13: The Entrepreneur Hustle with Bryant Dawson
Behind Their Success: Ep 13
Bryant Dawson: [00:00:00] I'm a big proponent of that. You can do anything, with will determination, hard work
Bryant Dawson: I just don't think there's anything that can stop somebody if they've got will and they're willing to grow.
Paden Squires: [00:01:00] Hey guys, welcome to Behind Their Success Squires, the host. Today we have Bryant Dawson on the program. Bryant Dawson is a former oil industry project manager turned real estate investor. He's built a massive rental portfolio with no end in sight. Brian has a passion for helping others achieve their real estate investing goals through creative financing.
Paden Squires: He's a seasoned and passionate real estate professional with over 14 years of experience in the industry. He's a CEO and [00:02:00] co founder of Ingram Capital. Leading the acquisition, remodel, renting, and selling of rental properties across multiple asset classes, including multifamily, mobile home parks, self storage units, and I think recently car washes, he's on a mission to create value for investors, tenants, and communities by providing quality and affordable housing solutions, while at the same time, generating attractive returns and opportunities for investors.
Paden Squires: Bryant. Welcome on the show, my man.
Bryant Dawson: Thank you so much for having me, Paden. I'm glad to be here.
Paden Squires: Yeah, Bryant. Take us back to the beginning. Give us a little bit of your background.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. So I guess my background realistically starts, you know, in a little town in southeast Missouri, right? So I started as a carryout boy in high school. Making 5 and 15 cents an hour. and then, me and my wife actually had both of our kids in high school, so we had to grow up pretty quick.
Bryant Dawson: I went into welding, learned how to weld and started welding in the oil and gas [00:03:00] industry. Did that for quite a while, worked my way up into management, but always had this, real passion for real estate. And, I got willed property whenever I was really young and,I understood at that point that I couldn't just own property.
Bryant Dawson: And, so,I started investing at 19 years old, and did a really terrible job at that, at that age, as you could imagine. And, it wasn't until my early mid twenties that I really started getting. focused on education and selling real estate. Yeah.
Paden Squires: you started off, you had two kids right in high school. Yeah. So tell me about the challenges of that.
Bryant Dawson: Man, it's pretty tough. I mean,I look back on it now and it's surreal that we actually made it work. Um, you know, I mean, I'm impressed, I'm married to my high school sweetheart.
Bryant Dawson: my daughter just turned 18. My son's 16, fixing to be 17 here in a month or so. And, I honestly don't know how we kept [00:04:00] it all together. It was just drive and determination. We honestly didn't know any better. So,
Paden Squires: so you got willed a property and you got into kind of welding and oil and gas.
Paden Squires: tell me about some of your experiences down the oil and gas road.
Bryant Dawson: Man, oil and gas is a crazy industry. It's like any other construction that is the craziest part about it. You're working. 12 hour days, 12 to 16 hour days, seven days a week. so I worked in the facilities maintenance side.
Bryant Dawson: And essentially what that means is they shut down a plant and you have X amount of days to fix it. they're working 24 hour shifts around the clock until you're finished. So you start to work yourself out of a job in a few months. So there's a tremendous amount of travel with it.
Bryant Dawson: you may not be in one place for more than two or three months at a time.
Bryant Dawson: yeah, and that was. Probably my biggest driving factor for wanting to grow a real estate portfolio was I wanted to be able to take a month off If I [00:05:00] wanted to and spend time with my family because you just don't get to see your family much you're working 84 to 100 hours a week Even if they're with you, which mine traveled with me.
Bryant Dawson: you're always working.
Paden Squires: Yeah. If you're awake, you're working, I've had some experiences that, I mean, you know, as we're recording this, I'm in the middle of tax season. So, you know, I can certainly relate to the,the 80, a hundred hours a week and the struggle of, Wanting to be with the family, but at the same time knowing, maybe there's seasons or what have you to where the work, there's time where you just needed more at work and hopefully you've designed your way or designed your life or your business in a way that allows you to maybe get that.
Paden Squires: Time back and other seasons. You spent time in Saudi Arabia and just all over the place. You told me a couple, a few crazy stories being over in Saudi Arabia. So, you know, you got the property when you were young, when did you say, you know, starting to learn and be more educated about the stuff?
