What does financial freedom look like for you? Is it working a W2 job, or is it something else? Here to share their cubicle escape plan are Mike Deaton & Ligia Deaton. Mike and Ligia are partners both in life and in business as co-founders of Deaton Equity Partners. Together, they have paved the way for a lifestyle of freedom to spend time with their family. Join their chat with Chris Roberts and be enlightened to carve your own path to financial independence. Plus, they share investing tips that will help accelerate your growth. Stay tuned!

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Creating Lifestyle & Financial Freedom – Your Cubicle Escape Plan! With Mike & Ligia Deaton

We are joined by Ligia and Mike Deaton with Deaton Equity Partners. How are you doing?

Fantastic.

We’re great.

Thank you so much for joining us. We’re looking forward to hearing about your journey and a little bit about your personal life, living in the mountains, climbing and hiking. I’m intrigued by that. You’re living the life of my dreams over there. We’ll hear more about that but I want to start by asking you, what is one thing you attribute to your success? Success is defined in many different ways. It’s not always about money. It could be about business or personal life. Tell us one thing that you could share with the audience that you attribute to some of the success you are having in the multifamily space.

 

From my perspective, there are 100 or 1,000 little things in a person’s background that builds up to a level of success. There are very few of any overnight type successes and we’re certainly not that case. We found in each other a perfect partnership that goes in our personal and professional lives. We love each other being married or maybe not. We feed off of each other from a business perspective.

As entrepreneurs, both of us have been reared in a corporate world. I worked right out of college in large Fortune 5 companies. I’m a ladder climber. It’s what I felt was the normal social path. Ligia is much the same. She has worked for companies and is a W-2 employee. When we got married and spent a little time together, life opened a series of doors for us. We were confident enough in our relationship and in the support we had for one another that we felt a level of security that I had not felt in my life to be able to take that leap into entrepreneurship and risk failing.

We both felt comfortable enough that if we were not at work, it would not be the end of the world. We would have each other’s back and be able to transition out of it if the worst case happened. For us, it’s that partnership that we bring that we’re each other’s biggest fans. It’s something that is a little bit rare to come across people like that in a professional way that can support and help you.

To continue what Mike said, we both have the same why and we are on the same page, which has helped a lot and working towards the same goal. It was very important for us and still is now.

Thank you for sharing that because it dives into more of a personal success versus a business success but then it dovetails into how you’re having and how you attribute some of that success in the business world. I can relate to that because as a young entrepreneur when I first started, my life began in the professional world is when I got married, I met my best friend, my partner, the person who was my rock and almost the opposite.

We both found this synergy and continuity where I as well felt like I could take risks and push the envelope and have that courage and strength. Not that I wasn’t successful on my own doing my thing, but it’s a much easier journey even though marriages can be challenging to have somebody you can bounce ideas off of that will challenge you. Unlike friends and family, a significant other will challenge you in ways that only she or he will challenge you and that can build a great foundation. I appreciate that answer. I can totally relate and I’m sure a lot of our audience can relate to that too.

Crew, I want you to take away from it that having a stable relationship and meeting a significant other can assist in building a wonderful business foundation. It’s not necessary but can certainly assist in that. Oftentimes, that’s overlooked. Having a stable family life and that support system will allow you to take risks and push yourself through that journey. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you two? You could talk about your history in business before, the multifamily space. You can talk about anything you want but give us a little bit of history about you and what you’re doing nowadays.

There are a hundred or a thousand little things in a person’s background that builds up to a level of success.

My background is a typical American journey. I was born in a pretty stable family. We weren’t wealthy, but we weren’t poor. We were upper-middle class. I was an achiever. I’m a first child. I’m a pleaser. I got great grades. I went to college. That was the path. I graduated and got into the large top five electronics companies in a more operation and engineering type role, in the early days. I transitioned into supply chain and logistics and operations management as I climbed the ladder. At one point in my mid-career, I was working with Nokia mobile phones when they were on top of the world in terms of mobile phone sales.

That’s when I got an opportunity to work overseas and start a factory in Romania, which happens to be where Ligia was from. Ligia was also working for Nokia at the time in a different division. I was in a place in my life and this was in 2006, where I had separated from my first wife. I was looking for an escape to be honest with you, from the raw hurt of going through a failing marriage, but also seeking a bit of purpose and redefining my life and my identity. I went over with this expectation that I was going to explore individuality for some amount of time.

