Hi, I’m Bryan. Nice to meet you. I suppose to start things off I’ll give you the story of how things started for me. This is less of a blog post and more of a brief history of how I arrived where I am today. Mostly, it’s the story of how I learned to be an entrepreneur. Grab a coffee, beer, or snack. I’ll start whenever you’re ready.

My family was fairly poor growing up, though now I wonder if they were just that bad at personal finance. We moved around quite a bit and eventually my step-father joined the Air Force where we still moved around all the time. I tried to count the places I could remember living and I was at around 20 before I was an adult. There were probably more that I couldn’t recall. We didn’t have very much money. My parents had an idea: they would make money selling homemade hard-candy suckers. So every other day after school and on most Saturdays, we would drive to Spokane, Washington. My older brother and I, probably around 7 and 8 years old at the time, would take a 3-tiered wooden sucker holder (I remember how heavy this thing was) and go door to door, he on one side of the street and myself on the other. Our parents would sit in the car somewhere while we walked a route they told us to. We would sell until it was dark and then head home.

When I was around 10, we moved to Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. The base would not allow us to sell suckers (YES!) because we didn’t produce them in a commercial kitchen, so we still sold them, just on the down-low. I began to take a cut of the profits for myself since we had less strict inventory control. Win! I had also picked up 2 paper routes. One was a daily paper and the other was weekly. During the summers, my best friend Jay and I would earn extra money mowing lawns. We would each take a lawn mower, set it on a relatively tall setting, and wander the neighborhoods. Every tall lawn we saw we would go to the door and offer to mow it in 10 minutes or less for $10 dollars, no weed eating. Weed eating takes too long, and we didn’t want to carry one. We would usually make $50 each whenever we did this.

I picked up a regular W-2 job when I was 15. My high school had a Japanese teacher named Brad Smith. He was not a “real” teacher because he wasn’t certified as a teacher, but the school wanted Japanese in their curriculum so he was granted a special waiver. His real job outside of school was as a mutual fund adjuster. Brad would take 1 day per semester in his classes and teach about the fundamentals of personal finance: savings, investing, retirement planning, the rule of 72, etc. It wasn’t in-depth because it was only an hour long, but I heard it 8 times over the 3 years I was in his classes as a normal student and as a student aid and had some side conversations with him. It stuck with me even though I didn’t act until I was 20 and in the Army. I bought into a mutual fund that he recommended and put $25/month into it which was more than I could afford at the time. No joke.

Just before I was set to exit the Army, I was stop-lossed. This meant that I could not leave the Army. Instead, I deployed to Iraq. While there, I saved every penny I made in order to buy a house when I left the military. I exited the service, moved to Colorado, and bought my first home. I still own the home as a cash-flowing rental and have since added more properties and investment types and made significant strides in my career and several side hustles. I believe that real estate is the smartest and best way to build true wealth. And now we’re at today. Good to meet you and my future posts will be more like a blog and less like a story!