investment

The Pursuit Of Financial Certainty And Happiness with Will Street – Part 1

TWSFF 06 | Financial Certainty

 

Everyone wants financial freedom, but not everyone is willing take responsibility to create one for themselves. Wealth strategist Will Street enlightens everyone on the importance of taking ownership of your finances. We can never be certain of the risk, but not taking the risk will not get you anywhere near financial certainty. Will shares stories of risks taken by investors and what we can learn from it. Failure is inevitable, but what makes a difference is rising up, learning from these failures, and having the will to continue the pursuit of financial certainty and happiness.

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The Pursuit Of Financial Certainty And Happiness with Will Street – Part 1

Financial Friday

I’m here with my good pal, Will Street. How are you doing, Will?

I’m good. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a podcast.

It’s going to be a fun one because we’re going to talk about the context of some of the guests we’ve had on so far for Financial Friday. We’re going to review an article probably as a part two that is going to help us prove or hits home some of these points. I look at finance and I look at it from probably a different perspective than most and I think you’re starting to grasp that. You had the legal background and practiced in the financial sector as an attorney, which gave you a perspective and then being here for a few years now. You’ve worked with a lot of individuals personally, but you’ve also heard things about the situations of people when it comes to finances. It’s helped you fine-tune perspective when it comes to what financial success is and what it isn’t. Talk to that briefly. What have you seen as the reasoning behind what creates success for people financially? What gets them into trouble, gets them to make bad investment decisions or financial decisions?

TWSFF 06 | Financial Certainty

Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win

I finished reading the book, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. I’ve read/listened to it. I had it and then I listened to the Audible version driving into work. The whole premise behind Extreme Ownership is you own everything. If there’s something within your sphere of influence, as a leader, he’s talking about it from the Navy SEALs perspective. You don’t cast blame on other people, you own it.

It’s your responsibility, your stewardship.

If something isn’t going right, don’t point fingers at somebody else. Look at what you could have done better to improve the outcome. To go back to your question, many people nowadays are passive when it comes to what they do financially. They assume that somebody else, whether it’s the government or Wall Street or businesses or whoever has their best interest at heart.

They’re competent to give them the advice that they should trust.

Things didn’t go well. Immediately, they look outward to try and cast blame on somebody else. My philosophy that has evolved over time is this idea that if I want to get somewhere financially or if a client wants to get somewhere financially, it’s got to start with us. It’s got to start with what we know, with what we understand, with what our objectives are and putting together a game plan to get there. It’s no one’s responsibility more than it is our own. That’s something that I didn’t understand the notion of Extreme Ownership in the beginning, but as people get into trouble it has to do with not taking an active role in what they do financially. Making assumptions that things will fall into place a certain way, that somebody else is looking out for their best interest and them not doing nearly what they need to do to take ownership of their own.

You’ve got to realize that all human beings, number one, we’re fallible. We all have opinion and we all have a perspective. Opinion and perspective can go hand-in-hand. Individuals tend to delegate responsibility to others, especially when it comes to things that they don’t understand. It’s easy. That’s the easy button. If they’re competent, they have experience and you don’t have to go through the trouble of learning everything, it makes common sense. That’s where most people get in trouble. What do you do? If you don’t have all the time in the world to study every single financial decision that you make, what’s the route that you take?

On this show, we’ve had individuals that represent a commodity type of investment. We’ve had Gene Guarino, who I’ve known for a long time. He has a new fund and investment in a cool niche part of the real estate industry. We’ve also had note investing guys in here. If you go to the Cash Flow Wealth Summit, the first presentation of Financial Fridays was my presentation at the Cash Flow Wealth Summit, which hits on a lot of this. We have the Hierarchy of Wealth, which helps to categorize where investments are. A lot of the categorization has to do with what you understand or the degree of certainty and control you have over whatever the financial decision is, whatever the asset is. In the Cash Flow Wealth Summit, we’ve had every type of real estate investing you can think of. We’ve had FlipNerd on and Mike Hambright on there. We’ve had Mobile Home. Andrew Lanoie was on as well for Financial Fridays.

These are all sorts of investment ideas, their perspectives, the little niches that people have and they’re presenting opportunities. You and I both know that there are a lot of opportunities out there that don’t end up the way that they were intended. That’s where I’ve tried to hit on this notion of instead of asking about the details or features and benefits of the actual underlying investment, it’s also to start to look into the business itself. The operations, the people involved because that’s where it starts to fall apart. There are some other things that you can do. That’s how I look at finances. I never try to discount anything.

When somebody claims or somebody says their perspective, I don’t say, “You’re right and I trust you,” I say, “That’s an interesting perspective and that’s valuable to me regardless of what the perspective is.” I start to ask some questions about it and verify if it’s a valid piece of advice if it’s a valid claim or not. That’s where we’ve used the three sides of the coin where you have heads, tails and the edge. Heads are one opinion, tails are the other opinion and then the edge is where you sit to make the most informed decision. As you’ve looked at investment opportunities and made financial decisions for yourself, what are some of the things that you do consistently that helps you make an informed decision?

