Tosin Oduwole was raised in an entrepreneurial family where he was exposed to the real estate business at a young age. After attending boarding schools in Europe and Africa that nurtured his entrepreneurial spirit throughout his teens, Tosin arrived back in the states ready to get to work. Today, he is CEO and founder of Building AQuisition Partners, a regulation D 506(c) fund that invests in turnkey and distressed assets in developing markets. In this episode, Tosin discusses how he raised capital for his first fund without a track record, the creative ways he finds deals, and how to build a strong credit profile.
Tosin says social media played a major role in his ability to raise capital for his first fund, but the key was how he and his partner used it. “We started up a free 800 number … and every Thursday, we’d have people just call in and ask us questions about the fund,” he explains. For a year and a half, they were able to speak directly with potential investors they were marketing to on social media and answer all their questions. By the time Tosin and his partner launched, their investor base was ready. They raised $7M in the first week and totaled more than $14M in capital commitments within their first three months.
Tosin likes to switch up his methods for finding deals every few years. Currently, he uses PropStream and Reonomy. Rather than relying on the common technique of targeting property owners behind on their taxes, he likes to employ more uncommon criteria. For example, in the past, Tosin has sought out property owners who had paid off their mortgages and lived in their homes for 20 to 30 years. Often, these are adults in their 60s who are looking to downsize, and they are more than happy to sell.
Tosin’s best real estate investing advice ever is to build a strong personal and business credit profile as soon as possible. “There are a lot of lenders that will fund a business credit profile that’s only been around for 18 months to two years,” Tosin says. “So just having that option to where you can potentially get funds from that lane — why not have that tool in your toolbox?”
Companies like Nav and Uline will report to your business credit profile, Tosin says. By buying things from these companies and paying them on time, you can establish a good-looking credit profile within about a year. He recommends talking to a business credit specialist for other options to help build your credit.
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TRANSCRIPT
Ash Patel: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I'm Ash Patel and I'm with today's guest, Tosin Oduwole. Tosin is joining us from Miami, Florida. He is the founder and CEO of Building Acquisition Partners, which invests in turnkey distressed assets in developing markets. Tosin is a GP on 98 units and an LP on 22 units. Tosin, thank you for joining us, and how are you today?
Tosin Oduwole: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me back. I appreciate it.
Ash Patel: Hey, it's our pleasure. Tosin is a returning guest. If you google "Joe Fairless Tosin Oduwole", his episode will show up. Tosin, before we get started, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now?
Tosin Oduwole: Sure. So I come from an entrepreneurial family. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My father was heavy into real estate when he was younger. My mom had just recently told me about two years ago that when he was 25 --I was probably about maybe two years old at this time-- but when he was 25, he had 210 units. So she used to self-manage them. And when I got a bit older, like around seven or eight years old, she used to always take me to these apartment buildings to cut grass, and pick up checks and things like that. At that age, I had no idea what it was. I didn't know she was self-managing the entire portfolio.
So I grew up around real estate as far as the grunt work. So when I got older, 14 years old, my dad had the bright idea to send me to boarding schools in Europe and Africa. So I have five brothers, but they sent me to Europe by myself when I was 14, and then I ended up going to another boarding school in Africa and Nigeria, where I stayed for about five and a half years. And during that time, we traveled to one other African country every year, and just look at their culture, how they handle business there. And that school that I was in really nurtured my entrepreneurial spirit. And so when I came back to the States when I was 19, turning 20, I just said, "I want to be a full-on businessman. And that's where my journey started when I was 20 years old.
Ash Patel: Alright, hold on. Are you the oldest, youngest, the worst, the best? Why did you go to boarding school?
Tosin Oduwole: I was the second born out of three children at that time; we ended up being six. So I was the middle child. You know what they say about middle children, they're always the ones getting in trouble; so I guess they thought that that would straighten me out. And when I was 14 years old, they started to send me around the world by myself.
Ash Patel: [laughs] I was in the same boat man, middle child, hell-raiser. Look how we turned out now, huh. Awesome. So you came back to the States and you wanted to be a businessman. What did you do next?
Tosin Oduwole: Well, the first thing I did was I went straight to college. I hadn't been in the States for about five and a half, six years, and I felt like I missed out on what it's like to be a teenager in America, which is a great experience. You get to get your driver's license, drive with your friends, go out to parties, clubs for the first time... So I missed all that, so when I came back, I wanted to just deal with it and what it felt like just to be a college student.
