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Dan had a few different business ventures before getting into real estate investing. He’s built a pretty good size business and portfolio. We’ll hear how he got into real estate, and a few different deal specifics. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!

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“Banks want to see buyers with some skin in the game” – Dan Gorman

Dan Gorman Real Estate Background:

 

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TRANSCRIPTION

Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast, where we only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff. With us today, Dan Gorman. How are you doing, Dan?

Dan Gorman: I’m great, Joe. How are you?

Joe Fairless: I am doing well, and looking forward to our conversation. A little bit about Dan – he formed United Property Group in 1999. He grew his portfolio of multifamily to over 700 units. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio. With that being said, Dan, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?

Dan Gorman: Yeah, sure. Just a  quick background on myself – I’ve graduated college with an electrical engineering degree in 1989, and I really did not connect with that at all, so I started managing a jewelry store that I had worked in during high school and college. Then I started my own jewelry brokering business. I was a diamond broker there for a few years, and just found — you know, the basic thing that Michael Gerber would say with The E Myth is that I found myself owning a job, and not a business. I was driving 50,000 miles a year, I was making good money, but if I wanted to go on vacation or I wanted to take a break, I didn’t make any money, so I started getting interested in real estate, to try to even out some of those highs and lows in my income [unintelligible [00:02:34].00] that had been sitting there for three years, one of those Carlton Sheets “No Money Down” series, and listened to it in the car over and over again… And just really got excited.

My dad was a homebuilder, and I’ve always liked construction-related things, so I ended up using his techniques to buy 25 units no money down, near the University of Cincinnati, and then pick up another 19 with no money down… So I had about 44 units there. Went from 0 to 44 in a year, so that was a lot of work. Those properties were pretty run down, filled with some college students, and just a heck of a lot of work.

I wasn’t really making a lot of money, because I had to give somebody a free apartment and pay them a little bit of a salary to help me out… So I found out that that spot, with that certain number of units was a lot of work, but didn’t really afford me the ability to hire a maintenance person and a manager to do all that for me. So I was getting  a ton of calls a day from that, and then trying to run my diamond business at the same time.

One of the guys that I was trading Rolexes with at the time – you know, he’d get me some, I’d get him some – he was an investment banker, so I sat down and I had lunch with him and I said “Man, I really wanna figure out how to buy something big enough that has [unintelligible [00:03:46].26] I don’t really have any money. What do I need to do to do something like that?” He was kind of like “Well, you know, that doesn’t happen very often, but if you bring me a deal that looks like this (he was talking about cap rates, and stuff), then I could help you out.”

Through a series of really weird and interesting events I found a 168-unit apartment community that had a Section 8 contract on it in Hamilton, Ohio. It was full (100% full), with a waiting list, and it was in foreclosure, because the owner was in prison for fraud. So I talked to the manager of the property and she said “Well, you really ought to take a look at this place, because we’ve got this long waiting list, we’re 100% full, we run great, and it’s been in receivership for two years.”

Joe Fairless: Hm…

Dan Gorman: So I got a lawyer, I said “I don’t know anything about this stuff, but would you look at this? Does this seem weird to you, that they’re not moving it towards getting any finality with this situation?”

Joe Fairless: Yeah.

Dan Gorman: We basically ended up filing something with the court and we said “Hey, this doesn’t seem right. This lender is not being made whole, and you’re just kind of [unintelligible [00:04:50].14] this thing for the last two years.” So the judge agreed, and he said “Okay, we’re gonna have a trial in 30 days and we’re gonna figure this out.” Or a hearing, I guess. I don’t know if trial is the right word.

So only three people showed up to bid on it, I was one of them, and ended up buying — that property had $500,000 NOI, and because I brought my investment banker with me and I had him looking at that, and the other two buyers that showed up had only heard about it a few days before that and they were very unwilling to commit, I ended up getting that property at 3.1 million dollars, with a $500,000 NOI…

Joe Fairless: Oh, my…

Dan Gorman: It was about a 17% or 18% cap.

Joe Fairless: [laughs]

Dan Gorman: The guy got the financing for, 100% financing, and it came with $100,000 in the bank…

Joe Fairless: Oh, my god…

Dan Gorman: So that was the opposite of no money down. That was no money down plus. That property changed the trajectory of my life, basically… Because I started thinking “I’m making a lot of money every month with this place, I’m driving 50,000 miles a year with my diamond business and I’m not making nearly as much as I’m making in this big real estate deal that I’ve got here”, so I’ve just kind of let that go and decided to focus on real estate full-time. I was able to pull about a million and a half dollars in equity out of that within 19 months, and used that to propel my investment portfolio over the next few years.