You don't cast blame on other people, you own it. Click To Tweet

The image that I have in mind is the Cash Flow Wealth Summit is this financial buffet of all different options and different strategies, tools, experts, companies and things like that. What a lot of people tend to do when it comes to their finances is they’ve got their tray and they take a little scoop of this, they take a little scoop of that. Then they get back to their table and then start to dig into it, but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no forethought given to what they’re going to do and how these various elements might interact with each other. It goes back to your point about everyone has a perspective. Everyone has some background, some knowledge and some familiarity with something. Everybody has somewhere to start. What I try to do is recognize that, “I don’t know everything, but I do know something. I know what my risk tolerance is. I know where my interests are.

I know generally where my goals and objectives are. I can start to put together a strategy that will start to point me in that direction as opposed to taking a little bit of this, taking a little bit of that, throwing it against the wall and hoping that something sticks.” Instead of taking that buffet approach, doing some analysis of, “What do I know? What am I drawn to? What am I interested in? Do I have any prior knowledge or experience or expertise with certain assets or asset classes or companies and starting to build from there?” I love the hierarchy because it does give us our blueprint for how to build our financial game plan. If we don’t have tier one established, if we don’t have the foundation securely in place, we’ve got no business jumping to the tip-top of the hierarchy. You’ve got to start it and you’ve got to continue it in the proper sequence.

Here’s how I look at it. It’s made me think about the idea and principle of certainty. It’s like human beings have this drive toward both certainty and uncertainty. Uncertainty is variety. It’s doing new things. It’s experiencing going on a roller coaster. We have this internal drive to do that. Sometimes, choosing from the buffet of financial options, it appeals sometimes to that internal drive. That’s why we’ve developed the Hierarchy of Wealth is because the foundation is certainty. That’s where we have certain characteristics and criteria. We teach the wealth maximization account and we use that for the characteristics that it has. Above that is when the degree of uncertainty sets in. There are three tiers above that. There’s tier two, tier three and tier four. In each level up, the degree of uncertainty increases. The idea is once your foundation is set, now it can properly balance the pursuit of this uncertainty, there’s a variety of different things that you may do. Let’s talk about tier two and tier three and some of the characteristics there. I’m going to use some examples as far as some bad decisions that I’ve made and also some bad decisions that I know clients have made, actual experiences. How do you look at tier two?

If I’m walking through the hierarchy with clients, which I do. The way that I explain it is where each layer, each tier that we’re building on top of the previous, there’s a little bit more risk or a little bit less control or a little bit less certainty with the previous. We don’t have a license to take on a bunch of uncertainty and give up a bunch of control if we don’t have the most secure, the most control and the least amount of risk established. For me, that’s that bottom layer. As we’re stepping into tier two and maybe it’s a little bit less certain, a little bit riskier and a little bit less control, I’m going to look at assets like real estate. Real estate’s a broad category in and of itself. For me, what I define as a good solid tier two asset would be the good buy and hold, three-bed, two-bath rental property. Going back to my own experience and my own expertise, my wife would tell you I have basically zero construction knowledge, expertise and ability. I’ll mess up an Ikea piece of furniture. That’s how bad I am.

In other words, I’ve got no business in a flip because I have no idea what needs to be done. I don’t know if it’s being done correctly. No clue, no concept. That is outside of my area of expertise, I understand buying a property. I understand what metrics to look at when it comes to rent relative to purchase price and some of those things. A good solid tangible asset like a piece of real estate or rental property is a fantastic tier two asset for me, or for somebody else, it might be starting a business. It’s something that you have control over. It’s something that you can impact. You’re not surrendering control to somebody else. You’re not leaving it up to chance. When you wake up in the morning, you’re not looking at the ticker and finding that, “The market is in the toilet now,” and you had no control. That’s not a tier two asset. We’re looking at something that might be a little bit less control, a little bit less certain and a little bit more risk than that bottom layer. We want to be careful about how much additional risk we’re taking on or how much uncertainty we’re moving into. At least that’s my philosophy.

TWSFF 06 | Financial Certainty

Financial Certainty: A good solid tangible asset like a piece of real estate or rental property is a fantastic tier two asset. It’s something that you have control over.

 

I’m going to deviate. This comes to some stuff I’ve been thinking about. I don’t want to get into failures and some bad decisions that I’ve made and clients have made. I look at some of the events that occurred in the last couple of years. You had Robin Williams commit suicide. You had Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. There are others as well. The thoughts that I’ve had is here you have individuals, you have human beings who achieved what some people are after. People are after what they consider financial independence, financial freedom and to be at a certain level. To be successful here, to be successful there, to have a lot of money here and a lot of money there. I would argue that that’s financial freedom that might not be freedom. Tier two for me is a lot of investment in yourself. I look at where people are at and a lot of what they want to become independent from or free from. It’s something that they don’t like to do, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do.