Paden Squires: when do you feel like you really started to make that shift and really turn the real estate stuff into your [00:06:00] career?
Bryant Dawson: I always had older friends in the oil and gas industry and they were always telling me, don't stay in this, get out.
Bryant Dawson: You've got to get out. It's a terrible life to live. and at that point I'd already had one investment property. I had the property that my grandparents had left me, that I was trying to rent out. But every renter I had, cost me about 10, 000 bucks. I didn't actually make any money.
Bryant Dawson: and then, I started really thinking about it at that point. So I need to figure out what this looks like. So in about 2014, I started really studying, understanding what rental property was. 2014 is whenever I really started taking the leap into rental ownership.
Bryant Dawson: And then, from 2014 to 2016, I was buying a lot of portfolios all the way up till about 2019. I bought quite a few portfolios and properties. Yeah.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. listeners, don't let him downplay. When he says portfolio properties, he's. he's buying large deals, large multifamily deals and doing stuff all over the place, right?
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, [00:07:00] absolutely. At this point we just turned, our 1900th turn. we've got seven or eight underway right now. And, we have about 35 units in our multifamily portfolio that we're turning as well. So,we're still turning and burning.
Paden Squires: Yeah. So, let me highlight that.
Paden Squires: And he said 1900 and he has turned and flipped 1900 houses. And this is a guy that's coming from a background that had, from a small town, had two kids while I was in high school. And Bryant, right? you're 35 at this point, 35. Yeah. and you've built these companies despite all the challenges of your background.
Paden Squires: still push through and have accomplished, got quite the impressive resume.
Bryant Dawson: I appreciate that. yeah, I'm a big proponent of that. You can do anything, with will determination, hard work, I see it every single day, business owners that I get to talk to.
Bryant Dawson: And it's like. Understanding how they get to where they're at. there's a lot of hard work past that first million, you know?
Paden Squires: Yeah. and you hear people say the first million is the hardest and I [00:08:00] would agree that the first million is the hardest, but it's really, it's just man, it's just the beginning like that.
Paden Squires: You just realize, man, I'm starting to play the game and there's a whole lot more levels to this.
Bryant Dawson: Oh yeah.
Paden Squires: and the cool thing is. me and you are kind of a mastermind networking group together. and being in that kind of group and surrounded by different entrepreneurs, you really get challenged and see people that may be at different levels in the different areas of life.
Paden Squires: and really at least really motivates me to figure out how to pull that off too.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, it's truly inspiring. I try to surround myself with people that are smarter than me, every day. hence why I hang out with folks like you. just the questions that get asked and get brought up.
Bryant Dawson: And if you're willing to, stay vulnerable and say, hey, that, that's my fault. I understand. I get it. And then. Continue to grow. I just don't think there's anything that can stop somebody if they've got will and they're willing to grow.
Paden Squires: Yeah. you've had quite a bit of success in the real estate world.
Paden Squires: [00:09:00] what do you think is the number one skill that's led to that? what is your best skill that's led to your success?
Bryant Dawson: I'm not afraid to get dirty.
Bryant Dawson: I'm not afraid of it. a lot of people come out and they grow out of the work part and they don't want to do the work part anymore, I'm building my house right now, and like I'm doing that.
Bryant Dawson: I could pay somebody else to do it, but I'm doing a lot of it myself just for the sheer fact that I want that pride. I want that thing. I don't know. It's just something inside of me. Some way I'm wired probably there. Maybe there's a problem with it. I just don't know.
Paden Squires: we're all wired differently.
Paden Squires: and you're right there too. there's certainly pros and cons to some of those things, you're extremely driven and I share a lot of those characteristics too, which, leads to our certain, successes in business, but at the same time, there's certainly downfalls, man, it's hard to ever shut it off Or even feel content sometimes.
Bryant Dawson: I had a big problem with working in oil and gas. I would only sleep about four or five hours a night. and I did that, I was on that sleep regimen for about [00:10:00] 12 years. and I think that obviously led to a lot of my success in the amount of units I was able to turn because I'd never, whenever I left my oil and gas job.
