How To Create Protect and Multiply Cash Flow with Clay Hepler

My guest today is Clay Hepler. Clay is the Chief Wealth Strategist and CEO of the Creative Capitalist, a multifamily investor, serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and cash flow specialist. He empowers entrepreneurs, executives, and real estate investors to create, protect and multiply their cash flow and maintain it no matter what happens in the market to get to financial freedom and abundance faster.

We begin the episode with Clay sharing his background story and how he ended up in the real estate. He shares that his goal in college was to be an ambassador, but he dropped out of college after working at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, which turned out to be a nightmare. Clay was very active, and being in an office was not what he dreamed of. It was so bureaucratic and the work was all mundane administrative work. His journey shifted from analytical and clerical work to marketing and sales in their family business. However, along the way, Clay met a successful real estate investor and developer in Washington, DC who started mentoring him in real estate. He taught him about insurance, taxes, and how to get equity in real estate. When he finally got into real estate, he leveraged his sales skill sets, and now he owns a wealth consulting company that works with entrepreneurs and real estate investors.

We then talk about how Clay managed to scale their family business from two to forty-two countries and why he shifted to real estate. He shares that he was living with his parents and working full time in the business, but he wanted to go out and do his own thing. Clay wanted to choose a path for himself, and he was on a mission to start something that not only made him successful but also brought the fulfillment he wanted. This led to the creation of Creative Capitalist, a firm that designs life insurance policies to help investors and business owners keep more of their cash flow by eliminating cash flow leaks, providing them with liquidity to grow, scale their business, and capitalize on opportunities for enormous growth. According to Clay, life insurance policies have enormous advantages.

Next, we talk about Clay’s plan for his business. Clay shares that the end game is to create a fractional family office. A family office is a structure that enables very wealthy people to access accounts of attorney advisers who work for them to ensure every dollar that enters their personal economy is used in the most efficient and effective way. Clay and his team are rolling out a fractional family office based on a subscription model where clients get access to hand-picked attorney advisers' accounts. The goal is to pull some of the greatest minds of attorney advisers together to help their clients get to financial freedom in abundance by preserving and increasing their wealth over their whole lives.

We then talk about the best strategies for scaling your real estate business. Clay shares that the most important thing in scaling your business is having the right people in the game. You can have all the tactics, strategies, and systems with KPIs, but without a team that aligns with your goals, you’re not likely to be in the game for long. According to Clay, most successful investors thrive because of their teams' effort.

Lastly, we talk about the things that Clay has found to be helpful in hiring the right people. Clay shares that he has not hired a lot because he looks for strategic partners rather than actual hires when scaling his business. There are many ways of partnering with other businesses, but Clay prefers giving a percentage of the profit rather than actually paying someone and training them. This has helped them to get people who have more aligned interests. In a flipping business, the same principle applies. You can partner with someone who can be an aggregator of distressed assets, such as an attorney or a CPA. For Clay, he has always scaled his businesses using exterior partnerships, and it has been very rewarding,

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Clay Hepler and get valuable information on how to optimize your cash flow, build more equity, and scale your business!

Notable Quotes:

“In real estate, you must have equity to become wealthy.”