On the first weekend, I went over there and Ligia and I met in the office. It was love at first sight, but it was definitely sparks at first sight. We started a courtship and quickly fell in love and started a relationship. It was something that I hadn’t experienced in my life, this level of support. I was at a different place in my life in being much more mature. We met in 2006 and fell into love in 2007 and it became a serious relationship. I was over there for three years. I have two daughters from my previous marriage and they both came over for summer and spent summer with Ligia and me.

They adored her but they were quickly becoming teenagers. I felt a calling to get back and that I was missing out on a significant part of their lives. We moved back in 2010 and both are still in corporate jobs, grinding away. I was traveling almost every week for business. At this time, Microsoft had bought Nokia’s handset divisions. I was a Microsoft employee and did a similar role with a regional supply chain focus. We both were living the American dream. We had a big house, a big mortgage, two full-time jobs, balancing family life and not a whole lot of free time.

In the summer of 2016, for different reasons, we both found ourselves unemployed. Ligia’s company had decided to consolidate their operations where their headquarters was away from Dallas-Fort Worth. My role had largely been outsourced. To continue with the company, I was going to need to have to move to Washington. The headquarter is there and I wasn’t looking to do that. I took the package out, and we found ourselves in a place where we were both looking for work. We took that moment to listen inside.

As I was sending out resumes and getting some interviews with bigger tech companies, I was very apprehensive about what culture I was going to step into, what life was going to be or are we going to have to move. We took that moment to reflect and say, “What do we want out of life?” Our girls were adults and going into university lives, so we were empty nesting at a degree. We slowed it down a bit and said, “Do we need to keep chasing this? What do we want out of life?” It was the quality of life that we were seeking. We took the opportunity to pivot into real estate and start our own business.

We’ve done that in a couple of different ways in those early days and we still do nowadays. We had a land business. We were buying and selling vacant land. A lot of what we do in that business is owner financing. People buy a piece of property from us and we’ll owner-finance it for 4 or 5 years like a car note and we built up a passive income book. The word passive income can be misleading. There’s a lot of active work that goes into building up a passive income stream. It was a full-time job for us and still is a large workload for us to some degree. We built up over 3 or 4 years a nice revenue.

 

It afforded us a lot of opportunities, but it also brought with it a large tax bill. A couple of years ago, we started looking at how we can offset a lot of these taxes. We revisited Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Tom Wheelwright, who is a CPA. He has also written some great books on how to minimize your tax bill and more and more was pointing into physical assets being multifamily, 0storage units, mobile home parks and things like that where you can enjoy depreciation and offset some income.

After a bit of research and trying to look at what we thought was the best asset class, there wasn’t any clear direction, so we said, “Let’s go into multifamily. Once we get going in that, we can broaden out into other asset classes if we choose to or not.” That took us into the multifamily world. Talking about partnerships on the show, a perfect partnership is we have a diversity of real estate income.

We also get to marry great returns on our land business and some good revenue with a good income stream for multifamily, but with the benefits of the passive losses that come with physical asset class like that. It makes our income and wealth-building a lot more efficient than it would be if we were W-2 earners or if we were entrepreneurs bringing in an income stream.

That’s taken us to where we are now. Ligia mentioned our why. We love being outdoors and in nature. We moved to Colorado in 2017, once we went into entrepreneurship. As a part of that, we downsize. We had a large home in Plano and we moved to Colorado and we were renters for a couple of years while we were figuring out what we were going to do. We quickly found out that because we were entrepreneurs with a new business, we couldn’t qualify for a mortgage. We got trapped into a little bit of that, but it was all good. We were seeking where we wanted it to live.

We bought a dream home for us up in the mountains. We’re at 9,400 feet elevation. We’ve got pine trees everywhere. We have a dozen deer that wander through our yard every day. There is about 35 Turkey that cruises the neighborhood. We wake up every morning and look out these big windows. The whole journey has been worth it. It took us a while to get here. We did make some sacrifices and continue to make some sacrifices. It’s the why that we’re after and what drives us every day. It’s been a great journey and a long story to your short question.