Bryant Dawson: I didn't shut that. I didn't go back to a 40 hour week. I actually worked harder and more with the house turns than I did,oil and gas, I think.
Paden Squires: Yeah. and it's interesting from an outside perspective, people may see where you're at, but they really don't see just the sheer amount of time and work that was put into it.
Paden Squires: And for years, right? So you say something like 2014 before you really got, really deep into it. you've been investing all this time in your business. working 80 hours a week for a decade.
Paden Squires: I talk about this with other guests on the podcast of how, entrepreneurship can get marketed and as this, Oh, this amazing, awesome thing, which it is, and there is freedom and whatever in it, but there's the other side of it, the real side of it, the day to day.
Paden Squires: side [00:11:00] of it, the suck of it, the suck of just the sheer amount of work and the process and the mistakes and the setbacks. I think it's really important, on say like podcasts like this and other areas where people are talking about entrepreneurship to really tell people about that, And not paint a picture of some just amazing fairy tale, because that really doesn't exist.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, I mean, it's,it's really tough and, people that generally make it in business, most don't, right? IIt's just a fact that most businesses fail. but I think that most entrepreneurs that make it can, have battle stories, and those are the best.
Bryant Dawson: that was probably my favorite part about oil and gas. I remember whenever I was exiting oil and gas, I was standing with a bunch of my buddies that I'd worked with for years. and, it was cold. Like really cold. We were up, near the Minnesota border. It was snowing outside, very windy.
Bryant Dawson: the windshield was like 27 below. We're all standing there like in this little huddle [00:12:00] with a little heater in the middle. And I was like, we'll remember this day forever. This is terrible, And, I've got one house that I remember. a lot, but a lot of houses I remember, but I have one that I remember in particular and that was, we had, Some tenants coming in, on some short term leases and these short term leases were Big part of our income at that point in time.
Bryant Dawson: And it's like on the come up. So any little bit of income that you can get is gold. And, I remember I was laying tile in this house and was like, okay, we're just going to pull an all nighter type situation. And I woke up on the garage floor and I looked up and I'm like, Oh, we got the tile done and I'd like, how far did I get before it fell?
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. Do I have to get back up and go at this again? or can I lay here for a little bit longer? So, yeah.
Paden Squires: Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, you know, same here, when you've been in business for a decade or so, We all got stories. We all got really interesting [00:13:00] stories of scars and different clients and dealing with the public and all that comes with that.
Paden Squires: you can get some pretty wild stories.
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Paden Squires: you told me your, your best skill is just really determination, grit, right? You're just willing to do whatever it takes. Tell me,what do you credit as the best decision you've ever made?
Bryant Dawson: getting started a hundred percent.
Bryant Dawson: I spent a couple of years, more than a couple of years, honestly, from the time I was 19 till my early twenties, I spent that time contemplating whether I should or shouldn't. Yeah. And if you sit back and contemplate, it doesn't really do a whole lot other than just confuse you.
Bryant Dawson: Like just take action and move some stuff across the board and see if it works.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's [00:14:00] big, I would say I did a lot of that early in my career too, even with having, running my business, even the first, I don't know, say three or four years. I was really good at gathering knowledge, right?
Paden Squires: Like I always enjoy reading and gathering knowledge, but I didn't really have any execution power. Like I was that guy that just wanted to learn everything to see if I could figure it all out before I got started, not realizing that you can't figure it out until you actually get started.
Bryant Dawson: And honestly, like you're not ready. For all the information. If you had all the information at your fingertips, day one, likelihood is you wouldn't know what to do with it.
Paden Squires: yeah, for sure. And you wouldn't even begin to understand it. it just, you don't have the capability of doing that.
Paden Squires: Yeah. It's really important. Like. Podcasts like this and other podcasts and books and stuff. That's all that information is really important and you should be constantly feeding yourself with that. But they say knowledge is power. It's not really powerful.
Paden Squires: Knowledge is like potential power. if you never put it to [00:15:00] work, it's really useless.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. Got to take action.
Paden Squires: I'm sure you've made many of these along the way, but what's one big mistake you've made?
Bryant Dawson: Man, I've made so many mistakes. I probably made every mistake that you can.