I just dipped my toe in a lot of different things over the next 5-6 years. About three mobile home parks, with about 300 pads total. I did a [unintelligible [00:06:21].28] with about a 120-unit apartment community, I bought a couple market rate communities, and then bought a neat apartment community with a Starbucks and a Graeter’s Ice Cream attached to it… So I was just exploring the different types of real estate to try to — because I just was really interested in doing a little bit different type of deal the next time than I had done before.

So about 3-4 years ago I was able to continue refinancing, and things like that, so I had money that I could redeploy, but it felt like it was getting more and more difficult to invest in apartment communities, just because the cap rates started getting ridiculously low, and nothing was a good deal. At the same time, I was getting these unsolicited offers for a lot of different things in my portfolio that I thought were very challenging to ignore.

The problem when you sell something at a market high like we’re in right now is that you have to replace it if you don’t wanna pay the tax on gains. You’ve gotta replace it at a market high as well… So it always makes me nervous when I’m selling something that I’m very familiar with and I’m buying something that I’m not familiar with, because there’s a lot of things that could go wrong with that scenario… So if you can’t get a good deal, you’re kind of stuck, I think.

So that one apartment community that I bought for 3 million dollars in 2001 I got an offer for 10,5 million dollars a couple years ago. So that was just an offer I couldn’t ignore. It was a really aggressive offer from this firm, so we went under contract and I spent about 18 months trying to find something to replace it with, so I wouldn’t have this huge tax hit, and I just was unable to find an apartment community that I felt was a decent deal.

When you redeploy that much capital, then you’re starting to compete against really large players in the market, that are willing to pay 5% and 6% for stuff that’s 1960’s and 1970’s vintage, which is — I can’t play in that same box…

So I ended up just — kind of at the last minute I found a broker, and I was talking to him about my challenges. This is a guy that worked at [unintelligible [00:08:21].10] so he found me a portfolio of 14 Dollar Generals.

Joe Fairless: Huh.

Dan Gorman: He said “These are all brand new, they’ve got brand new 15-year leases on them, 7% cap, so you’re gonna get better cashflow than you would get on all these apartment communities you’re looking at. There’s no unknowns, you know exactly what you’re gonna get for the next 15 years.” So I ended up shifting all the money from that one apartment community into those, and that’s been kind of nice, to just take a deep breath and not have to worry about those for the next 10-15 years.

So this is what I have been doing. Selling some of these things where I was getting these really high offers, and then… I haven’t really been able to find a lot of apartment communities to put this money into, but I feel like it’s been very easy for me to find office buildings.

I bought a strip center, and a few office buildings, and it just seems like there’s more opportunity there if you’re doing that in a decent part of town. You find somebody who has owned the thing for 20, 30, 40 years and is just kind of tired of it… There’s a lot of opportunity there, so that’s what I have shifted into. It’s kind of what I’m doing right now, as I look for things that need to be repositioned – office buildings, shopping centers… I’ll take an apartment community whenever I can find one, but I just haven’t been able to find one lately… And just go in there — if you get it cheap enough, you can really do some nice stuff with it, and it just really gets exciting for the potential tenants that are looking for things like that.

On a side note – I don’t know if you wanna stop there and revisit any of that, but I also opened up a company in Africa, in Rwanda. My dad was a builder, and I’ve just always been very interested in it, and I was taking mission trips to Nicaragua, South Africa, and just seeing how inefficient the building process is there, so we are working on a way to build an affordable concrete home very quickly over there.

We’ve got a model home that’s been improved by the banks and by the government. We’ve got another four that we just built here, and I’m gonna be flying over then within the next 30 days to talk to some government officials about [unintelligible [00:10:20].00] 200 they wanna build in this neighborhood, so hopefully that will work out well.

Joe Fairless: There’s a lot to talk about. [laughs]

Dan Gorman: There is, I know. Yeah…

Joe Fairless: A whole lot to talk about. What a fun story… So let’s dig in a little bit, and I’d love to just learn more about some of this that you’ve mentioned. First, how much did you 1031 from the sale of the place in Hamilton, 168, into the 14 Dollars Generals?