I’ve joined an inner circle of Tony Robbins, which is called Platinum Partnership. I’ve been listening to a lot of his material. There’s something that hit me and he said, “For a fulfilling life, you have to spend between 50% and 60% doing meaningful things.” It’s the discovery that I don’t think most people ever venture to do. Meaningful things are something that drives you, something you’re inspired by, something that you know makes a difference and aligns with who you are, your talents, your abilities, your strengths. The discovery of that is part of tier two because one of the things is potentially starting a business. Retirement is an idea of escaping something. You stopped doing what you don’t like doing, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do because a part of you dies when you’re not contributing. I look at the meaningful things that people do and what drives them and why they thrive. It’s not because they make a lot of money but because there’s another interest in it besides that.

Tier two is where you can take assessments. You can take StrengthsFinder 2.0. You can take Kolbe, DISC and Myers-Briggs. There are a number of them out there. The idea is to understand more about you. It’s also to dig deep and start to pay attention and put some glasses on where you can see the world and the things that you enjoy doing, the things that make a difference. It’s starting to pursue a business that revolves around that. If you look at tier two, some of the criteria are things that you have more control over, but still have an element of uncertainty. Real estate has that, but at the same time, there’s still a degree of control that you have especially with how you determine markets. How you determine rents and values. How you determine down payments. How you determine mortgage payments versus rents. It’s one of those things where it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to have a good piece of real estate. It’s somewhat passive.

You look at other investments to make. There’s an article that I wrote a few years ago and I mentioned the idea in the book, which is how to get a 10% raise for life. Most people get a 3% raise. If you look at a 30-year career, someone that makes $100,000 will earn shy of $5 million total earnings with a 3% increase yearly. If you make a 10% increase yearly, the earnings are almost $17 million. It’s a huge difference, a little over $11 million. What’s the difference between someone that gets a 3% raise and someone that gets a 10% raise? 3% raise is because of the cost of living. It’s standard. If you look at 10%, it’s because somebody has figured out a way to create more value in either that capacity or another capacity. They get a certification. They learn management. They learn leadership. They learn how to do marketing. They learn things that create more value for an employer or for customers. That’s the idea. That opportunity is available to everyone. It’s where you have the most control when it comes to taking risks or delving into the realm of uncertainty.

It’s one of those things where all of us can think about times where we’ve done something meaningful. Maybe it’s giving to a charitable organization or serving in some way. The feeling of invigoration that comes from that, it makes you fire on all cylinders. If you can start to make that a part of what you do as a matter of practice, how much more driven are you going to be to get out of bed in the morning to work harder, to be better, to produce more. Think about somebody who’s stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy and how deflating that is and demotivating and difficult life can be and unhappy. Flip that completely 180 degrees the opposite and you start to invest in yourself and to fuel what drives you. That’s huge.

Let’s talk about some failures. We’re hitting on things that we’ve hit on before. It’s going into the context of what’s the purpose of being financially successful? What’s the end result to escape or to support or help to buffer doing the most meaningful things according to what makes the biggest difference in your life and in other people’s lives? The failure side of things, I look at all the decisions you make. You want to have trustworthy people in your life, but at the same time you have to look back and say, “Everyone has fallibility.” They make mistakes. They make bad calls. Rarely is an investment opportunity going to tell you not to invest with them. You have to look at that and that essentially gives you the area in which you can ask questions. You can dig a little bit deeper. You can verify. You can check and use your financial education to make a decision. Oftentimes, that comes as the result of not doing it. You can say, “That guy sounds like a credible guy. I’ll write him a check.” These are mistakes that I made a number of years ago. This was probably 2004, 2005.

I remember I was invited to this person’s house. In Utah, there are two things that happen at people’s houses. The first thing is it’s like MLM or network marketing company. They try to have you sell the vitamins or the juices or whatever, or it’s some investment or business. I’ve been to both. I didn’t grow up here, but I learned whenever you get that call, “I have this business I did. You’re a business guy. I think you should come and attend.” It’s one of those two things. This was an investment one. The investment opportunity was a fish farm and they had this proprietary way to breed fish. It sounded cool and the name of the company that did it was Winsome. That should have been a sign. It was a $20,000 investment and I never saw anything from it. It was a group of people that was in Sandy. It was about 30 minutes away. It’s an investment that went bad. The actual fish farm existed, it’s just that they had nobody to sell the fish to.

Individuals tend to delegate responsibility to others, especially when it comes to things that they don't understand. Click To Tweet

What was cool was this guy went to prison. This was a few years after this occurred. It was right during the time where I had tons of different failure business-wise. I was called into an FBI office. There’s a building here in Salt Lake and in the building, there are three floors of FBI. I went in there and there were no signs or whatever. I go into a huge boardroom and there are people everywhere, plus there were people on conference calls. There’s this horseshoe thing and I come in. They asked me questions like, “How did you hear about this guy? What happened? How much did you invest? What type of communication did you receive from him?” It was an interesting experience. I learned more about what this guy did. It wasn’t just people in Utah. There were a bunch of other states.