Ligia, did you have anything you wanted to say about that?

For us, our continuous why is to keep this going. Mike and I have talked about it many times. If something happens and we have to go back to a W-2 or a corporate job, we would do it. It gives me a physical reaction like there’s a big knot in my stomach like, “I never want to do that.” We want to continue building our income so we can continue living this life that we enjoy so much. We all know that it’s not 100% passive.

I don’t think we would want it to be. We love what we do. We love working and we love the challenges of running a business, learning new things and meeting new people. The previous generation, my parents’ concept of retirement or what you see in the TV advertisements where you work until you’re 60 to 65, you retire, start playing golf, sit in your rocking chair and do all this stuff. That would be mind-numbingly terrifying.

We certainly like the challenges, but we also like being our own boss. If it’s a beautiful day outside and I want to go for a hike, I want to be able to go for my hike and bump things until the afternoon or evening. For us, it’s that flexibility and freedom in our lifestyle that keeps us going every day and drives us to keep the cashflow engine going.

We want to be an inspiration for our daughters because they’re entering adulthood. Our oldest one has a W-2 job. She works long hours and she feels like she can never take off more than a couple of days for a holiday. We would love to be an inspiration for both of them to start younger, have a side hustle, and see how life can be different. You can live your life in a different way than being a slave to your job to work, pay the bills and having that stressful life.

You have several whys and I want to touch on this for our readers because the why is very personal. Sometimes, it’s about money, flat out. Sometimes, it’s about success, prestige or notoriety. Sometimes, it’s children, a health issue in the family, or whatever it may be. I want to touch on this because you covered a lot, which is great. Let’s touch on this for a second.

What I want our readers to take away is you had a fear, a roadblock, a bump or a challenge in the road with Corporate America, an epiphany or all of the above. That caused you to reconsider your options, life, strategy and plan. Through that, you went down a journey of diving into land. Maybe you already had the land going, but it opened your eyes to diverging down a different path than you would have through Corporate America. You had some challenges along the way, but through that journey, your eyes were opened through the multifamily space where you realized all the depreciation options advantages, passive cashflow, active cashflow, and all of that.

What I want them to take away and it’s something, Ligia, that you’ve covered, which is the knot in your stomach with the corporate world. It’s that entrepreneurial spirit. It was in the 1800s when everyone started heading west. They’re going over these mountain tops like Colorado, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They knew they wanted something else. It wasn’t even a matter of, “I don’t even know where I’m going, but I know that my work ethic and my mindset are going to get me there one way or another.”

Spend some time on education—learn the language, learn the pros and cons of how things work—then start to build your network and find someone who can help support you along your way.

Through that journey, you grow, learn and then you realize, “I can do this.” That knot in your stomach that you mentioned will keep driving you. Not only will your whys keep driving you, but that will keep driving you like a corporate scare, fear of being broke and standing in food lines when you’re young. There are all these reasons why you might drive forward, but once you get a taste of that, there’s not any going back. What’s funny is you mentioned like, “If I had to, I would.” You’re not going to have to. You are driven.

I’m assuming you come from another country or at least worked in another country for a period of time and probably have a different perspective than a lot of folks here in this country. As you work together and break down those barriers, I have a feeling that you’re not going to have to worry about going back to W-2s. It’s a matter of strategies, systems, processes and execution to help you grow what you have now exponentially.

I, in my person, am a seeker. I’m constantly reading or exploring other topics. Even in my corporate career, I loved the companies I worked for because they afforded me the opportunity to get a breadth of knowledge across so many different things and explore the depth of knowledge where I wanted to. I love this adventurer’s mindset. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a W-2 job. It drives a lot of people and it’s very rewarding.

There are companies that are incredible to work for and super valuable and give people a strong sense of purpose. I came to a point in my life, and Ligia got to the same in hers where it wasn’t fulfilling a need that I had. You hit on that entrepreneurial spirit. It was something that had nagged at me for years, if not decades of, “What if? Could I do this?” It’s probably not too unique of a journey that we all fall into where we grow up as dependents and become independent, but then we quickly get married, have children, get a mortgage and have bills.