Dan Gorman: Well, the sale of the apartment community was 10,5 million dollars, so I had to find another property or group of properties that was at least 10,5 million dollars. So I think the deal ended up being somewhere around 14 million dollars. We dropped one or two of the stores because they had some environmental issues… So in the end we bought 12, and we just had to transition all that 10,5 million dollars to the next deal for the Dollars Generals, plus — I had a really large chunk of equity in that deal, so it was very easy for me to get the loan for the difference there between the 10,5 and the 13 or 14 million that  it ended up being. So that provides really nice cashflow for me right now, without much risk or effort.

Joe Fairless: The 1.5 that you pulled out of the property in the earlier days – had  you ever seen 1.5 million in your bank account up until that point?

Dan Gorman: No, that was a really cool day. That’s a great question. I’ve never had anybody ask me that before… I had never seen more than probably 10k in my bank account. You have to remember, when we acquired the 168 units, by that time I was over 200 units, and I had bought all these properties with no money down, so I’d really never had money to buy the properties to begin with, or had a lot of money after I purchased them, because if you really leverage up on some of these, you’re not gonna get a lot of cashflow. But when I got that, that was a game-changer, it was exciting.

Joe Fairless: What was more exciting – seeing that 1.5 in the bank account, or seeing the proceeds from the 10.5 million dollars transaction in the custodian’s account for your 1031 intermediary account?

Dan Gorman: I would definitely say the most exciting thing on the journey so far has been the day in court when the judge said that we got that property, that 168-unit. That was such a huge jump for me, going from 40-something units and really not having any idea what I was doing, to getting a property that large. That was really, really exciting.

Comparing the two things that you asked about – the 1.5 million dollars cash in my bank account, and that first refi for that large multi-million-dollar transaction into the bank account recently, I would say it was much more exciting back then. After a  while, when you’re doing these and money is moving from one account to the next, from one deal into the next, I never really think of it as like being really well off or wealthier, or anything like that; it just always feels like these are just transactions that move back and forth. I don’t know if you know what I mean.

Joe Fairless: You mentioned earlier that there were some weird and interesting events that led you to the 168-unit. How did you find out about the 168-unit?

Dan Gorman: Well, I had met with that investment banker, and he kind of gave me some criteria that I would need to look for… So I just started beating the bushes, and back then – this was right when the internet was just taking hold, so I was still looking in the newspaper in the classifieds, and I saw–

Joe Fairless: What year is this?

Dan Gorman: This is probably 2000.

Joe Fairless: Okay.

Dan Gorman: So I saw in the classifieds that there was an apartment community up in Dayton, Ohio that was for sale. It was 140 units, and something in that ad indicated that it was troubled. So I called the broker and the owner, and they sent me up, I looked at it, and it was almost completely abandoned. It was a  war zone. It was terrible. There might be three apartments occupied in it, but it was lots and lots of [unintelligible [00:14:05].11] scary.

So I called the guy back and I said “I’m not really comfortable with this property, even if you give it to me for free. I don’t even feel comfortable walking around it.” And he said, “No, no, you’ve gotta go interview the lady at this apartment community in Hamilton, because I’m gonna hire her and her maintenance guy, and we’re gonna send them up there and they’re gonna turn it around. You don’t have to worry about it. She’s used to doing stuff like this.” He said “Just go in there and talk to her.”

So I went and I sat in front of her and I said “Hey, I’ve been talking to this guy, and he says that you can turn an apartment community like that around.” And she said “Well, yeah, I can do it, but [unintelligible [00:14:37].29]” and I wasn’t really getting any response to my efforts to find out why it was still in receivership, and my attorney wasn’t getting a response either from the receiver…

So when I talked to somebody at HUD, I’m like “[unintelligible [00:14:54].08] that the apartment community is suffering, that the tenants are suffering because there’s been no movement here. Is there any hints that you can give me to help move this along, to see if there’s a chance to acquire this and make a difference here?” And the lady at HUD, she said “If I were you, I would start emailing your congressmen, your senators, the president – everybody… Because this property has a government contract on it, and this is not supposed to be happening.”