It’s one of those things where every single person that gave this guy money and it was millions of dollars. It was done by trusting that he knew what he was doing. Nobody asked questions about, “Who are your customers? Do you have contracts? Can I see those contracts? Let me see the business plan. Who else is on your team? Who’s doing the marketing? Who’s doing the operations? You’re in Texas so who’s running the thing in Puerto Rico?” It’s one of those things where nobody was asking those questions. All the questions were, “What’s the rate of return? When am I going to get my money? Do I get it monthly? Do I get it quarterly? How much is it? Could I get more?” All had to do with the financial details, not the principles, the values and the operations. That was one of the more crazy investments that I heard of.

I’ll give one that will make everybody laugh. This was in 2018. We started getting lots of people who were interested in cryptocurrency. You’re talking to them and explaining the Hierarchy of Wealth and how to position assets. People started to tell us that they were refinancing their homes and cashing out everything and putting their money in Bitcoin. This was when Bitcoin was probably $18,000, $19,000. They were convinced that Bitcoin was going to $100,000 and that was going to be the key to their retirement. This is an example that sounds ridiculous, but it was happening a lot. It was a number of instances. There’s another one too, which is the Iraqi Dinar. This was probably a few years ago when we started to get these types of calls where people were like, “I’m coming into this large sum of money, which is to the tune of potentially $500 million. I need a place to put that.” I’m not going to get into the details of that, there’s plenty of information online. Individuals, the uncertainty that they’re in pursuit of is natural. It’s not like people wake up one morning and like, “I’m going to go pursue uncertainty.” It’s one of those natural drives that compel us to want variety. We realize that, but at the same time once you realize it you have to position things so that you don’t let that get in the way for making good decisions.

TWSFF 06 | Financial Certainty

Financial Certainty: You want to have trustworthy people in your life, but at the same time you have to look back and say, “Everyone has fallibility.”

 

I would say there are a number of people I talked to that have lost money, lost investments and they value what we do a lot more than those that haven’t lost money, but at the same time, I look at that as a powerful tuition. It’s an investment and it’s an investment in your future. I got off the phone with a guy. He was a dentist. He was successful and made bad decisions. It costs him $500,000. He was like, “I want to make up for lost time.” I was like, “You didn’t lose time.” You gained time if you think about it because you learned some valuable lessons that are going to be essential as you expand your practice and as you raise your family and as you determine what your future looks like. You’re going to have so many financial decisions throughout your life, whether it’s purchase decisions, whether it’s investment decisions or whether it’s what you do with your career.

We advocate that having a foundation of certainty, which consists of financial education as well as certain assets and structure that allows you to buffer the uncertain decisions that you make. That’s where you start. It’s also to understand the values and the principles that underlie all of these decisions. Sometimes that’s the discovery of your strengths, your purpose, your mission, your calling and the pursuit of that meaningful work. We are going to be reviewing an article of a woman who studied 600 millionaires and she discovered where you choose to live has two effects on your ability to build wealth. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to take the contrarian. Her opinion’s heads, this is tails. Stick with us until the next episode for the second segment of Financial Friday with Will Street. Thanks. We’ll see you in the next episode.

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About Will Street

TWSFF 06 | Financial Certainty

Will earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brigham Young University in 2005. After graduating from BYU, Will attended the University of Iowa College of Law and received his Juris Doctor in May of 2008. Will began practicing law with the law firm of VanCott, Bagley, Cornwall & McCarthy the oldest and one of the most well-respected law firms in the State of Utah. Will’s practice focused primarily on consumer finance-related litigation, consumer finance transactions, sale and purchase agreements, NDA’s, RFP’s, teaming agreements, security agreements, creditor’s rights in bankruptcy, and estate planning. Working directly with clients to analyze a problem, develop a solution, and working to ensure a successful resolution are what Will enjoyed most about being an attorney. Will comes to Paradigm after nearly six years in the private practice of law.

After his exposure to the Infinite Banking concept and seeing that his legal training would be directly relevant to his role at Paradigm, Will made the decision to leave his practice. Paradigm allows Will to continue to do what he enjoys most – develop client relationships, dissect problems, create solutions and work collaboratively with the client towards a successful resolution. Originally from the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington, Will currently resides in Salt Lake City with his wife, Sunny, and their three children.

 

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Breaking The Common Stereotypes About The Oil And Gas Industry with Beau Flowers

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

 

Having the biggest driving population right now, the common stereotype about oil and gas is that they are simply for fuel. However, they are more than just that. For Financial Friday, Chief Executive Officer of LoneStar Asset Management, LLC, Beau Flowers talks from a 30,000-foot view about the oil and gas industry – where it is at right now, and where it is going. He touched on the impact of the new millennial generation, the green movement, and the downsides of the industry. Sharing lessons for success, Beau also gets into what makes or breaks an opportunity, how to set up operational structures, and what are some of the poor choices in the industry that have led to bad outcomes.