And so my freshman year of college, I really didn't do too much. I mean, I did start buying and selling things on eBay, so that was probably my first entrepreneurial move back in 2005. I think eBay and PayPal were brand new companies, so I was probably one of the first people that was doing the buy-and-sell hustle on eBay. And then started looking at real estate, of course, because my parents had been in it for years. And like most people, when you're getting into real estate, if you don't necessarily have a mentor or you don't necessarily have somebody that's going to walk you through it... Because at that time, my parents weren't necessarily walking me through it, so I started buying courses. They used to have these infomercials on TV. I think it was "Buy houses, pennies on the dollar" or something like that.
Ash Patel: Did you buy Carleton Sheets?
Tosin Oduwole: No, I did not buy his. No, no.
Ash Patel: I bought his.
Tosin Oduwole: I bought and I'd get a ton of CDs, CD-ROMs, and these big files, and I was like, "Oh, I have to read off this stuff." And I just turned away from it. And then a couple of years later, I think I was about 21, then my mom brought me on to help manage one of her nursing home facilities that she had in St. Louis, Missouri. So I got to learn about payrolls, scheduling... We'd have to bus our clients from home to the location.
And then she started showing me how she was buying these properties. And she was getting them from tax certificate auctions, and then holding on to them for a year, foreclosing on them, and then turning them into whatever cash-flowing use that she could find. So that was when I really started putting a strategy together for me, and trying to figure out what's the easiest and best way for me to get into it. So my first purchase was a vacant piece of land in Newark, New Jersey. It was a 25 by 100-foot land. I bought it from the city of Newark for $1,000 and I was fishing again.
Ash Patel: What did you do with that property?
Tosin Oduwole: I did nothing to it. I held on to it, cut the grass, paid the property taxes, and I ended up selling it a couple of years later for $75,000. So at that particular time, when I bought it, I wanted to build a duplex. I had no idea what it's like to build a ground-up construction. And keep in mind, this is my first real estate deal, and I'm telling myself I want to build a ground-up construction.
Ash Patel: Tosin, how old are you?
Tosin Oduwole: I'm 36 now.
Ash Patel: No, no. At the time.
Tosin Oduwole: At the time, I was in my 20s. 25, 26.
Ash Patel: Alright, so you hit a home run in the land...
Tosin Oduwole: Yup.
Ash Patel: ...and now you're Donald Trump, man; you want to develop the whole city.
Tosin Oduwole: Exactly, and had no idea how to do that. My first couple of contractors that I had put deposits down on, I guess they knew I was wet behind the ears, they ran off with the deposits, and never... I got scammed very early on with the whole contractor hustle, so it turned me off a little bit. And I said, "Hey, you know what? The value of this thing has gone up in the year or two I've had it. I could sell it and use those funds to go on to something else."
Ash Patel: What was that something else?
Tosin Oduwole: I started a real estate fund. Well, no, that was after. So next was I co-founded a Regulation A Tier 2 fund. And in that fund, that's where we bought 98 units. The 98 units was in Macon, Georgia. Bought 14 units in Lake Charles, Louisiana, seven units in New Orleans, and then a bunch of single-family homes in Ohio and New Jersey that we aimed to flip. Those didn't really work out too well, but we still had the cash flowing from the multifamily units.
Ash Patel: Who was "we"?
Tosin Oduwole: I had a former partner, Jay Morrison, and we have been working together for probably about four and a half, five years. And I had always wanted to start a fund, and at that time, he was more geared towards the education space, real estate education, investing in education. And I just thought it would be a great idea if we actually got into acquiring large assets.
So that was how we started the groundwork, and I got a lot of help and assistance from another fund called the Prodigy Network, based out in New York. They had done over $300 million in deals at that time and they were very gracious to invite me into their office and show me their structure, how they raise capital, how they pick their third-party fund managers, their marketing... Basically the whole thing. And they laid that out to us, and that was how we got started on that first fund.
Ash Patel: So you bypassed a lot of those stumbling blocks that people go through, and went right to the fund. How did you raise capital with not much of a track record?
