The Anti-Investing Strategy: Why Survival Matters More Than High Returns | Ep 110

James: Today I wanna talk about why the best investment strategy might be anti investing. And I'm actually gonna lean on my old buddy pal, Jim Collins, to help prove the point, because he studied companies that didn't just have great quarters, but had great decades. Hmm. And I think what you're gonna find.

Overlaps a whole lot with investing and it's gonna be awesome. On the Furlo Capital Real Estate Podcast where we dive into the intricacies of passive real estate investing and our mission is to equip people to anti invests well so that we can, uh, what was this? Anti invests Well, oh my gosh. And properties and people so that together we can build housing while improving our wealth.

Nope. We can improve our wealth while, no, we can improve housing while building wealth, whatever. You know exactly what I'm talking about. This is the anti intro apparently. Um, I'm James and this is my wife Jessi.

Jessi: I, yeah, I

James: man, every time it's so hard.

Jessi: Every time it is hard. You to, you have like a flow and then you mess with the flow.

James: I do, but

Jessi: it's worth it. It's right.

James: It's worth it.

Jessi: It is worth it. I li I do like the hook. Uh, I have no idea what anti investing means.

James: Hmm. Great

Jessi: question. I mean. Other than I know what anti means and I know what investing means. What is that? So it's like, don't invest, don't invest investing.

James: Yes. Um, it's more like, um, it was funny.

I'm against

Jessi: investing.

James: I, I had notes. It was funny. I was going through writing this all up and I got partway through and went like, oh, I feel like I'm just like, there's a big overlap here with Jim Collins. And I was like, you know what? So I restructured my notes and I actually got rid of, so interesting that initial intro where I was explaining what do I mean by anti investing?

So I actually write it down. Um, but it's the idea of, it's a, it's a, by anti investing, it's, it, it means not doing the, the trendy types of things. It's, it feels very opposite.

Jessi: Okay.

James: And so as opposed to the goal, and maybe here's a way to say it. The goal shouldn't necessarily be, lemme make as much money as I can.

Jessi: Hmm.

James: Okay. Mm-hmm. As fast as I can. Yeah. That's not, 'cause that's usually like, you know, that's a great investment. Look how much money he made and how fast. Mm-hmm. This is very different. And so for example, the very first one that good old Jim talks about is he wants you to avoid the death line.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: Okay. So, um, the concept is that in business, if you run out of cash. It's game over.

Jessi: Mm.

James: And so in investing, that means that you also don't wanna run outta cash. Mm. Um, you don't want to have a permanent capital loss. Mm-hmm. Um, you don't wanna have to do a forced sale or have some sort of liquidity crisis or even hurt your reputation.

Mm-hmm. And so those are the things that cause a death line. Mm-hmm. That he would say the goal is to avoid those things. 'cause as long as you avoid it, you can keep playing the game.

Jessi: Mm-hmm. Right.

James: And that's the. The goal is to play the game. Not necessarily. 'cause there is no win, right? Yeah. It just keeps kind of going.

Jessi: Mm.

James: And um, yeah, so his quote is, you don't need to win big, you just can't die.

Jessi: Huh? It, it seems kinda like a pessimistic view of. Investing, you know? 'cause it's like you want something that's gonna be successful that does make money.

James: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessi: You don't just wanna be avoiding a catastrophe, I guess.

James: Well,

Jessi: I mean, yes you do. But that

James: is almost

Jessi: like, well,

James: I know what you're saying. It's like, um, what are they, what's the, there's a quote when they talk about in football, a prevent defense prevents you from defending,

Jessi: right.

James: I think,

Jessi: yeah. It's like.

James: Yes. And I and, and, and. Yes. But I think it's like, it's, you obviously do wanna pay attention to the overall returns mm-hmm.

And what you're doing and, and get good deals. And we'll talk, there's, I have other ones in there mm-hmm. That dive deeper to make sure it's a quote, good investment. But it really is about like, don't necessarily try to hit a home run.

Jessi: Mm.

James: Just focus on hitting those, those singles and doubles. Alright. And that's okay.

So that's what he means by avoiding a death line. Don't do a speculative deal where you put all your money into it and you go, this could be it. And I gotta rule a six to win. Right? Like you don't want, don't do those deals. Yeah.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: That's the. Or, um, you don't

Jessi: wanna leverage yourself

James: so much if you're doing us where we have a new, with

Jessi: so much risk.

James: Exactly. Um, we just recently got a new card game from the Oregon Trail card game. It's based off the original computer game, and it's just as so hard, hard. My very first round, I, I had to forge a river card.