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Breaking The Common Stereotypes About The Oil And Gas Industry with Beau Flowers

Financial Friday

I have an interesting topic. It’s oil and gas investment and I have as my guest, Beau Flowers, who’s the President of Lone Star Asset Management. He participated in the Cash Flow Wealth Summit and also was one of the sponsors. My relationship with Beau is still new so I’m excited to learn more about his business and also about the oil and gas industry that I have some experience in. I can’t wait to get into it. Beau, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

We talked a little bit before we started this interview and I look at the oil and gas industry. There are so many different facets of it. With the social opinion of the biggest driving population right now, which is the Millennial generation who are making their ways in the workplace and they’re living differently. You look at oil and gas, the stereotype is that it’s for burning fossil fuels and it’s for cars and for transportation and there’s a big movement for green. It’s one of those things where the stereotype and the misconception people often have about the oil and gas industry is it’s just for fuel. Why don’t you talk maybe from a 30,000-foot view about the oil and gas industry, where it’s at right now and where you think it’s going and then we’ll go from there.

The new Millennial generation starts establishing itself as the prominent figures in the economy and in society. The oil and gas business is starting to get somewhat of a negative connotation towards it with the old pushing for the green movement. Wanting to eliminate fossil fuels is becoming more of a thing that you hear about. At the end of the day, where we are right now and where our civilization is right now is we’re nowhere near being in a position to where we can eliminate or even come close to eliminating the use of fossil fuels. It’s still the most prevalent and probably one of the most important industries in the economy now. This is where we are right now.

Oil and gas business is so big and so broad and there are so many different ways to get into it. What we try to do is find our little niche, find our little corner in the industry and do specific things that are profitable to us and profitable to our investing partners. Essentially, our main concentration is wealth preservation. You can go out into a wide variety of aspects of the business where the risk factors can be really low and really high. It depends on what your tolerance is. We try to carve out our little niche in to this already prevalent and essential aspect of our economy. We try to be as profitable as we can at that and not concern ourselves with the rhetoric or any connotations that might be evolving with this Millennial-driven society.

Fossil fuel needs to make advances; we need to have different kinds of renewable energy sources. Click To Tweet

You look at the perspective that we have as Americans and we often place our perspective of what life is, how things work and assume that everybody else in the world has that perspective. My wife grew up in Mexico and I had no understanding of what poverty was right until I visited and experienced the neighborhood she grew up in and how people live there. People are happy there, but yet it’s a totally different perspective. If you go to third world countries, it’s the same thing. If you look at the emerging markets and the massive economies that are on the rise, whether it’s India or China or Africa, these are economies that don’t have this massive dependence on fossil fuels.

However, because they are emerging and because technology is integrating into their emergence, they’re obviously going to have demand. You look at the demand now for oil in China, the demand in other parts of Asia, in India, as well as in Africa, it’s massive. Maybe the US and in our production, we’re headed toward more of a green and setting trends there. The transition from being exclusively dependent on fossil fuels to slowly decreasing that dependence, it’s not a one-year, five-year or ten-year. It’s probably a couple of decade transition. What do you think about that?

That’s a very good point. There are two things that I would address about what you said. The first was our dependence and our demand for fossil fuels and the things that fossil fuels provide us is not decreasing. If you look at the actual facts and statistics of the supply, the demand and the usage of fossil fuels to provide the things that we need, even above and beyond in transportation, it’s still a very needed commodity. One thing that I would address, we mentioned the push for Millennials and now being such a big member and prevalent member of society, is they’re also a very vocal generation class with social media.

They have a different medium to vocalize their opinions. It’s not like it was in the past where it was close to your neighborhood or the bar where you hung out with your friends and the coffee shop. Now, it’s like they take that message and because they grew up on technology, the message and the opinion just magnifies.

Just because their opinion or their word or message is broadcast in such a wider spectrum now than it ever has been in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean that they’re right all the time. I’m not saying that we don’t need as a society to start transitioning into other alternatives. Fossil fuel needs to make advances and we need to have different kinds of renewable energy sources. I’m certainly not saying that. I’m just saying right now, we are where we are. From an economic financial standpoint, our goal is to take advantage of where we are and where we’re going to be for the foreseeable future. That’s what our goal is in our firm. The second thing I would address, you were mentioning of geographic locations and cultural backgrounds influencing what your views are and then perceptions are of different things. That brings me to why am I in the oil business.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: The opportunities with any industry are what exist in the past and what exist in the future.

 

I’m from Texas. When you grow up in Texas, from an outsider looking in and the guys that aren’t familiar with our industry and aren’t familiar with our culture, when they think of oil business, they get this negative connotation because they think of J.R. Ewing sitting at the top of a big building in Dallas, smoking a cigar with a big cowboy hat and making money hand over fist. That’s the general connotation that folks outside of our industry look at it as. When you grow up in it, when you’re in Texas, you look at it not as something like that. You look at it as your lifeline, as our livelihood. It influences every aspect of our day-to-day lives at some point or another.