Tosin Oduwole: Social media was our biggest engine behind that; but not just social media, but how we used it. So we had told ourselves, "We're not going to start raising capital for another year and a half, two years. So what we'll do is we'll start up a free 800-number, freeconferencecall.com, I believe is what we used. And every Thursday at either 7 P.M. or 8 P.M, we'd have people just call in and ask us questions about the fund. What cities? What markets are we going to be focusing in? What are the requirements for investing in the fund? Do you have to be an accredited investor, unaccredited, etc.?
So for an entire year and a half, a good 16-17 months, the people that we were marketing to social media were able to talk to us and ask us and get real information. So when we actually launched, our investor base had already been built and groomed, and they were ready to go. There was no doubt in their mind that they understood what they were investing in. So we raised, I believe, $7 million in the first week, and I think $14.1 million capital commitments in about three months before we closed it out and started acquiring assets.
Ash Patel: So you raised the capital first, on soft commitments.
Tosin Oduwole: Correct.
Ash Patel: And then you started looking for deals.
Tosin Oduwole: Correct.
Ash Patel: How did you find these deals?
Tosin Oduwole: When I started wholesaling, which I left out of the story... I started wholesaling back in 2010-ish. So at that time, I would say wholesaling really taught me how to source deals and build relationships with brokers, and skimming through public records of different counties and finding properties that are tax delinquent, or sometimes just reaching out to property owners in a zip code blanket, sending them emails or text messages and saying, "Hey, you own a property in this zip code. Are you interested in selling?"
And a lot of times you get no's, but you reach out to 20,000 people, you're going to get 500, 600 people to say, "Hey, what are you thinking?" And so a lot of it was really just going back to what I learned when I was wholesaling, keeping in touch with brokers, viewing a ton of property all over Georgia. And that was pretty much it, it was just a lot of legwork.
Ash Patel: And today, you look for turnkey, distressed, assets in developing markets. What does that mean?
Tosin Oduwole: Turnkey and distressed.
Ash Patel: Ah, okay.
Tosin Oduwole: It depends on the market. So I've been heavy in Chicago for about three years. So when it comes to Chicago, I'm looking more for turnkey properties. I was just in Chicago four days ago, we were looking at a six-unit, fully occupied on the south side, for $221,000. So a lot of your viewers that are in real estate, they can tell you that's a pretty good deal. Chicago has a lot of those, especially in the South Shore or Englewood, or if you go further South to Riverdale, you can find a lot of those properties that are turnkey, and the deposit, you're looking at maybe $30,000, $40,000 down into these deals. When we look at in Atlanta, Georgia or Miami, Florida, then I'm looking more for distressed properties, because the buy-in is a lot lower, and it's just a better strategy to get in when you're looking in those markets that have significantly higher prices and lower cap rates.
Ash Patel: Tosin, what's your definition of developing markets?
Tosin Oduwole: Developing markets, to me, are markets that are trending upward in some significant level. Meaning that there's a lot of people that are moving to that city, there are large Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 companies that are headquartered there and are hiring, and also that there are colleges and universities there that have somewhat of a good name, so a lot of people want to come to those colleges.
So when you look at Chicago, you have it's either Walgreens or CVS that's headquartered there. They have Northwestern Law, which one of my attorneys was a professor at, one of the best law schools in the country. And then when it comes to the Midwest, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in Chicago my entire life, so when it comes to all the other country towns that are in Illinois and Missouri, when you want to move out of one of those towns, like Champaign or Edwardsville, Illinois, you're most likely going to a St. Louis or Chicago. You don't necessarily say, "I'm going to go to New York or L.A.", because that...
Ash Patel: You're not going to Philly.
Tosin Oduwole: Exactly. Because to make that jump from paying $700 a month in rent on your apartment to $2,800 a month in a Philadelphia or a New York, that's a huge jump. So Chicago and St. Louis, those major Midwestern cities - they have a huge population that moves there every year. And people that move there are going to need new housing. So those are the three basic ways that I like to identify what I call a developing market. At some point in time, that will plateau and we'll start seeing prices for rent and acquisitions catch up until the Eastern counterparts and the Western counterparts, but that's how I like to gauge it in the beginning. There are some caveats that may make or break that decision, but that's the baseline.
Ash Patel: What's your most valuable piece of advice to experienced real estate people, whether they're investors or operators? Actually, let's do both. What's your most valuable piece of advice to investors, and operators?