So I just kept sending these email blasts to everybody, and somehow that trickled bad to the received, and to HUD, and places like that, so I did get this little — it was interesting, when I was in the courtroom and we were talking, and the judge said “Hey, we’re gonna take an hour break for lunch”, the receiver came up to me and he goes “Hey, this is a good opportunity to email the president again.”

Joe Fairless: [laughs]

Dan Gorman: So he found out about all those emails I was sending, and he would have no way of knowing that I emailed the president… So I’m not sure; it was kind of interesting. So the key was that the judge, when he set that thing for a trial – or a hearing – he only gave 30 days, and that was really not enough time to advertise, or anything, so he kind of had to know about the deal when he showed up. It was a little bit of a risk. I mean, we were getting such a  great on it, but we really didn’t have any opportunity to do any third-party reports or environmentals, or anything like that… So there was risk.

Joe Fairless: One question on the Dollar Generals… So you’ve got a chunk of equity, you put it into these Dollar Generals, they’re on 15-year triple-net leases… Knowing what I know about Dollar Generals – which isn’t a whole lot, but I’ve shopped at some – they’re usually in little Podunk areas, remote parts of the map… And first off, are your Dollar Generals in very small towns/off the beaten path?

Dan Gorman: Yeah. Pretty much the way that it works is you have these developers, and they just continue to move on down the road, up through a state or whatever, and they’re building a Dollar General here, and then 30 minutes down the road they build another one, or two hours down the road, or however long it is… So the majority of the ones that I’ve got now are in pretty small areas.

I think that I’ve got really nice risk – I’m not gonna say risk-free, but really nice management-related type of property where there’s gonna be no problems at all for the next 15 years, but that does not mean that they’re not without risk. Because I think what you may be alluding to is that when that 15-year lease comes — what’s great about Dollar Generals is they’ve been around since the 1950’s. I don’t see them going out of business [unintelligible [00:17:18].19] with a bankruptcy type of thing where you’re not gonna get your rent money, or whatever. But when it comes to the end of that 15 years… Now, a company like Dollar General is opening up thousands of stores a year or more; they’re gonna make some mistakes and they’re gonna say “Well, that little community there is just really not producing that much revenue, so we’re not gonna renew that lease.” So that is kind of stuck in the back of my head right now, where in 15 years I’m gonna have 12 stores that are all kind of renewing at the same time, and that does present some risk, because if Dollar General does leave, and I’ve paid 1.2 million dollars for that location, the chances of me finding another tenant in that area…

Joe Fairless: Not gonna happen.

Dan Gorman: …where when they signed a lease makes it worth that much money is pretty big.

Joe Fairless: Yeah.

Dan Gorman: So my strategy to deal with that is I’ve got a couple brokers out there working for me, and I said “I wanna continue to trim this portfolio where –” So I’ve got 12 of them. Within the next 12 months probably, even though we just closed a year and a half ago, while they’ve still got 11, 12, 13 years left on the lease, I’m gonna try and shed some of the ones that might be in some of the more remote locations, or maybe don’t perform as well, if I can figure out which ones those are… And then replace them again with more Dollar Generals or something similar.

Joe Fairless: Okay.

Dan Gorman: So we just continue to update the portfolio with leases that are more spread out and not all expiring at the same time.

Joe Fairless: Well, you read my mind with where I was going with this. [laughs] I figured you’d thought about that; I was curious about your thought process.

Dan Gorman: Yeah.

Joe Fairless: Cool. And you mentioned that you’ve done mobile home parks, low-income tax and bond deals, market rate apartment community with some mixed-used, with Starbucks and Graeter’s, the ice cream shop in Cincinnati… Your background is in electrical engineering; a lot of the engineers I know are very methodical about things, and it surprises me a little bit that when you hit a walk-off grand slam with the first deal, that you chose to do other things besides what you just hit a grand slam doing. So why choose all these different variety of asset classes? Clearly, you’re in multifamily for most of them, but it’s a different flavor of multifamily, and then you did a mobile home park… So why not just go with what you had been doing initially, that made you all the money?

3: I don’t know. The engineer in me — I really love the numbers. The most favorite thing that I do involved in real estate is just figuring out a good deal and figuring out how to close it. That’s where I get all my juice. I don’t know if you’re the same way or not, but…

Then, after it’s closed, I keep saying to myself “Okay, I’m gonna take a break and just focus on the portfolio etc.” but I can’t help myself. Within 24 hours I’m looking for the next deal, it feels like. I really enjoy the challenge of figuring something out.