Jessi: Yep.

James: And to forge, to, to cross the river. You gotta get a, an even number. So 2, 4, 6.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: But, and if you don't, you have to keep going.

But this card was special because it said if you roll a one, you die. Guess what? I rolled right out the gate very first round. I'm done. I was like, well,

Jessi: so bad.

James: Good game everybody. Enjoy. Good luck family. Yeah. I sat there and I watched the rest of it, but um, yeah, that's the death line. So you don't like those are bad investments Yeah.

Of doing investment where it's like, 'cause there were a bunch of other ones where it was like, you gotta roll even to cross. If it's odd, you gotta try again. Mm-hmm. Like those are fine.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Do those ones. But like

Jessi: if, yeah. Okay. That makes a lot more sense to me. Be aware. Of those deals that have, that have the critical miss a death risk, you know, that you're like.

All right. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna risk this. I'm gonna go for it.

James: Yeah.

Jessi: Like, don't, don't do that.

James: Exactly. Exactly.

Jessi: I have some stability.

James: Yeah. Uh, also related, um, by Collins, he talks about a concept called productive paranoia. Right. And that's where like the best investors are quietly nervous. Right. And it's not necessarily fear, it's not pessimism.

Take that.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Um, it's a constant awareness of what could go wrong.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: And then preparing for it.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: So. This is where like, um, the anti investing behavior

Jessi: Mm.

James: Might be something where you just assume that conditions could get worse. Mm-hmm. And you want to prepare for it. So even when markets, they feel calm and good.

Mm-hmm. Which they don't right now, but maybe they do. Yeah. Or when deals pencil out evenly

Jessi: mm-hmm.

James: You guys go, well what if, what if expenses due skyrocket? Or, my vacancy is a lot higher than I thought. And even when everyone else is optimistic, it's when you wanna be like, okay, does this. Makes sense. Yeah.

So it's not expecting disaster. It is just refusing to be surprised by it.

Jessi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Considering all the different possibilities.

James: Right. And so as a result, you're gonna be a lot more conservative

Jessi: mm-hmm.

James: About those things. And, and you're gonna test for things like higher rates, lower rents, longer hold periods, like I guess I said Sure.

And, and you might ask like what assumptions are carrying the most weight

Jessi: mm-hmm.

James: In whatever the your investing model is. Yeah. And. And so you're not gonna invest in as many things. 'cause you might be like, ah, man, I don't know what if. Right. Mm. And it's my job as the sponsor to tease some of those things out for you.

Sure. And, and it's honestly like we had a couple deals where like we just didn't make as much as we wanted on it. And so I was like, you know what, like. I'm dialing back some of these assumptions that we had because the market has fundamentally shifted from where we were, uh, a year and a half ago. Mm-hmm.

And so we're making those changes and that's part of that productive paranoia. Hmm. Where I'm like, you know what I, we used to, it used to be you listed a property. The next day you had offers. 30 days later you closed like way beyond that now. And we actually have been modeling where it's like, well maybe it sits for 30 days and then we have another 30 days to close.

Like, nope, we're doubling those numbers now. Whoa. And I'm building that into the model and you know, if it does better than that, awesome. Sure, I'll take the win. But that's not what I'm walking into the assumption with. Mm-hmm. But that funnily mentally means I'm now offering less money on properties. So I'm not getting as many deals.

I'm anti investing.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: I'm okay with that.

Jessi: Yeah. 'cause you're, 'cause. Overall, it's a net. Net win. A net positive,

James: I think so. I would rather my capital sit still and not do anything than lose money on it. Like, duh. But that's really hard.

Jessi: Yeah, that is really

James: hard when it's, when it's just sitting there not placed.

Jessi: Right,

James: because it doesn't feel like it's working for you.

Jessi: Yeah. Huh.

James: Next example of Collins is fire bullets and cannonballs. Oh, I love this one. And uh, so the idea behind it was he talks about back in the olden days, um, when they had ships, you would, you know, fire cannonballs at them. But, uh, it was like you first had to dial in, you had to calibrate

Jessi: Right?

James: Um, the shot. And so what they would do is they would fire. Bullets first, get it calibrated, figure out, okay, here's how far it is, da da da, da. And then once they had it calibrated, then they would load up the cannonball and take down the ship. Mm-hmm. Because you could fire a lot of bullets really quick to quickly calibrate.