You have these things that are somehow prohibitive to taking a big risk because you have a lot more at risk. You have these people dependent on you and you’ve created a certain lifestyle. For me, it was very much that way. I was very fearful of trying anything, if not downright trapped and not being able to try anything because I was a little locked into my situation. As I mentioned, life opened up a few doors for us at a certain time in life. We were conscious enough to recognize it, take a moment, pause and step through those doors into what could be possible.

We started with land. My personality is a burn the boat type of situation. It’s hard for me to do multiple things at once because I’m very loyal to one thing. When I was working with a company, I felt disloyal if I was pursuing something on the side. This generation may have a different mindset in that regard in terms of being able to work side hustles, the gig economy and different things.

For me, I very much needed that finality of, “You’re out of a job. You got to find something now and you have to be all-in in committing to that.” That has helped propel us to where we are now. We feel that way very much now where Ligia said we could do it if we had to. I’m not sure I could do it if I had to go back to a job. You do what you need to do, but I’d have to be the right fit for me. I’d probably be a terrible employee in certain situations having been an entrepreneur.

If the entrepreneurial journey can be rife with challenges, successes, failures, big-time peaks and valleys, ups and downs and all of that, which is why it’s great to have that partnership. Your partnership could be a relationship partnership, other partners, other team members or things of that sort. Along your journey, you have each other, but at some point, you delve into the multifamily space.

Tell us a little bit about whether it be your first acquisition or how you took the leap from land into the multifamily space because you are successful. You’re running a business where you’re buying these assets. You could be partnering with folks or doing it on your own. Could you tell us briefly how that transition occurred and what the first opportunity looked like?

When we went into the land business, I listened to a few podcasts on side hustles and I stumbled across two different episodes unrelated to people doing this and having good success. I got curious and started digging around and exploring it. I purchased a toolkit on the basics of how you would go about it. I was working at the time, so it came in the mail. I put that on the desk and it was collecting dust. When the impetus hit, we said, “Let’s explore this.”

Through that journey, we met other people that were doing this and we decided to get a coaching program. We had somebody who helped walk us through and we felt that we were going to do this full-time. It behooves us to accelerate that growth by learning from other people’s experiences and helping us get there. We went through this journey and it helped get us to a level of success faster than I believe we would have stumbled and bumbled and went through the process on our own. When it came time to pivot into multifamily, we didn’t pivot into it, but we diversified into multifamily.

 

We went about it in the same approach. We said, “Who out there is having success doing this and who could help mentor or coach us?” If you spend much time in real estate in general, multifamily specifically, everybody talks about how it’s a team sport. You’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in assets and a diverse array of skillsets needed to take it to the finish line. You have legal, brokers, financing, operations, due diligence and all kinds of things that it’s difficult, especially starting out to have all those skillsets, so you need to build a good team.

We did a lot of research for six months on who is out there doing it. There are formal programs out there. You have the Rod Khleifs, Michael Blanks, Brad Sumroks and all these large people that have coaching programs and do these. We spent some time exploring. Went to some events, met people, talked and picked people’s brains on what did they like, what they not like and how they would do it again. We were close to committing to one program and these can be expensive programs. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars to sign up in some instances to mentor under someone. It’s not a small investment.

We have a colleague that we also met through the land business. He has a land business similar to what we do, but he’s a successful multifamily entrepreneur as well. I decided one day to give him a call and pick his brain on, “Would he make this investment? If he were going to restart his business, how would he do things?” He stirred us in a little bit different direction and turned us on to a group that I had not heard of. It’s Mark Kenney. He runs Think Multifamily. It’s a smaller group. It’s a little more family-ish in general. It’s an intimate type of thing.

We did a little exploration in that thing and it felt good for us versus some of these others that we had looked at that were a little more clinical. It felt like while you would get the education and the tool kit to do the business, a lot of it would be up to you to get out there. It’s almost like you’re getting thrown in the water with a bunch of other sharks, you got to find your way and fight it out. It felt like there were going to be some hierarchical type moves that would have to be made in terms of starting at a certain level and then graduating into this and that.