We’re talking about people that are running the companies, producing the oil all the way down to 80% of the working families that I grew up with in my small town were employed and fed their families from this industry. Where we’re from, it’s definitely quite the opposite of a negative outlook. It’s our lifeline. You can even see our business is very cyclical and it has its ebbs and flows for sure. You see how detrimental those ebbs can be and those low points in the business can be. That’s why we hang onto it and try to push it and still be a part of this industry because it’s what got us here from every definition of the word.

The opportunities with any industry, it’s what exists in the past and that’s what exists in the future. I’m looking at just the oil and gas industry, it’s a major part of our country. The opinion and the stereotype of guys with the big hat, sitting up and smoking cigars, I’m sure that that’s changing. I want to go there really quick because one of the things I’ve perceived in the financial industry over the last ten to twenty years is there is a significant shift. The 2008, 2009 financial crisis forced it in a sense where individuals were taking matters into their own hands. Individuals were not using stockbrokers, were not using money managers but also they pivoted to these Robo platforms or technology. There’s such a quick evolution and a lot of financial advisors or the financial industry has a difficult time keeping up.

By the time they try to steer their battleship in the direction of where things are going, it’s changed again. There are new trends and there are new demands. I look at the same thing with the oil and gas industry where it’s controlled by some big players. Because of how big they are, it’s sometimes difficult to pivot which provides opportunities for smaller firms to go in and find a niche and capitalize on that. Maybe talk just briefly about what you see as your industry and how the guard is changing and how things are evolving and the opportunities that are presenting themselves to smaller firms.

I’m glad you brought that up because what you mentioned and what you talked about is our driving motive why we started this company and why we do what we do. It is because of the different natures of the business between large scale operator like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Did you hear about Valero? Did you hear about every day? You pump your gas in? A lot of people think about the old business, that’s all they think about. They are the biggest players, but there’s a whole lot in our industry that goes on outside of that. Since about the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s since we went through what’s called the Shell play revolution where we have essentially discovered a brand-new way to efficiently produce this massive wealth that the big guys produce. That’s all they’re concerned about with now is going in and looking at $50 million developments, drilling 30, 40, 50 wells or whatever it is. All at once of these extremely expensive wells to drill to have these astonishing production rates.

It's easy to get stars in your eyes in this business. You see opportunities and all you think about is the upside. Click To Tweet

When that shift happened, it started happening in the mid-2000s. Whenever the big companies completely shifted their focus to those developments, there was a ton of what we call the conventional place that was left. That wasn’t what they were concerned with anymore. What we do in our company is we follow where these big companies started and spent their money researching and developing and then all their resources, figuring out where to drill and then how to drill in certain areas. They never finished essentially. When they shift their focus to a different business model of the Shell play, we go in and acquire their data.

We acquire all their records, everything that they had and we picked up where they left off, which for us works out well because we get a plethora of research and data that would be uneconomical for a company of mid-level or small level producer to be able to afford that level of research. We can acquire that from them for a much reasonable financial compensation. We can go in and pick up where they left off. They had every intention of doing and then the revolution came along, they shifted their focus and they forgot about this stepchild. It’s not quite as good as what they’re doing out there, but it’s good for producers like us. That’s our philosophy and what we try to do. We’re evaluating our prospects and it’s worked out well over the last six or seven years.

That’s where things shift with the discovery of new ways in which you can extract oil and then finding big places that have never been tapped before. That’s where all the big players can go, but there are limitations where they need to have a lot of money at work and require a lot in return to get a good return on investment. When it gets to be smaller, that’s when the numbers don’t make as much sense as they did previously. It allows you guys to go in and to clean up. I look at this and we’ve had some guests on over the last several years in regard to oil and gas. I know that a lot of your education and what you provide in your website and talk to people about what goes into a lot of the details of why this is a significant opportunity which I completely agree with. I want to get into what makes or breaks an opportunity, which isn’t necessarily the opportunity itself. On the Cash Flow Wealth Summit, the presentation that I gave talked about Robert Kiyosaki’s B-I Triangle and how a successful product is supported.

A product could be an investment, it could be a commodity or it could be a business. That’s where the least important thing is the actual product, service and investment. The most important thing is the underlying infrastructure that supports it. My exposure to oil and gas, I’ve seen some big success but I’ve seen also some failure because of mismanagement and poor management, poor understanding of details and poor communication. It wasn’t intentional, but I’ve also seen some intentional things too where it was a complete fraud. I look at you have an asset management company and you’re in this industry, I’m sure you’ve heard way more stories than I’ve heard. How do you use the lessons of others and use the failures and the successes to build your operational structure? How you’ve set up your business to be different and successfully execute on your business objective in this massive opportunity?