Whereas cannonballs, again, they're slow and expensive. Mm-hmm. The same thing's gonna be true for your capital. So you wanna figure out ways to test cheaply learn fast and only scale when it's validated. So you might start with a smaller initial allocation, right? You're only doing $50,000, you're not going all in on the $250,000, something like that.

You watch how sponsors behave after they close with that, and then you pay attention during the boring quarters, not just the exciting ones. And, and so that's, um, and then once you're like, okay, this feels good. Yeah. Then you go all in. Now that you've mitigated some of that risk. Mm-hmm. And um, quote here was, most investors fire cannonballs emotionally after seeing other people succeed.

Which is the scary part.

Jessi: Yeah. I could see, I could see an investor getting, getting excited.

James: Yeah.

Jessi: And just being like, oh my gosh, crazy deals. I gotta get out there, I gotta get in there. And. If they don't,

James: and I'll be honest, like

Jessi: vetted and that's

James: part of my, part of what I do. Right,

Jessi: right.

James: Get in on this one.

This is the one

Jessi: which,

James: I mean, I try to be pretty straightforward with it, but you know, I'm also like,

Jessi: sure.

James: I'm, I'm a slight hype man.

Jessi: Yeah, yeah. Well there's some sales involved in it and you do need, yeah, need to build the hype, need to get people on board.

James: But I also like I do the other stuff. So when it's a good deal.

Jessi: Right.

James: This is a good deal.

Jessi: You're willing. Yeah. You're

James: willing to, so this is going to, let's see, this one will air after we have. Funded our land development deal.

Jessi: Okay.

James: And so I, I'm going to predict in the future where we bought, uh, we bought a piece of land and we did the initial, like we got all the plans done, we got all the permits done.

Mm-hmm. We did the initial site work, we got temp power, all the stuff. And so it was to a point, I'm gonna put this in past tense. Mm-hmm. Um, it was to a point where we were ready to like do the foundation and start building. Mm-hmm. That was when we went for funding. After we had figured out all the other math, got everything set up.

Yeah. Like timelines were no longer a guess. Mm-hmm. We're ready to rock. And so the way I will did present it was like, guys, this is a good deal. I ran the numbers. We know what the comps are. Mm-hmm. Because we actually had a couple that were relatively close by that sold, we know the numbers, and even then they're debt people.

So if the numbers aren't exactly what I want, there's our lenders will still make the same amount of money for it. And we, because we're going with a builder who has built this house multiple times, we know exactly the cost. We know exactly the timeline. Well then, you know, and we also know the plus or minuses there.

Yeah. 'cause like, this is what they do. They build these kind of spec houses. So I, it is just like, we've mitigated a lot of the risks there and we know the numbers and so Yeah. I get excited about it. Like, this is a good deal, you should go for it. And we're helping provide affordable housing so it meets our, our bigger goal.

Mm. So anyways. Uh, but yeah. Why? I hyped it up a little bit. I'm like, this is awesome. Get in.

Jessi: Right.

James: And we only have so many slots. That's the other issue with duo's issue. We'll put that in quotes. Um,

Jessi: which, like you're saying, smaller deals, someone. I, if it's their first time investing with you, they could still invest a smaller amount.

James: Totally.

Jessi: And test it out and get to know you and Yep. Be able to build that trust. So,

James: and there's other things that you can do too in terms of firing bullets, which is hop on the phone with me and let's have a conversation. Listen to these podcasts. Read my stuff. Download my downloads.

Jessi: Right.

James: And like,

Jessi: yeah, there's, you're transparent.

James: Very easy bullets,

Jessi: all this information and

James: yeah,

Jessi: knowing

James: what people are getting

Jessi: into,

James: you could talk to previous investors and Sure. They'll tell you, James is amazing at this. He's okay at this. He can use improvement here.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And I usually get that feedback and I try to take it in. So, yeah.

Jessi: Cool.

James: Uh, he talks about in his book, the, in his one of his books, I think it's Great By Choice.

Um, the idea of Return on Luck, it's very interesting. He goes into this whole thing about how there are luck events. Just things just happen. Okay. And great companies. They are able to leverage the good luck into good stuff or minimize the bad luck.

Jessi: Hmm.

James: And then, yeah, the way he got into measuring it was very interesting and he actually, like, he didn't want to include it initially, but eventually his fellow students, researchers, um, were like, dude, this is a thing.

Jessi: Interesting.

James: Super interesting. And so, um. He talks about everyone experiences good and bad luck. Uh, great performers extract more upside from the good luck and limit the damage from bad luck that, yes, thank you. I did. It's almost like I made this earlier. And, um, but here's what's really interesting is that oftentimes you gotta, you gotta be careful where a good outcome doesn't necessarily equal a good decision.