Bryant Dawson: think of whenever it comes to housing. I think this is probably the biggest mistake that I made for many years, and I'm no longer making this mistake. but that was thinking that I had to do everything on my own.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And that's, that's a lesson I'm still learning myself as I've, you know, I've gone through different transitions and kind of a big transition in my own business this year is it's Peyton, finally letting go of stuff.
Paden Squires: And that freaks me out, scares me, and that's a transition and it, especially as an entrepreneur that built your own business. I've built my own business, letting go of that, realizing that. you're not naturally skilled. at everything, right? you have certain skill sets and other people have other skill sets and realizing that, there's things that people are probably better at [00:16:00] than you are, even despite it being your own business and being able to be self aware enough to realize that and be able to let go of things is huge.
Paden Squires: And that's the only way you're ever going to scale anything of significance. you're never going to get anywhere really you always need relationships and other people on your team.
Bryant Dawson: You can only finish so much by yourself. There's only, everybody has the exact same amount of time in the day.
Bryant Dawson: And yeah.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Looking back over your career, let's go back to 19 year old Bryant. you got a couple of kids, you're young, you have no idea what you're doing. if you give yourself one, one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself at this point from your perspective now?
Bryant Dawson: Man, that's a tough one. Cause I know at that point in my life, I was battling back and forth with everybody on the sidelines is telling me everybody that I'm working around is telling me to get out of the industry that I'm in, but looking back on it, getting out of the industry that I was in, would have been a bad idea.
Bryant Dawson: It gave me a lot of tools. I was able to work for [00:17:00] many, very large companies,Chevron and included in that. And you start working for companies like that, that are doing multi billion dollar projects. It allows you to expand your mind a lot and you get to work with a lot of really smart people. I think I probably would just tell myself to work on building processes earlier.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And that, comes back to the multiple people, the scalability, all those things. and you're right when you're sitting there talking about working, with a multi billion dollar company,Chevron and, or, and who else, whoever else you worked with.
Paden Squires: And I think, you coming from a small town background, I certainly came from a very small town background. Getting used to big numbers or big numbers may not scare you as much, right? and me and you had this conversation, I don't know, last week or so, but you told me about a conversation you had where somebody said, Hey, don't just, don't be scared of the extra zeros on that number, right?
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, and
Paden Squires: the game's kind of the same, no matter what, you're just playing at different levels and you have that experience [00:18:00] in the big companies, it lets you maybe get a little more used to those extra zeros.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. we were working some of these jobs, you a small cap project is going to be 10 million bucks,on these.
Bryant Dawson: So you definitely get used to bigger numbers coming across the board and especially in the project management role, you're watching these numbers pretty closely. So,I'm very, very thankful that I had that opportunity to be able to understand That there are people out there playing it in much bigger numbers than 20,000 houses.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. And
Paden Squires: I, I would say that was probably one of the bigger things, especially, the beginning of my business is not realizing and coming from a very small rural area that.there are higher levels to the game once again, and realizing that you don't have to play it small.
Paden Squires: And it took me forever to get to that point to realize like, yeah, those, they're just bigger numbers. The work's the same. and honestly, and my industry, as you climb up and work with some of those bigger numbers and bigger clients, in a lot of ways, it becomes [00:19:00] easier. because my business is all like relationships, really.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And,typically not a hundred percent of the time, but typically when you get higher up level, you're dealing with, I would say, more mature or more emotionally intelligent people and it can be a lot easier to do the work.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, it definitely is. and there's something to be said about that, in real estate too.
Bryant Dawson: Obviously there's many different real estate classes or, I guess asset classes rather. And each one of them has its own nuance, but some of them are definitely easier. And the ones that involve bigger numbers do get easier. as that top line revenue increases, there's just more flexibility, more tax incentives, and just more things that you can do.
Bryant Dawson: You can be more flexible.
Paden Squires: Yeah. and as you've grown in scale, you can solve bigger problems now. and honestly, I assume you would agree with this statement, but like you're playing in a smaller pool of competition, right? you're doing deals where 90 percent of the market.
Paden Squires: Can't even consider [00:20:00] doing and, tell me if I'm speaking out of turn, but I feel like, you know, the, market you play is, obviously not the low end of the market, but it's also, not the crazy high end where you're not competing against, private equity and all these different massive monies that can come in.