There are several different answers to that. One is in some cases learning the hard way. One thing about our business is that you get amazing tax benefits better than any other investment vehicle that I know of and any of my investors have known of, but these investments did not come without risks. Anytime, no matter what you do and in our business, it’s going to have a risk factor to it. Probably a little bit higher risk factor than any other investment vehicle most of our partners have invested in. What I found is the old saying, “Keep it simple, stupid,” is what we’ve learned works best for us. In this business, especially when you start having a footprint in the business over a few years as we do now. You can imagine the opportunities or deals that come across our desk of folks that think they’ve got the next biggest well in Texas or whatever. It’s hard and I’ve seen companies that I worked for in the past and even my company and being guilty of it myself to some degree.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: A product could be an investment, a commodity, or a business.

 

Sometimes it’s easy to get stars in your eyes in this business. People come and you can see opportunities and all you think about is the upside. We’re talking tremendous upside. We’ve had deals that pay back the entire investment within 30 days, which is unheard of in any other typical investment vehicle. Those deals are few and far between. We’ve built our team. I’ve got a very dynamic team of close-knit group of guys, a 50-year veteran in the field, Andy Whitehead, our operating partner that has an old school mentality of evaluating our deals. He and his dad has been doing this for 50 years using his own money for the most part. He evaluates them very conservatively. We’re not necessarily looking to knock one out of the park every time, but we’re trying to put us in the best opportunity to make some money that puts us in the lowest risk opportunity of losing our money.

That’s the real hard thing in our business to evaluate is to be able to walk away from those opportunities that are presented to you that have this tremendous upside that put stars in your eyes. It sometimes makes you forget about the heavy risk factor that comes along with it. We’ve got to be disciplined in our company checks and balances system to be able to pull the reins back, walk away from deals and stick to a more conservative approach that might not have the tremendous upside as the other deals. It also doesn’t carry near the risk factor and it gives our investing partners and ourselves because in every deal we do, we’ve got our own money into it. We’re shoulder to shoulder with our investing partners in everything that we do. We also have more motivation than anyone to preserve our capital. It gives us the biggest opportunity to help that grow and not lose it, which is something that can be done pretty easily in this business if you’re not careful.

It’s the worst thing to happen in any business. I always look at it because we’re in Salt Lake City and our office is right next to a huge conference center that takes up an entire city block. I sometimes equate it to a restaurant starting two days before one of the biggest conferences comes into town. It assumes that the rest of the year is going to be like that weekend where they have people out the door and you’re hiring and you’re ordering food. Before you know it, everyone’s gone and there are three patrons in the afternoon. It’s one of those things where you have to be very cautious. I’ve seen that and that’s one of those reasons to have good structure. A good structure allows you to make good decisions when things don’t go as planned. You have plan B is you have communication, figuring out what can we do at this point relative to whatever the challenge is.

Every opportunity and every business get these curve balls that you’re not prepared for. It could be legislative curve balls, it could be economical curve balls and in your case, oil prices. You don’t know what OPEC is going to do here and here. I have massive options market in the oil and gas industry. It’s one of those things where if you have a good structure when things go wrong, you make the right decision, not when things are going great. What have you seen maybe as a result of poor choices in the industry that have led to some pretty bad outcomes?

I’ll look at it from a different perspective because what we try to do is we try to make a good outcome for us based on some poor decisions of other companies. It is not predatory or it’s not something we go and prey on companies. With this cyclical environment, just like you’re talking about when nobody knows what oil prices are going to do. When they’re hot like they were in 2008 and then again in 2012 and 2013, all the typical governing rules of economics go out the window. It’s the Wild Wild West. That’s what I call it in the business. When oil prices are hot, nobody cares about what they’re spending. Nobody evaluates budgets. Nobody looks at anything except what can we do to get the most oil out of the ground right now. A lot of companies make a lot of money doing that. I can see where those mistakes are made, but a company did that in our area. They’re in Southeast Texas where we are very active.

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A company that was doing well right there in 2010, 2011 and 2012 were bringing in after expenses $34 million a month, really big money and got overextended. They got greedy, put a bunch of money into some stuff that they weren’t with. They borrowed a bunch of money against their production to expand their operation into something that wasn’t their bread and butter. Then when the prices fail, that was it. They were done. Their financial backer out of New York pulled their funding and they were done. I went in 2016 or starting in late 2015 and we finalized the deal in 2016. I went in and bought up. If you put it in perspective with all they spent probably $22 million, $23 million worth of their assets for pennies on the dollar. When I say pennies on the dollar, I mean that in the truest form. I went in and revamped them, repumped it up and made a lot of money off of what they couldn’t keep going because of their poor decisions whenever the prices were high.