So I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m gonna go specifically look to buy mobile home parks now, or I’m gonna specifically look to do a tax credit deal. It’s just kind of those opportunities end up in front of me as I’m doing my research for the next deal, and I’m like “Wow, that’s interesting…” And then I start just kind of going down that path to try to figure out whether or not  — well, I guess you can either continue to wait for the same exact type of thing you already have, or if something comes along that seems interesting too, you can go down that path.

I feel like it was — I wouldn’t say it was the smartest thing I’ve ever done, diverting into mobile home parks, but when you look back at it now, after 20 years, the breadth of experience has really helped me become a better investor now.

So luckily though, we were getting so much cashflow from that 168 units that it made it okay if I made a little bit of a mistake. The mobile home parks for me was a mistake. It didn’t lose money, but we didn’t make much money on those, and I just could never figure out how to get that right.

But if I’d had a capital call for myself, where I had to jack some money in, I was able to do that because the cashflow on the 168-unit was so great. I don’t know if that answers your question or not…

Joe Fairless: Yeah, it does.

Dan Gorman: It just kind of makes it more interesting for me. I always felt like — I guess from the very beginning I never really had any money, and I think sometimes people go a couple different ways when you get a big chunk of money and you’ve never had any… You can kind of like  hunker down and protect it… But for me, I was always like “You know what – you only get one life; let’s try some cool stuff and see what happens. If it some of it or all of it goes away, we can start over again.”

Joe Fairless: You mentioned that mobile home parks didn’t lose money, but they didn’t make it. Was that the least profitable out of the things you’ve done since?

Dan Gorman: Yeah, I would say definitely the least profitable. I did that with a buddy of mine, one of my best friends. He was looking to buy business at that time, and I’m just kind of like dipping my toe in the mobile home park business… So we kind of gapped this business plan together, where we were gonna buy 1,000 pads together, and hire a really high-powered, regional person to run that for us. So we acquired three parks fairly quickly, and what we ended up doing was we felt like if we bought a park out in the middle of the country, that there would be the possibility of competition because they could maybe open a different park a few miles down the road, or whatever… So for one reason or another we ended up focusing on more urban parks, or parks that had been around for a while, but are surrounded by a populated area, because we felt like the land would be desirable, and we would be an easy thing to sell because of the proximity to the population, and things like that.

But what we figured out was that when you have a mobile home park in a really populated area that’s kind of old and run down, that you’re not the most popular people in town. The municipality usually isn’t too excited to have you around, they cost a lot of money to maintain those homes… So the problem is that when you have a park that’s been there for 50 or 60 years and you’ve got a lot of old homes in it, a lot of the regulations continue to change and get more and more strict about those homes. So if you ever want to take a home out of there, it is super expensive to bring another home back in… So you end up having to continue to — we have these trailers that are kind of grandfathered in, and for us it was just this gradual slide down that was really tough to stop, and no matter what we tried, how much money we threw at the problem, we just could not solve it… So it was just really challenging for us.

So I would never, ever touch a mobile home park again myself. Now, I know that people love them… I was just on vacation with a guy who’s got a bunch of them and loves it, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it well.

Joe Fairless: Based on your experience as a real estate investor, taking a step back, assessing the last couple decades, what is your best advice ever for real estate investors?

Dan Gorman: I don’t know. I don’t know what to say to that. I feel like I try to deal with a lot of integrity with the way I treat my employees and my tenants, and my faith is really important to me, and I feel like if I let that guide my actions and kind of just trust that this is gonna work out, and things like that, [unintelligible [00:24:11].23] what I do with my money, and stuff, I feel that things end up working out okay in the end.

I’d say for the most people that meet with me and they wanna figure out how to get started, and they wanna buy a single-family home or whatever, what I say to most of the younger folks that I meet with is that it’s real estate investing. If you want to start growing, you’ve gotta have this plan to get big chunks of money, because the days of the no money down stuff – that might have worked 20 years ago. It’s a little bit more challenging now, with these banks… They want to see buyers with a decent amount of skin.

So I’m usually advising folks to work out some flips, and things like that, so they can get these chunks together, and then figure out how to — get a chunk of cash, so you can get something of a decent size… Because a lot of the people that I see that are investing in two-families and four-families – it’s a challenge, because if you have a unit that’s empty for a while, or you need a roof or a boiler or whatever, that kind of wipes out your profit for the year, and it can be a little bit defeating or deflating for some of those folks.