And vice versa. A bad outcome doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad decision.

Jessi: Okay.

James: And that's part of their, like there's luck in there. It's one of the things that I've. Had to grapple with, which was, we bought our very first investment in 2009 mm. And we just so happened to have graduated in 2007. Mm-hmm.

Had good jobs that were, you know, they were established enough so that when the bottom fell out

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Like we could keep our jobs and we had enough savings mm-hmm. That we could get in on a duplex from another company who was struggling. And then it was like. Uh, geez. How many years was it later? Um, 10 years later.

Jessi: Mm.

James: Ish. Like we were looking at all the numbers and I was like, 'cause of nothing we had done. Mm-hmm. The economy had gone up and I was like, oh, we can 10 31 this into an awesome

Jessi: mm-hmm.

James: Warehouse property.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Like, I don't, I didn't do anything magical there.

Jessi: Yeah. There was timing that you didn't control

James: it.

In the, in the market. Like, and one could make the argument like we, like the, the housing market had dropped and people paying attention would be like, okay, is this the bottom? I don't know. Is this eventually going to come up? Yes.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And then, and so you went, this is the time to invest.

Jessi: Hmm.

James: But I also wasn't intentional about it, if I'm honest.

Like it was just, I finally had enough capital, so we went for it.

Jessi: I, Hmm. I don't like the word luck, but only because,

James: okay. Then you don't like what James Collins was saying, but keep going.

Jessi: Well

James: wait to disagree with a great man.

Jessi: It's probably, Hmm, I, I,

James: yeah. What's your thought?

Jessi: I just,

James: it's like there's market forces versus

Jessi: Yeah.

There's

James: individual.

Jessi: I tend to just lean more on, yes, there are circumstances that are outside your control and they'll either. Shift positively or shift negatively.

James: Yep.

Jessi: But you can be intentional on paying attention to those things and taking advantage of the timing. Yeah, and I get that. Yes. It, there's happenstance sometimes I, I, I don't know.

I, I just, I wouldn't call that luck, I guess.

James: Okay.

Jessi: I would just call it like, yeah, it was fortunate timing, like you didn't have control over that and, okay. It happened to work out great. Like, which, okay. Maybe it's just semantics.

James: I think it is.

Jessi: Some people call that luck.

James: I think so.

Jessi: I don't know.

James: I, yeah, I don't know.

Um

Jessi: hmm.

James: I, I, I, I would hit on semantics.

Jessi: I, I don't know. I guess I, I don't wanna get like spiritual or philosophical or whatever, but I also, but I'm going to 'cause I also believe that like we're stewards of what we're given.

James: Yeah.

Jessi: And. If we're generous with that and open handed and like are praying and like in relationship with God about managing all of it, like he's gonna bring blessing and this is not prosperity gospel like you do the right thing and God blesses you.

But I, I think that is there, you know, and so it's like, yeah, the Lord knows like, you can handle this, you can, you're gonna run with this and yeah, I'm gonna bless you during these different times. So it's like, I wouldn't call that luck like

James: it's, um, Collins, I actually know wouldn't agree with this quote 'cause he addressed it, but I have heard the quote.

Luck is the intersection of preparedness and opportunity.

Jessi: Sure.

James: And I think that's kind of, that's more, that's where you're headed, where you of my

Jessi: definition.

James: Correct. Yeah. And, and I think that's, and, and I think the other piece is that what, what I got from his books is it's not just the luck events.

That's not it. It's the. It's, it's both. It's avoiding the death line. It's being productively paranoid. It's firing bullets in cannonballs. Yeah. It's getting the right people on the bus and then finding seats. It's, it's, it's all the things, right? Yeah. It's the hedgehog concept. It's, it's it's clock telling.

It's all the things

right

Jessi: there is preparedness

James: and

Jessi: taking advantage of opportunity. And there happens to be great things that happen sometimes,

James: and he goes, and this is more like it's a lever.

Jessi: Sure.

James: Right. It is. Like these are more the macro things.

Jessi: Mm.

James: They're the opportunities. Yeah. Or like the bad opportunities.

Right. Yeah. And it's if you're, if you're disciplined about all the other stuff. Mm-hmm. Then when those things come along, luck events. Mm-hmm. Opportunities or disadvantages. Mm-hmm. You're prepared to either handle it really. To handle it well. Yeah. Either like, oh, I'm gonna leverage this to the max. Mm-hmm.