Mark’s group is a lot more open-minded and open in that way. You mentor directly with him versus some of these other groups where you’re coaching with employees or nominate coaches and stuff. We decided to take a plunge into a coaching program. Part of what comes with that is it’s not quite a ready-made team, but you are put into a group of other like-minded individuals, as well as getting instant access to people with skills that you would need to make an acquisition like this. You’ve also got property insurance, taxes and all these different things. You are able to accelerate your journey.

Once we did that, we dove in from an educational perspective, learning as much as we could about the business and networking with as many people as we could. We came into the group thinking we would have a certain value add, but we remained open and flexible enough. As we had these interviews with people, we quickly found out that what we thought was going to be our value add or our superpower was not going to be a superpower. We decided to pivot into more capital raising, bringing investors into these deals, as well as looking to acquire our own deals.

Over the course of a year and a half, we started as passive investors. We put our own money into deals to learn how the process worked. We graduated into more of a general partnership role where we were helping raise money, do due diligence and get a little deeper behind the scenes look at things. We’re able to partner to find our own deals and build up our knowledge base as well as our assets in that way.

For anybody looking to get into this space, spend some time doing education. Learn the language, learn the pros and cons of how things work, then start to build your network and find someone who can help support you along your way in doing this. As I mentioned, these are $10, $20, $30 million purchases and to make a mistake, it can be millions of dollars. To invest the money and have a good mentor and coach behind you in that experience base, for us, it was a no-brainer when we were going in. It’s more than what makes up for the cost of being able to accelerate the journey.

You can go at it alone. You can take an awful lot of time to vet all of this information and figure out every process, but you could be doing it for years and years potentially before you ever make an acquisition. Whereas you invest in your education and mentoring programs or software, you name it. It’s not always an expensive mentor program. Although they do some good things for you, it may not be the right fit for you.

You may get caught up in the hustle and bustle of it all and sign on the dotted line, and the next thing is, maybe multifamily is not even right for you. You realize, “I don’t have what it takes to go and grind this out or buy assets from across the country.” It’s business. Not everybody was meant to go out and open up an ice cream shop because they like ice cream. There’s bookwork, backend, performance, managing people and all of these types of things. I appreciate that answer.

Time is the asset, commodity, or scarce resource that we all share. We all have the same amount of time in a day. 

Charging Forward Crew, what I’d like you to take away from that is even if you’re investing $1 in your own company, it’s investing in your company and self-education. It could be books or podcasts. You touched on a lot of that, whether it was podcasts to stimulate the thought process or books and mentor programs.

You kept taking it to the next level and now you’re in a process where you’re learning from peer groups, which is great because you can all bring value to the table and knock these deals out together until you get strong enough. Maybe you are strong enough to do it on your own or maybe it’s even a comfort level. It’s not a matter of strength or experience. It’s just comfort level.

You touched on a good thing that I would like to point out. We both enjoy being extremely active and we’re also at a position in our lives where we have the time to be active in our roles in terms of real estate businesses. We will go, walk and do due diligence. We will get involved in all aspects of the business.

For a lot of people, that’s not going to be their comfort level or desire and it doesn’t have to be. You can easily achieve tremendous wealth by passively investing in a lot of these deals and stuff. For us, we enjoy being a control freak or something, but I’ve been in the deal and making the decisions in putting the business plan together and working the plan. I come from operations and continuous improvement type background. It’s in my wheelhouse and I enjoy doing that.

One of the things that help our partnership is we complement each other very well in many ways. I enjoy strategizing and looking at where’s the business going to go next, how do we make strategic acquisitions, and what markets do we plan, which is very much more on the ground, rolling up our sleeves, calling brokers, and working through the actions necessary to do things. We have a good marriage in our business relationship that works in that way.

For anybody reading, you need to spend some time to get to know yourself if you don’t already and what are your things, because to your point, multifamily may not even be what you wanted to do. We love it because we get to transform communities. We do value-add investments where we’ll find a property that’s been neglected, worn into the ground and needs a lot of TLC. We go in and do that. You invest capital. While you’re giving investors outstanding returns and benefits, you’re also transforming a community in the most personal way you can. It’s their homes and it’s the place they live.