Tosin Oduwole: I would say for me it's building a lot of relationships with people that are all-in in the business. No matter what niche they are. Some people like to focus on single-family, some people focus on two to four units, some people focus on commercial or office space... But anybody who's gung-ho in real estate and this is their way of life, there's so many things you can learn from them by just being in proximity with them or having friendships with them. And it can be things as new lenders, or contractors that have great deals and do good work.
There's just so many little things that, if you have a ton of friends that are in real estate, you'll be alright. You'll always have people you can go to if you have questions or there's something that you need some help with. There's always going to be somebody. And so that, I think, is very, very important.
Ash Patel: Yeah, and that's an answer that fits both questions. Good for you. What's the hardest lesson you've learned in real estate?
Tosin Oduwole: The hardest lesson will probably be something I learned early on, is learning how to properly underwrite a deal. And then also having a qualified attorney go through your purchase contracts. Because in the beginning, I lost some earnest money a few times, because I didn't read that they were non-refundable if you didn't close. And so I would get some properties under contract, put a deposit down, and then start running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to finance the deal or find a loan for the deal, not knowing that a lot of the lenders look for track record, they look for tax returns, and all these things that at that time I didn't have, and I probably lost a good maybe $20,000 or $30,000 over a couple of deals in earnest money, putting $5,000 down here, and $7,000 down here. So I would say definitely, definitely make sure that you know how to underwrite a deal properly, so that you know if you take this deal to a lender, it's going to get funded... And to read. Read your contracts, guys.
Ash Patel: Yeah. Not too long ago, I questioned my attorney; I said, "Hey, can't we just have a standard PSA that we use on all of our deals?" And their standpoint is they want to get paid on everything. But to their point, they're like, "Everyone is a little bit different, and it behooves you to have us look through it." 99% of the time, it's not a problem. That 1% of the time that you get stuck in something, you'll be grateful that you had attorneys' eyes on it. So yeah, great advice.
Tosin Oduwole: Paying $200 or $300 for contract review is a lot better than losing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 on it.
Ash Patel: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Do you have partners today?
Tosin Oduwole: I do.
Ash Patel: What's your role, versus your partner's role?
Tosin Oduwole: I'm very confident in my skills and what I bring to the table. So when it comes to deal sourcing, actually going and walking the properties, doing some research on the neighborhood, whether it's job growth, population growth - I like to do those things. So when it comes to my partners, mainly I'm looking for people that can bring capital to the deal, and also any relationships that they have, whether it's lenders, attorneys, or other LPs that have some capital liquid, things of that nature. So it revolves around -- capital and guidance is what I look for in partners.
Ash Patel: And do you have different partners on different deals?
Tosin Oduwole: 100%. That also depends on the deal in the market. If I'm buying something in Atlanta, Georgia, then most likely I'm going to want to partner with somebody who's been buying and developing and flipping in the Atlanta area for years.
Ash Patel: How do you find that partner?
Tosin Oduwole: I did move to Atlanta in 2017. I was there for a couple of years until I moved the company to Miami. And what I started doing is I just started going out to a ton of real estate meetups. My first four or five months in Atlanta, Georgia, I was probably going to two or three a week, and just making myself known in the area. Talking to a lot of people, going to a lot of other people's flips. I went to a ton of open houses for realtors. No intention of buying the houses, just go there to say, "Hey, how you doing? My name is Tosin. You're a broker... Hey, let me get your card. I may need you some point in time."
Just watching them, how they treat their clients, if they're professional enough, how they carry themselves. I like people that have personalities that match with mine, to where we could be friends if there wasn't business involved. It's just sometimes easier to talk to them, easier to deal with them. So I was really just putting myself outside and in the environment, and was able to meet a lot of people, and some became mentors, some became partners, some became friends... But just that free flow of information that exists with everybody was what I built, and it took me about six months to do it.
Break: [00:18:50] - [00:20:37]
Ash Patel: Tosin, you've mentioned a lot of creative ways that you've taken down deals in the past. What are you using today to find deals?
Tosin Oduwole: I've used a lot, because things change so quickly in real estate. Back in the days I used to use Kent Clothier's system, Real Estate Worldwide. That was in, I think, 2013, I was using that to pull [unintelligible 00:21:01.08] from public records, so finding single-family homes, finding distressed properties. Something happened with that software or portal to where it wasn't really of any use anymore to the way that I was using it. I don't want to tell people it doesn't work, because it does work just not for what I was using it for at the time.