Or I'm gonna minimize what's going on. And, and, and I, I think that's what, like, that's a fair characterization. So I, but I do say for, like, for our investing Yeah. Obviously we were wise about it. Mm-hmm. And, and we kept rolling into it and I paid attention to what was going on in the market. I didn't just sit on those properties.

Right. And we did keep them well maintained and well rented so that when the time came to sell, like, yeah, we got top dollar for them. And so there, there were things that we did. Mm-hmm. Where like, yeah, we were able to highly leverage it.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And then I went and found another deal that just made sense.

Right. And so I,

Jessi: yeah. But that, you're right. The initial timing, it wasn't within our control at all. It just was lucky that the, we were,

James: yeah.

Jessi: We had the income, the investments were there, were born a

James: certain year, graduated a certain year. Like I,

Jessi: yeah, it

James: was, you know, it's funny, like perfect

Jessi: timing.

James: Think about Mike, my brother, who's in a situation where he graduated two years later than me.

So he graduated, let's see, I was, uh, he graduated in 2009.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: Couldn't get a job.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Like at some point in time he was working for our dad, helping out with him. He was working for Arby's. 'cause that was a summer job that he had. He did a bunch of internships. Mm-hmm. But like, I, what are you gonna do?

Yeah. In that situation. And, and I know like with hp, when I first came in in 2007, I was one of the youngest people there.

Jessi: Mm.

James: They had a, like over the rest of 2007 and 2008 and a lot of 2009, uh. There were younger, you know, I would see other waves of people who were younger than me and almost all of them left.

And at the, by the end of 2009, I was again the youngest person and I was that wave for like four or five years and then all of a sudden I went, Hey, they got young people again. Cool. And so like I hit that cutoff just right where I had been there long enough that I had established, I had. Uh, I had the experience with like, okay, we actually wanna keep him on board as opposed to, you know,

Jessi: yeah.

James: Not hiring anymore. So like I, that I had no control over that. That's just pure luck.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Which gave us the income to, then we didn't, I mean, we went on vacations, but like, we then were very disciplined about our spending. At one point in time, we were only spending, we were saving 70% of our income and it was to invest and do stuff.

And so it was like, that was the combination of those two things together. Is, um, is what helped. And so I would say for, uh, for, you know, for high net and high net worth individuals watching this, like they've got the capital and the opportunity now the question. And they've made some wise decisions and have been disciplined up until this point.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And so for me, what I'm trying to communicate is like, Hey, you gotta watch over these things. Don't get exuberant. Mm-hmm. Don't go. Mm-hmm. Chase after the highest IRR that you can find. Don't think that you always have to have your money placed. Even though velocity is important, then the faster you can get money moving, the better.

But it's gotta be moving in the right direction. It can't just be moving for the sake of moving, because then you might miss on this other stuff. And so that's where I think we can put all together in this anti investing playbook, which has. Uh, four parts. Um, first one, survival first.

Jessi: Mm.

James: Right. Preserve your capital.

That's the important part. Sure. That's one of the nice parts about, um, a lot of the short term stuff we do. You're a lender. Mm-hmm. So like you get a guaranteed interest. Mm-hmm. And I personally guarantee it 'cause I have the portfolio back it up. Mm-hmm. And, and that one investment relative to the rest of my portfolio is small enough.

I'm like, yeah. Like I can, I can handle it. You're not gonna lose your capital. Mm-hmm. And worst case scenario, again, if I don't pay it back, like you can take over the property. Mm-hmm. All sorts of stuff. There. Uh, principle number two is that paranoia with a purpose, right? Mm-hmm. You wanna build slack in, you wanna preserve some liquidity, and you just remember cycles exist.

Yeah. It's a thing. And the question is, where are we now in the cycle? Mm-hmm. A few weeks back we talked about my economic predictions and where we're at.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: Um, I was listening to another show today that was, you know, everyone's talking about it at this point.

Jessi: Mm.

James: And everyone has. Different opinions.

Jessi: Yep.

James: Um, so you wanna pay attention to that and just assume that at some point it's gonna drop and you wanna be ready for it. Uh, anti investing principle number three, you just wanna slowly scale. Right. It's that fire bullets watch behavior, figure it out. Yeah. And then invest. It's okay to take your time.

You don't have to be, don't go

Jessi: all

James: in to the pain right away all the time. Exactly. Yep. And then number four is just judge the process, not just the results. And that's the whole don't. Keep a new mind. There's luck in, in what you're doing and that's okay. Yeah. But you, and so somehow, as best as you can, try to extract out the Ooh, yeah.