Paden Squires: but that nice medium multi family stuff to where there's a lot of opportunities because there's very few people who can solve those problems.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah, we're, playing in a field that is not, that it's not touched. There's still competition in it, but much less competition than, a deal that everybody can purchase.
Bryant Dawson: And then it's too small for institutional quality, people, they're generally looking for a couple of hundred and fifty units or something like that. So,they're looking to place capital, we're looking to place capital, but. But we're just looking to place it and we'll work harder for it.
Bryant Dawson: I guess that's pretty much the only difference.
Paden Squires: So, you know, you're the CEO of Ingram capital. just give us a little more about the business and what you guys are doing and yeah, just what you're trying to accomplish.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. So,ultimately, after flipping [00:21:00] so many houses I've done some syndications over the past and, always get the question like, Hey, how do we invest with you?
Bryant Dawson: And, honestly, that was a difficult question for me because whenever you start dealing with other people's money,it's much different. It's a little scarier. And it's way scarier. Yeah. So you start, trying to figure that out and navigate those waters. I actually went back to school.
Bryant Dawson: after trying to learn this, I went back to school at Harvard, for alternative investments and learned a lot about alternative investments, how other people do it. And, so now we operate and own a group of funds, where we syndicate and we'll take other investors' money. And then we place that into much larger assets than anybody could purchase by themselves.
Bryant Dawson: And,we're. We have a property management company, construction company, and the capital company. So we run the entire stack, so we can really control things, and keep costs in line. So our big goal is that we can take the person that maybe is a [00:22:00] professional at their job and doesn't have the time to invest, doesn't want to learn how to invest, or Just wants to become a passive investor and we'll take that capital, we'll place it into an asset that's, got a cash flow for a super long time.
Bryant Dawson: And, give great returns on a monthly basis. So that's what you're doing. Yeah.
Paden Squires: And getting to know you, Ryan, I've peeled back the curtain a little bit and see how you guys, the detail and really the process you guys have of underwriting deals like this.
Paden Squires: it's not just something, Oh, you, find a deal and say, Oh, that looks good. And let's buy it. Yeah, no,
Bryant Dawson: we've underwritten and said no to over 250 million worth of deals. And it's March 14th.
Paden Squires: Did that to that year to date, right? This year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's this year.
Paden Squires: that's pretty cool. And knowing a little bit about you and the network you've built up there, you created a nice deal flow, opportunities that come across your desk or on.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. We have a tremendous amount of deal flow.
Bryant Dawson: we're probably getting sent 15-20 [00:23:00] deals a day, a week, it varies up and down, but, it's a tremendous amount of deal flow. And there's a lot of them that actually don't ever make it to underwriting. we'll look at them and we have a back of the napkin that takes about five minutes and kick a bunch of them out.
Bryant Dawson: And then we do what's called hanging around the rim. we'll say, Hey, by the way, Peyton, we really liked your deal, but we're way off base on it. Call us back later if something doesn't work out and we actually get a lot of deal flow from that, whenever the broker, the seller goes out to market, the market speaks, and says, Hey, we can't pay that.
Bryant Dawson: We'll get a lot of opportunities on that side. And that's probably it. 80 to 90 percent of our actual purchases come from that.
Paden Squires: Yeah. When they go out to the market and reality slaps them in the face of what their assets actually were.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. Or, we've had deals that went under contract, and then they didn't trade.
Bryant Dawson: And then they come back six, eight, nine months later and say, Hey, would you be interested? It's like, yeah, just not as your number [00:24:00] now.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is, man. It's solving big problems and solving big problems. that's where a lot more of the money's at.
Bryant Dawson: Yeah,
Paden Squires: if people like what they hear and like what you have to say, what's the best way for people to reach out to you or contact you or just get in touch with you?
Bryant Dawson: Yeah. So, our website's always a good one. Ingram Capital. fund. And then, I'm super active on LinkedIn as well.
Bryant Dawson: And that's just Brian Dawson on LinkedIn.
You
Paden Squires: Very cool. So yeah, guys, you're interested, Ingram Capital and they're launching their new fund,here in, late March of 24 and, yeah, they're some great guys to check out.
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