And then I started going to the New Jersey property tax database and finding addresses and phone numbers and doing it that way. Right now, I've used a lot of PropStream and Reonomy. PropStream more for residential and skip tracing, Reonomy more for commercial deals. So I've been using Reonomy for about nine months, and I've been using PropStream for about four years. So it varies and changes; every four to five years there's a new thing that I use to pull leads.
I think lead generation is the most important thing. And I like to pull leads from property owners that may not be in a position to where they're thinking of selling, or to where nobody has approached them to buy their property. So the different portals or softwares that I use - it changes every couple of years depending what takes superiority, but right now it's PropStream and Reonomy.
Ash Patel: Everybody uses people that are behind on taxes, people whose tax bill is sent to a different state. Am I correct in assuming you go against the grain and don't do the typical criteria for these lists?
Tosin Oduwole: Yeah, I don't. I do go against the grain. Not saying that those strategies don't work, because they actually do. I know a woman named Chantelle Owens. They call her the Tax Lien Queen in Atlanta, Georgia, and she's gotten over 1,000 properties taking the tax lien route. So it definitely, definitely works. I just don't really have the patience to wait a year to be able to foreclose on a property. I like to be able to move quickly; especially if I'm getting money from borrowing money from somebody, I want to be able to get this deal moving and rolling in the next two, three months.
So yeah, I try to use ways that are uncommon, that aren't necessarily blown up, and try to ride that wave until people catch on to it. A lot of times I do teach it to other investors. I never really keep things to myself, but during that period, I try to just hit it as hard as I can, share with as many people as I can, and then hope that it doesn't have to switch up anytime soon.
Ash Patel: I love that mindset. Joe Fairless does the same thing, he gives away all his secrets. I've got a mastermind where I literally give away all my secrets. What are some examples of criteria that you've used in the past, going against the grain?
Tosin Oduwole: Sure. So I think maybe I thought of this by looking at my parents, because when all of us became of age, and either went to college or moved to other states, both my parents downsized on their homes. And growing up, both my parents had huge houses. My mom had a six-bedroom, three-bath home in the suburbs in Olivette, Missouri. And my dad had this huge, huge mansion in Connecticut, on a hill.
And when we all got older, they all sold those properties, but it wasn't that a realtor reached out to them. They just sold them themselves for sale by owner. So I told myself, in my filters, "Let me look at people who have had their mortgages already paid off." So that means I know that you spent at least 30 years in that house, anywhere from 20 to 30 years in that house. You spent 20 or 30 years in that house, most likely you have children. Those children are probably grown by now. They're probably out of the house, so you probably have a five-bedroom home and you're in your 60s, and it is a hassle for you to walk upstairs. You want something that's a bungalow, something that's one floor now.
So I changed my filter to specifically target all of those potential situations, so that I can have older people who are like, "Well, I never thought about selling my house, but yeah, we've been living in this 4,000-square-foot home for 10 years and we'd like to get something smaller." So I've seen that those conversations are a bit easier to have with those sellers, because they're in that mind space already. Everything you're telling them, they agree with you. They agree. So now it's more of we're focusing on "How much can you really give me for this house?" So we just get straight there. So that's...
Ash Patel: I love that, and I love that there's less competition towards those people. The second you miss a tax bill, I would imagine you get bombarded with postcards, emails.
Tosin Oduwole: Yes.
Ash Patel: But yeah, who's hitting up the 60-year-olds that have been peacefully staying in their home for 30 years? You are, and probably only you, so good for you. How are you finding investors now? I know you use social media to get established and really grow, but now is it the same thing, or is there other creative avenues?
Tosin Oduwole: No, sir. I'm going to give you another tip. So I do have a Regulation D 506(c) funds, so that means I can publicly solicit anywhere - social media, email... If I'm in a coffee shop, I can say, "Hey, man. I have a fund, do you want to invest $1 million?" So there's no restriction on who or how I can talk to. So I said, "Alright, since I can only solicit accredited investors", and they have to have a minimum of $1 million in assets, $350,000 a year in income if they have a spouse, and I think $250,000 a year if they're by themselves... So I said, "I can go on PropStream and put in a filter in any zip code, and show me people who have at least two or three properties, that have an estimated equity of at least $1 million."