I got lucky there. Mm-hmm. Um, despite what I did, I still made money or whatever.

Jessi: Hmm.

James: Right. Um, so there's some, some questions that you can ask. As you're going through it. The first one is, does this deal keep me clearly above the death line? Um, where is my margin for error? I think that's a huge one. Mm-hmm.

Thinking about assumptions, we do, when we do flips, I actually do a Monte Carlo simulation, so I explicitly try to model that out. Right. What does this downside look like? And um, you know, and like for example, when we look at, um, comps, we list them all in there. Some will higher, some are lower. Mm-hmm. So we use that to create our bounds.

Oh, we go, okay. What does the low look like? What does the high look like? Where do they all fall? Right. And so we can, so I like, I've built into the model a way to run all of those. And then at the same time, that's kind

Jessi: of cool.

James: We look at our repair costs and uh, the software that we use gives us a range.

I go, okay, here's the lower end, here's the higher end. I actually, we do, um. When we put in the final number, I don't just do the middle number.

Jessi: Right.

James: I actually do the three quarter average

Jessi: Yeah.

James: Of it, because like I, I'm gonna buy's higher, it's more

Jessi: conservative.

James: Yeah. But then in this Monte Carlo simulation, I say like, okay, if it's really high mm-hmm what's that number?

And maybe we'll get lucky if it's a low, what's that number? Mm-hmm. And then, um, and then we also do it for the whole period. 'cause that's the other big one. Mm-hmm. Where we've got our assumptions in there, and then it, and then I essentially just go, and if it's longer than I thought, what would that be?

And, and it. The cool part about the Monte Carlo is that it, then we run it a thousand times and it iterates within those bounds for each of them, all kind of randomly. Yeah. That gives us the distribution of saying, okay, here's where the likely the most likely outcome's gonna be. Mm-hmm. And then given our explicit assumptions, here's where we fall on that curve.

Mm-hmm. We more or less conservative relative to the most likely outcome.

Jessi: Interesting.

James: So it's just a really, it's a mathematical way, right. For me to, a

Jessi: very analytical

James: way to do I know right. Approach that I wanted to do it because I remember I learned about the Monte Carlo simulation. I was like, this is so cool.

How can, can I

Jessi: use this?

James: I, yeah. I, I first used it at HP when it was actually during the whole 2009 stuff. We had all sorts of questions about like, what's gonna happen with the business? And I was like,

Jessi: what's the range? I don't

James: know. And so we were doing it for hardware shipments and

Jessi: yeah.

James: All sorts of stuff trying to build in.

These simulations, like looking at

Jessi: a ton of scenarios all at once.

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Jessi: Possible scenarios.

James: Yeah. I was trying to figure it all out. So, uh, so yeah, so I build it in 'cause I'm intro, I wanna know Yeah. What those are. And, and there are times where it's like I'll go, Ooh, we are being a little mm-hmm.

Aggressive. So let me dial back some of those numbers, which again, usually just translates into a lower offer.

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: Or what we'll try to do is we'll try to structure it where we'll say, okay, well let's do some more seller financing, or we'll try the sub two, and that way we can get you a higher price 'cause of the terms and the payments and blah, blah, blah.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And, um, so anyways,

Jessi: yeah,

James: that's the, the games that we play. Um, where am I making assumptions? No, what am I assuming will never happen?

Jessi: Hmm.

James: It's just a good question to ask, right? What are those Black Swan events? Hmm. And am I mistaking recent success for skills? And um, then just final one, you know, if this deal underperforms, do I lose money?

Jessi: Mm-hmm.

James: Or do I lose options? Mm-hmm. Which is another interesting way of thinking about it. So again, like Jim Collins, he didn't just study the companies that had great quarters. Mm-hmm. They had great decades.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And so I think a lot of those lessons, especially for real estate, since they, it is a longer term thing, I think they translate really well and are worth remembering.

So that's what I mean by anti investing.

Jessi: All right. I've, I'll, I'll buy it.

James: Cool, cool. Uh, it's just being a wise investor. I don't know. It's catchy. Yeah. What can I say? So, so there you go. Anti investing. Glad you buy it.

Jessi: What's Anti Invests?

James: So if you wanna anti invests with us, um, you can check us out at furlo.com and there you can see previous deals that we've done.

You can learn more about our investing thesis, what we're all about. Um, and heck, if you already own a property and you're looking for a property manager, give us a call for that too. Um, but yeah, that's where you can learn more about us. With that, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

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