The Art of Decision Making in Business (with Jack Allweil)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode.

Thanks for having me on, Sarah. My name's Jack Alweil. I grew up in a very small town in Michigan, about a hundred miles north of Detroit.Like a thousand people, I'd say my journey or background really started sitting in a math class my junior year of college. I was a math and econ major. Didn't really know what I was doing with my life. Like many people, like, you know, 20, 21 years old.And this class was an interest theory class. And I had always liked math, but this class we got to use a lot of different symbols for like calculating present values of future cash flows.And I was like, yeah, I kind of, kind of like this.And it was, it was part of the actuarial mathematics curriculum and part of the appeal to the actuarial profession I thought was it was very exam driven. It seemed like if you just pass the exams, you would get a fair shot.And even at the time, it kind of seemed like you kind of needed to know people to get opportunities in some realms. So I thought it seemed pretty fair in that respect. So I got into that and I actually ended up moving down to North Carolina in 2015.Didn't know a soul. I had already passed five exams at that point and the sixth one was giving me a lot of issues. And I ended up losing some balance in my life.My work product was, was on the down, I would say. So I ended up getting fired in 2016 and I needed to revamp my life so I started reading a lot.I still got another actuary job, but I decided to house hack in 2017 and that really made my life a lot more robust and it felt like I had more freedom to pursue other passion projects and get started really into my real estate journey.I think the story from my life that might be a little more applicable to someone that really doesn't have a lot of money going forward or starting with is after I started house hacking, I started reading a real lot about real estate and some creative financing methods. So one of my strategies, I was calling property managers and this this does take a lot of time, but it doesn't take a lot of money.So calling property managers and seeing if any of their clients are looking to offload for any reason. Sure enough, I found a property manager that had client that it was a couple, they were going through a divorce.They had to offload three of their properties once, three unit and two single families. I ended up asking them if they would sell or finance it for me.Like I said, I did not have that much cash and they wanted like $20,000 down and I basically raised 15 of those 20,000 from friends, my brother and a friend and was able to make the down payment that way and then the owner's finance the rest. That's how I got started.

Suitedash is the ultimate all in one business software platform designed to simplify your operations and supercharge your growth.Say goodbye to tech tool overload and hello to a single unified system that handles CRM proposals, scheduling, contracts, invoicing, subscriptions, project management, client portals, file sharing and marketing all in one place. With Suitedash, you'll enjoy one login to streamline your business, saving you time and sanity.No code automations that put your business on autopilot by slashing manual tasks. The real kicker, unlimited users and clients. This means you can invite your team, clients and contractors without worrying about extra fees.But Suitedash isn't just about software, it's about community. Their roadmap thrives on user feedback and live support. Ensure you're never alone on your journey to success.Trusted by tens of thousands of small businesses with over a thousand glowing five star reviews on Capterra NG2 Sweetdash is the platform you've been waiting for.You can try it free, no credit card required@suitedash.com that's s u I t e d a s h.com suitedash One login, one platform, one low price, unlimited potential.

I feel like I had so many mistakes, it's pretty crazy.I didn't verify the owners had insurance on one of the rentals and when I went to get insurance after I had bought it, they said, oh, you need a new roof on the garage. I'm like what do you mean? And then I went back to the owners and like, how did you guys insure this? Which company did you use?And they said, yeah, we just didn't have insurance. Doing proper due diligence is paramount, I would say in any way. Getting referrals beforehand, doing research on insurances.I've been bamboozled by a website creator. This was a slightly different Company, but my land flipping company.I was talking with this Irish guy on X, seemed very nice, said he could make me a website. You know, I send him $2,000 to make me a website.It seems to be going well, and then next thing you know, I'm sitting at my desk trying to update the website and he's not responding. I have no idea how to use it, and I've just been bamboozled out of $2,000. My biggest success, I guess I would say, is at least financially.That first deal I did, I mean, it was a slight risk, but it has had a huge impact to my overall net worth.I mean, I bought those three properties for 60 grand, sight unseen, and now they're all together worth over 200,000 in the cash flow and they're paid off. So great reminder that you never know where a decision is going to take you.Say at the end of the day, if you want to scale anything, you need to leverage either other people's money or other people's time. So with the rentals, I've tried to get good management in place. I think that is very important. I would get a lot of references.Do your due diligence on the property managers so they can do the work for you. In terms of land flipping, I started to go to states where I could do most of the research on my own.I really been flipping in Arizona, where I can do all the title research myself remotely. And so that's been pretty cool.And I've utilized a tool called LGPass for my CRM and sending out mailers so I don't have to physically print out letters, envelope them, and stamp them. It's all done automatically. I just upload a CSV file into LGPass and it mouse the letters out.So that's been a very useful tool I've used along the way to acquire properties that I then go and sell for more money. I'd say one of the biggest things to get comfortable with is making decisions.And I think to be a good decision maker, it is imperative for you to separate the decision from the result. And there's a famous former poker player, Annie Duke, who wrote a book called Thinking in Bets, where she has this phrase she calls resulting.It's the idea of separating the result from the actual decision because you can play a hand correctly and still get unlucky.So it puts this idea of that there are some parts skills, some parts chance in life, and you have to get comfortable making decisions and being okay with the outcomes. On top of that, I would say it's more important to understand the environment we're operating in.For example, instead of trying to create a plane that flies faster, it would be more beneficial to find the time of day where the weather patterns are in your favor and you have a tailwind to your back. So I think that goes to the monetary environment, understanding how to use debt, how the government operates in terms of money printing.And I think learning that will be way more beneficial than just trying to make more money. Just like working hard because the system is kind of rigged. But as long as you learn the rules, you won't get slaughtered.Basically, if you want to go I talk a lot about money topics, macro and hard money on my YouTube channel, and that's @jackalwell5746 and thanks for having me.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guests.