So the reason why I put two or three properties is because the accredited investor definition says that you have to have $1 million in equity not including your primary residence. So that person has to have multiple properties that bring their net worth to $1 million in order for them to be in that bucket. So I said, "If I put a filter that says people that have at least three properties, that have at least $1 million in equity, then by definition, I know all of these hundreds or thousands of people that [unintelligible 00:26:57.01] are accredited investors by definition, and I've just got to skip trace them."
And because I'm Regulation D 506(c), it's perfectly legal for me to openly solicit them, send them an email, text message or cold call them, and then you just got to go through that process of going through that enormous list and making your pitch and getting a ton of no's, and a few people who say, "This isn't the best time for me. Call me back in six months." And then you have those people to say, "Okay, tell me what you got going on."
Ash Patel: You seem like you would enjoy that outward reach. Do you do all of it, or do you outsource that?
Tosin Oduwole: I do about 85% of it. I just started using virtual assistants for our Miami campaigns... Just because, Miami - I've been getting a huge influx of warm leads coming back in incoming calls, and it's overwhelming. So I'm not sure, I don't know why, but Miami has been a lot coming in, and so I just started putting on virtual assistants for that.
But I like the person-to-person engagement. And just for my brand and my business and my reputation, I want people to know me. I want sellers who say, "Oh, no. I didn't deal with a virtual assistant when he bought my house. It was him that spoke to me. Yeah, he's the one that came by and took pictures, and I'm talking to him." So I just like for people to know me and speak directly and deal with exactly who they're doing business with. That may change. Hopefully, it changes when things get bigger and we've got 100 calls a day coming in, and of course, I can't do that.
Ash Patel: The challenge is finding another you.
Tosin Oduwole: Yes. The hardest thing is finding somebody who is very passionate and loves real estate, just loves the grind and the journey of talking to people and going through fire-damaged properties. I really genuinely enjoy that.
Ash Patel: Yeah. And back to your earlier point, surround yourself with people that live and breathe this, if that's what you want to do. Yeah. And you have to be as passionate as them, or this isn't right for you.
Tosin Oduwole: Correct.
Ash Patel: You can't go into this thinking, "Yeah, I'll do it for five years." You know, real estate people - it's in their blood. They're going to do it forever. There's no retiring from this game. Yeah, good for you. Tosin, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Tosin Oduwole: Oh, wow. My best real estate advice ever... Something that I think would apply to everybody is that, as early as possible, build a really, really strong credit profile, personal and business. That's number one. Number two, I would say if there's any part of your income, if you have a nine-to-five, or you have multiple jobs, you have a side hustle or you have anything, if you can delegate and put aside 5% to 10% of your profit after taxes and put that in a separate account specifically for down payments on property, then that will give you a lot more options and less stress when you actually find the deal that you want to take down. You may not have to borrow as much from other people, you may not have to leverage yourself by bringing in two, three, or four people on the deal. Maybe you can bring in one, or even none.
And that, I think, just gives you more options to decide what direction you want to go. Any direction can work, but having the option to say, "Okay, by choice, I can do this," as opposed to "Oh, I have to do this because this is the only way I can get the deal done." So I think it starts with those two things.
Ash Patel: Yeah, that is powerful advice, because the stress of raising a down payment when you have something under contract - that's a big burden.
Tosin Oduwole: Yup.
Ash Patel: There's a lot of going back and forth on social media about establishing business credit. Why are you a proponent of that?
Tosin Oduwole: I'm a proponent of it -- not saying that it's 100% always needed, I'm saying it's an option you should have in your bag... Because recently, there are lenders - not too many that I've seen, but there are a lot of lenders that will fund a business credit profile that's only been around for 18 months or two years. So just having that option to where you can potentially get funds from that lane - why not have that tool in your toolbox?
Ash Patel: How do people go about establishing their business credit profile?
Tosin Oduwole: You have the Paydex -- so get a Dun & Bradstreet number, you want to get a Paydex score, there's also these companies called Nav, Uline... There's a ton of companies that will report to your business credit profile. And then really, it's just about buying things from those companies, whether it's a net 30, net 60, net 90, paying them on time... It takes about a year to do it right, to where you actually have a profile that looks good, where you have six or seven vendors on your profile and you have 100% payment history. So there's that way.