For people to have a sense of pride, value and to feel that somebody else values their residents and their community, it’s super rewarding. That’s one of the reasons we love multifamily, but there are probably an infinite number of asset classes out there. You see them all the time. People are syndicating. We have a good friend from multifamily that is syndicating vineyards. They’re going out and buying raw land, planting vines, growing vineyards and they’re producing great returns for their investors along with some great grapes.

There’s an opportunity out there. You just got to work hard and find it. I think back to what I referred to, traveling from the east to the west to go and stake your claim. I’ve met people whose great grandparents were original land claims stakers back in the day and are very successful because of that land. Maybe they’re on the corner of a freeway and the owner of this property and shopping centers and whatnot.

The stories are interesting to me because somebody worked hard to stake that claim. That’s why I say, it’s not about failure. It’s about an exploratory journey even in exploring the multifamily space, storage units, single-family flips or even opening a brick and mortar store. It’s your journey, so you have to explore it, but you have to invest. It could be time or money but you have to invest or sacrifice something to build that foundation to have the skyscraper eventually. Thank you so much for that.

Let me ask you this. You talked a little bit about your why, but give me an example of how you stay motivated in this space because it can be challenging, and then is there someone along the lines that stand out for you or something that keeps you motivated? Let’s say there’s a motivating factor. Maybe it’s a book, an author, a mentor, a family member or something in your life that’s happened that’s keeping you motivated. Can you attribute something that the readers could read where they say, “I’ve got that in my life. I don’t read enough. Maybe it’s my wife or whatever it may be?” Could you touch on that a little bit? The motivating factors and someone or something in your life that keeps you going.

Ligia touched on a good one where we’re both each other’s motivating factor at this point because we enjoy spending quality time together. Even that quality time takes one avenue in our work life. We wake up in the morning and usually have a fairly thoughtful morning where since we’re in this home where it’s starting to get a little colder, but we sit out on our deck and watch animals feed below us. Ligia is a coffee drinker. I like a little tea in the morning. We’re not consistent practitioners, but we do some meditation.

We try to start our day off very mindfully before we step into the work world, but we both do it together. For us, that quality of life and recognizing that time is the asset, commodity, scarce resource, or whatever that we all share. We all have the same amount of time in a day and as you get a little older in life, you start to appreciate those minutes you have. For us, being together with each other and as much as we can with family and having that quality of lifestyle is our biggest motivator.

We have on our bulletin board a list of our whys and they range from generating wealth, not just for wealth’s sake, but to be able to provide for our families and hopefully coach them along the way. It’s time being together, spending time in nature and having that flexibility of lifestyle is a constant motivator for us. It’s one that we try to ground on every morning before we start to make sure we’re centered on that why.

 

I’ve seen some of the photos and videos of you being outdoors and being a mountain climber and a scuba diver, I love being outdoors in nature. There’s something so peaceful that we all lose touch with because we’re so busy hustling and bustling, especially if you’re in Corporate America, because you’re often in a cubicle, in meetings all the time or in a box. I can imagine for you how motivating that would be and it’s a beautiful thing. You mentioned you go out, have your coffee or tea, clear your mind, think about your goals and the things you want in life and all that. That’s important.

I have a mantra and inspiring things all over my offices. I have several offices that I work out of for different things. Those things indirectly motivate me. I might look over and see a saying from a founder. I might see an inspirational quote. I’ll replay my mantra in my mind. Family and things like that motivate me as well. I love the way you said that because it’s not always about money, more doors or whatever it may be. It could be when I walk out my glass door, that’s all I need because that motivates me every day to continue to be able to look out my glass door and not punch the clock at 9:30 after sitting in traffic for three hours. That’s a perfectly good answer. I love that.

It’s honestly what pulled us to Colorado. We both found that mountains and forests resonated with us more so than a beach or other nature features. Over the last four years of being here, our dream was to have a place in the mountains. We’re super fortunate, blessed and grateful that we’ve gotten where we are. Now, it’s even more of a motivator for us to be able to continue to live here. There is our little value add a property, so there are things that we want to do around the house over the years. We want to be able to bring our families out here for great vacations, spend time around the fire pit, go for hikes and things like that.

