years from now, which is amazing with technology and the stuff that's coming in not only our industry but other industries around us. It's going to be absolutely incredible.

The Legacy

So I'm super excited about that and pumped up for that. We've built a team here. There are six of us now that operate the Legacy Real Estate Team. We do this every single day, all day every day, and live, breathe, eat, sleep, and drink this. It's the most fun you'll ever have because it's truly something different every single day. I love it because I get to talk about real estate. I get to look up the trends in economics and all these kinds of things that impact real estate. And I get to talk about it. I get to do videos and podcasts, get to put out blog articles about all these trends and all these things that I love to help our consumers, to help the people around us. So that's why I love doing it and that's what gets me the biggest thrill. I just loved being able to do that. We have an unbelievable team that allows me to be able to do that more. I'm so appreciative of them because it allows me to spend a good chunk of my time on learning, growing, and strategizing how we're going to serve our clients better, our sellers, serve our buyers better and how we're going to guide them better, get them the best information that they can possibly have. Because that's what I spend a lot of my time doing. Especially a lot of my free time doing as my wife sure knows that I'm always constantly on a blog or reading books about currency history, on Zerohedge or some different sites that are amazing that talk about the current economic situation. That is why we're doing what we're doing and that's why we're here to serve. I want to serve people, our team wants to serve people. That's what this podcast is for. That's what our Facebook page is for. That's what our YouTube channel is for, to serve those around us in a different way, in a better way. I can't be everywhere at once. My team can't be everywhere at once. So really four or five years ago, we started getting into digital media big time because I want it to be able to expand the number of people I was helping and to be able to scale that and affect more people than me trying to go around and talk to every person in the world one by one, right? That's impossible. So what was the way to do that? Well, it's getting on some type of digital platform. What we're doing right now, it's getting out in front of people and being there that whether it's the middle of the night. If they can't sleep and they're throwing in something, they want to learn something, well it can be the middle of the night, it can be the middle of the afternoon, it can be middle of the morning, it doesn't matter. But I can be there for them to help them grow and to hopefully help them learn something.

That's a short version of my story and why we're doing what we're doing, how I'm here and why we're here. It's the most fun I've had in a long time. Hockey's a different kind of fun, and then it becomes a business and now we're actually in business, but it's still incredibly fun. Obviously, it's really the most fun. And if you can have fun doing what you're doing, that really helps. This is definitely a calling of ours I think. I think one thing to is a lot of people get passions, callings and their purpose were a little bit confused. And there are so many people that say, "If you could make a job out of your passion and then you're doing something right." It's true to some degree. But I believe we're truly all put on this earth for a purpose. Not many people find their purpose. Some people might get to work their passion and a lot of people that never get to do any of that. They never got to even work their passion and they never even come close to finding their purpose. We're all put here for a purpose and it's our job to find that. And I'm happy. I'm glad, I'm grateful. I feel blessed that we can, I can feel like making an impact because we are living our calling or I'm living my calling to serve other people and to help other people, hopefully, guide other people to the right direction.

I appreciate everyone who has reached out over the last four or five years with all of our Facebook videos and YouTube stuff like that. It's only just the beginning. It's pretty incredible to see how far things have come, especially in the digital space. I am so excited. This podcast and stuff we're doing going forward is just really some of the beginning of some of the plans we have. As the team grows and as our bandwidth grows, we have some awesome stuff in the store. I've huge master plans. I've got stuff mapped out everywhere. I've got huge pieces of paper and whiteboards with stuff mapped out for things that are going to be coming in the days, months and years ahead. I just can't wait to show everyone that it's gonna be a lot of fun. In any way that we can serve and help you or those around you, that's exactly what we're here for. That's what this podcast is for, that's what the people are for. Market updates, Insider's reports. Market updates are going to be local markets stats for the different counties in the area and the big major counties and Metro Detroit. Insider's reports are going to be more macro kind of global economic, national economic news, how it's affecting us, trade wars, tariff wars, currencies, manipulations, things like that and all that stuff. So that's gonna be a lot of fun kind of getting into all of that, how it's going to affect us here at home. So be on the lookout for all of that. And then again, just we're going to have interviews in here with people in the area. Probably some national people too, but people in the area that are affecting the Metro Detroit area.