There's a bunch of other ways that maybe the business credit specialists can tell you better than me. But those I know, because I've done them myself, and they're ways that you can get access to lines of credit. Using Uline, I think Quill, it's either called Quill or Trill, is the name of one of the vendors... So that's the baseline way. I'm not an expert in that. I've done a lot of my stuff through my personal, but that is definitely something that I'm still growing to this day. And I may use it at some point in time, but to get to 118 units right now, I haven't had to. But for all I know, that could help me get to 500, so...
Ash Patel: Yeah. Great advice and worth looking into for everybody. Tosin, are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?
Tosin Oduwole: I'm ready, hit me with it.
Ash Patel: Alright, Tosin. What's the Best Ever book you recently read?
Tosin Oduwole: Recently, I would say Principles by Ray Dalio.
Ash Patel: What was your big takeaway?
Tosin Oduwole: Man, that guy is a genius. Learning the psychology of the people that you're working with is very, very important. And then also having a borderline of principles, things that you will not do regardless of the payout, regardless of what it can do for your pockets, and sticking to that, it's very, very important. Because a lot of people think that, oh, if you compromise your morals, you can make more money... In the short term. In the long term, if you don't compromise your morals, you can make more money, because there are people that are going to want to deal with you long term, because they know how you roll.
Ash Patel: That's evident from all the people on top.
Tosin Oduwole: Yeah, so Principles was very, very, very eye-opening for me, and he has a very creative way of dealing with people and the psychology of it, similar to the way that I like to find leads. He has a creative way and it was very... I was like, "Hey, I never would have thought of that." But of course, somebody who's 65 years old and has been a successful businessman for 40 or 50 years, of course, there's probably some caveats that he would have learned that me at 36, I just haven't gotten to see them yet.
Ash Patel: Yeah. Tosin, what's the Best Ever way you like to give back?
Tosin Oduwole: Number one, silently. [laughs] I like to give back silently. What I do is, a lot of times when I'm cleaning out my apartment or cleaning up my house or wherever I'm living at the time, I always like to take all the clothes I'm done with, and I go on the street, and I find homeless people and give it to them directly. Before, I used to go to Goodwill, until I found out that Goodwill, sometimes, they sell them. You're giving them free clothes and then those clothes are ending up in middle-class households. And it's like, "How did you really help anybody?" So I'll just drive around and find people, give them shoes, give them clothes.
When it comes to knowledge, I love, love, love, love talking to seniors in high school and freshmen in college, because that's the time to where they really can make a choice where they want to go in their lives. And they can make multiple choices, and they can also make a lot of mistakes. So at that age, I like to encourage them and hype them up and motivate them to say, "Hey, just pick something. If it doesn't work, you can change your mind and you'll still be young. If you do this thing for three or four years, and when you're 21, you find out you don't like this, guess what? You can pivot. You can go do something totally different, start from scratch. And if you become an expert or a professional in that, you'll be 27 years old and you're still young, you still haven't cracked 30." So I like talking to between 17-21, 22, I just love being able to give them some game, direction, and just the freedom to go out there and do whatever the heck it is you want to do.
Ash Patel: Tosin, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?
Tosin Oduwole: Oh, wonderful. They can send an email directly at tosin@bapunited.com. Or they can follow me on Instagram, @tosin_oduwole. Or the fund Instagram, which is @bapunited. Those are the best ways. And if you are an investor in the South Florida area, you can reach out to me. I am a newly licensed agent in Florida and can help you find anything using the strategies and tactics I spoke about earlier.
Ash Patel: Incredible. Tosin, I got to thank you again for sharing your time with us. A lot of your insights, a lot of your secrets. You started out as a rebel, got thrown into boarding school, came back eager to get into business. And I think you used a lot of that rebel mentality to continue to go against the grain and build on your success. So congratulations and thank you again for sharing your story with us.
Tosin Oduwole: Thank you so much for having me. I wish you guys success, and I just really appreciate you guys for always having me on your show and just taking the time to listen to what I have going on. I really, really appreciate it.
Ash Patel: Thank you. Best Ever listeners, thank you for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five-star review. Share the podcast with someone you think could benefit from it. Also, follow, subscribe, and have a Best Ever day.
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