For Mike and I, what’s important is that we’re very similar. We don’t chase the next Ferrari or a huge house. We look for financial freedom that gives us more quality time with each other and the family. I know that for everybody, we are motivated by different things. For us, this is what we search for. We want to become at the point where we are free financially. We can do whatever we want to do with our time and spend time with the ones we love. Personally, for me, I remember in the beginning when we started our land business, it took us six months to sell our first property.

It was not an overnight success. We were in a group of people left and right. People were not selling land. I’m like, “What’s wrong with us? What did I do wrong?” I’m personally a huge fan of Sara Blakely, the Spanx founder. She talks about that for two years, nobody believed in her idea. The tenacity to keep going when nobody believes in what you do helps me a lot when I don’t see an overnight success or a quick return. It’s to keep on going that one day, I will see it. That helped me a lot in the past years.

Again, it’s the entrepreneurial journey. We believe in ourselves that we’re not going to give up and we’re going to be successful. Maybe nobody else believes it but the reality is it’s our journey. It’s ours to succeed or fail. If we have the right mindset, right work ethic and the right why, we’ll get there because the majority of people don’t have what it takes to go out, start a business, see it through and have the tenacity to hang in there when they get beat down over and over again. Most people will go the path of least resistance. If you have that thing, whatever it is, you’ll be successful.

It may take a while. It may not be as quickly or as much as you like, but you’ll get there. It’s great because you have touched a lot on your why, which is very personal. You’ve touched a lot on business, how you got there and some of the programs you’ve invested in. I truly believe you are going to be immensely successful in your journey along your path because you have the right mindset, the right whys and you have each other, which is awesome. If you don’t mind, as we close here, why don’t you tell the readers a little bit about where they could find you? You could share some social links, websites, any place or calls to action you might have for the audience.

We are motivated by different things.

Our website is DeatonEquityPartners.com. That’s the single place to launch into us. We’ve put together a landing page for anybody interested. There are so many things out there. Everybody’s a little bit different in terms of wanting to communicate via email, scheduling appointments or other passive learning. If your readers will go to DeatonEquityPartners.com/freedom, we’ve put together a page where we put different ways to get in touch with us. If you want to talk, we love talking with people.

One of the things in our business model is we are trying to maintain more of a boutique-style, a smaller and more intimate base of people we work with. We get to know them a little more personally. We can help counsel on helping build your own wealth platform or seek things in your own way. We love talking to people via email, phone, Zooms or however. On that page, you can find a link to book an appointment with us or shoot us an email. We’ve also got a few little items that people can download.

If you’re interested in the land, we have a little bit about our journey on how we got started and some key resources that would help along the way. If you’re into multifamily, we have a guide that helps discuss some of the potential benefits that people would be able to enjoy in pursuing passive or active investments in multifamily.

Finally, we also have a link where we have a passive investors group where you get a little more behind the scenes, look at things and there’s a way to sign up for that. It has no cost. It’s a more intimate group where we offer a little deeper education level, as well as when we come across investments or investments that we’re sponsoring. We’re able to reach out directly to investors that we’ve personally vetted and feel that it’s a right fit for. We put together a one-stop-shop for people to go to. That’s at DeatonEquityPartners.com/freedom. You can start your own journey there.

Ligia and Mike, thank you so much for sharing your personal journey and a little detail on how your entrepreneurial journey worked as well. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for sharing with us. There are a lot of good nuggets and knowledge there that we’ll be sharing with the crew in some of our highlights as we launch this episode. Thank you so much for joining me and have a good day or a good night, whatever it is when you’re reading this. Thanks.

Thank you, Chris.

Important Links:

• Deaton Equity Partners
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Think Multifamily
• DeatonEquityPartners.com/freedom
• https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UCuKHP0VCb02w_f-LHTi6F_A

About Mike & Ligia Deaton

Ligia and Mike Deaton escaped the corporate world and entered the real estate market together in 2016. They formally launched their real estate investing business full time in 2017 and have incorporated multiple asset classes to combine tremendous financial returns with incredible tax benefits. They are currently active land investors as well as partners in more than 1,000 units of multifamily assets across multiple markets. As real estate entrepreneurs, they love enjoying ultimate lifestyle freedom while delivering on their mission in making significant impacts to both investors and the communities in which they partner with the ultimate goal of returning over one billion dollars in investment returns.