The big part of the structure is knowing what you say yes to and what you say no to. It’s hard sometimes to say no to that greed factor because that’s one of those irrational drives that usually kills people. When the decision is made because of that and not a rational model that dictates what your business parameters are. I think we’re all guilty of it. I certainly am, saying yes to way too many things. You lose focus and you don’t have any focus anywhere. Things end up not working out in a few areas and it hurts. If you go into and understand, “This is what we say yes to. Here are our parameters. This is what we say no to,” it makes it easy so that when that volatility produces something that seems like, “This is a five-star star in my eyes, we’re going to make a killing.”

It’s one of those, “Should we do that?” That’s why having a good team, having a good debate, having a good perspective allows for the best outcome. That’s where I went down that road is because you’re hitting on certain things where that’s evident in so many industries. Real estate is one of them where people are buying stuff, pennies on the dollar. It was only the people that understood what was going on that had the pennies to pay. The people that are letting it go, they didn’t have pennies.

I haven’t learned only from other people’s mistakes, I’ve been guilty of it myself. I tell my business partners, the guys that we do business with every day that four or five years ago, what I thought was literally the worst thing that could have happened to me in business and even in life at one point with some deals that didn’t go as we planned. That in our early stages when we needed them the most, that turned out to be one of the most beneficial things that ever happened to me in my career. Because had I not took those bumps and bruises early and saw those curve balls that this industry can tell you first hand right off the bat and learn how to sustain from those curve balls, then I wouldn’t be where I am now and we wouldn’t have the business model that we’ve over the past 18 to 24 months has proven to be successful. Like the tortoise and the hare, go back to slow and steady wins the race. It’s exactly what’s worked for us.

In business and investment, I’ve learned whether it’s hiring employees or investing in a company or bringing a company on as a strategic partner, aligning with this firm or that firm. If they haven’t had their bumps and bruises, you have no idea how they’re going to behave when they get them because that’s an inevitability. When things are at their worst and people do the right thing, that’s one of the greatest signs you can have. That’s ultimately what happens is when things don’t work out and people are not used to failure, they’re not used to things not going as planned and what to do about it. You could get a person that has great morals, great ethics and do the right thing or you can get the other side where they don’t make the right decisions.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: People who are not used to failure are not used to things not going as planned.

 

That’s the thing, we all have our bumps, we all have our bruises and knowing that and having someone that you align with in whatever capacity and that hasn’t had them, I think that’s one of the worst decisions you can make. This has been awesome. I appreciate you being candid because this is what investment is about. There’s always an inherent risk you have and there’s not just one type of risk. Like we mentioned, you have political risks. You have an economic risk. I would say though the prevalent risk that you have is people risks. That’s where understanding the dynamic of a team and the dynamic of a company, how to communicate and how to have good operations, that’s where businesses make or break themselves. Thanks for sharing your opinion and perspective there.

Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it. As I said, the investments that we offer and folks that invest in our project are specific target audiences. It’s definitely not for everybody but at the end of the day, we’ve hopped on the risk and the downside of the business. At the end of the day, we wouldn’t be in it and keep doing it if there wasn’t more money to be made in this than any other business that I know of. We go out there and we sustain those risks and we sustain those bumps and bruises. When we do have success, which is way more often than not, the return that we see in this business, even in this modern oil prices are just astronomical compared to normal investment vehicles. There’s a reason that our folks keep investing with us time and time again. The reason we keep putting our money into the projects time and time again because there is a lot of money to be made out there. That’s why it’s one of the biggest backbones of our economy and society in my opinion.

Why don’t you give the listeners ways that they can learn more about you, learn more about your company, learn more about the industry and the specific opportunities you have available?

The best way to check us out is to visit our website at LoneStarAssetManagement.com. From there, you can get the history of us and the background of our company and links and resources to help you learn about the industry and the tax benefits of investing in oil and gas, which are phenomenal and things of that nature. If it’s something that everybody’s interested in discussing further, when you get on the website, right there at the bottom of the main page. You can schedule a free one-on-one consultation. Usually that consists of about ten to fifteen minutes conversation with me or somebody here in the office to explain to them what the investment upside is, what the risk is and what we’re currently offering. What our goals are for our folks in building a small oil and gas investment portfolio outside of their primary investment portfolio and just go from there. If you have any questions, all our contact information, phone number and everything is on there. We would be happy to talk with anybody interested and get any questions answered that we can.

It’s been great. Thank you again for your time. Thanks again, Beau. I’m sure you’ll have an awesome year. Best of luck to you and thanks for being on.

Thank you for having me. I look forward to talking to you soon.

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About Beau Flowers

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Beau Flowers is the Chief Executive Officer of Lonestar Asset Management, LLC. Mr. Flowers is a native of Southeast Texas and a graduate of Texas State University. Mr. Flowers has over fifteen years’ experience in the oil and gas industry, and for the last five years has served as Vice President for some of the top oil and gas firms in the United States.

In that capacity, Mr. Flowers has had the opportunity to work with private investors and investment firms from across the country to assemble and execute numerous successful oil and gas drilling programs.

During the course of his career, he has played a key role in the development and production of over thirty oil and gas joint ventures, similar to the projects currently proposed.

 

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