But if your end goal is to say “Okay, I wanna have an apartment community that is big enough to have a manager and a maintenance guy, so I’m gonna need to have $750,000 cash to do that, then let’s figure out how we start from nothing, or whatever I’ve got, to get to $750,000.” If you’re rolling that money over to it, you accomplish that goal.

Joe Fairless: Yup. It makes sense. We’re gonna do a lightning round. Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?

Dan Gorman: No.

Joe Fairless: Well, we’re gonna do it anyway, regardless if you’re ready or not… [laughs] Alright, first though, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.

Break: [00:25:42].27] to [00:26:21].14]

Joe Fairless: Okay, best ever book you’ve recently read, Dan.

Dan Gorman: Best ever book I’ve recently read… I’m just gonna go back to The E Myth, which is the Michael Gerber book.

Joe Fairless: Yup. What’s a mistake you’ve made on a transaction that we haven’t talked about already?

Dan Gorman: Paying too much for a property.

Joe Fairless: How much did you pay?

Dan Gorman: Well, I paid four million dollars for an apartment community, then I put the tax credits on it, and stuff like that… And I could never recover, because I paid too much. So this is what I’ve learned from all my mistakes – it’s a very common mantra in business, which is that you make all your money when you buy, so… Don’t fall in love with it. Walk away if you can’t get a good deal.

Joe Fairless: Do you still have that property?

Dan Gorman: No, I just sold it within the last six months. I ended up doing okay on it, but it was very painful. I owned it since 2004, and it was just very, very challenging for many years.

Joe Fairless: What did you end up selling it for?

Dan Gorman: Well, it was complicated, because it was this tax credit thing, and all that kind of stuff… So we ended up probably making 1,5 million dollars on the thing when all was said and done… But halfway through it though, I was talking [unintelligible [00:27:27].15] about going bankrupt, because it was so stressful and challenging, because we paid too much… And luckily, we were able to survive that period, but very, very stressful.

Joe Fairless: Hm. Besides paying too much on the front-end, what’s something else about that deal, if you were presented it again, that you’d do a little bit differently?

Dan Gorman: Well, I was being counseled on that deal by a lot of people that we’re gonna make money if I closed on it, so… I did not fully understand it, and I can’t even say I understand it now. [unintelligible [00:27:58].13] low-income tax credits, things like that… So I got into a deal not only paying too much for the property, but also not fully understanding the mechanics of the financing, and how many fees and things like that there would be involved with it… So I would say that the consequences of making a mistake because either you pay too much or you don’t fully understand can really be magnified with real estate. Leverage is great in real estate to be able to really magnify your wealth, but also leverage can come back to bite you when you’ve only put a little money down, but you’re responsible for a huge project, and you carry the burden of that huge project if it goes sideways.

Joe Fairless: On the flipside, a more sunshine and roses – what’s the best ever way you like to give back? You mentioned it a little bit, about the concrete homes that you’re building in Rwanda… What’s the name of that company?

Dan Gorman: The name of my company is United Property Group, and the name of that company is United Property Group Africa. So if you looked at UPGAfrica.com, it’s got a video of the homes, and it kind of explains the process, and things like that. So that is a very, very exciting thing to be veering into. I tried to devote enough time to it, but I’ve actually hired an American guy to kind of go back and forth, and [unintelligible [00:29:08].03] But I think that the potential, if you can figure out how to solve some of the issues in the developing countries and make money at the same time, I feel like there’s a huge, huge potential.

So if you wanna make money, you can. If you wanna do it as a philanthropic effort, you could do that as well, but… There’s large potential.

Joe Fairless: And how can the Best Ever listeners learn more about your company? You just mentioned it, and I’m actually on your website as you were talking, because I wanted to check out the UPGAfrica.com… But any other way, or is that the best way?

Dan Gorman: That’s probably the best way. We’re redoing our website right now, so my website is not the greatest right now… UPGAfrica.com is the most exciting thing I’ve got going on right now.

Joe Fairless: Dan, thanks for sharing your story, talking about lessons learned, talking about what it was like getting 1.5 million in the bank account when you’d seen about two or three less zeroes at most in your bank account up until that point… And lessons learned for how you are mitigating the risk of when you have these 15-year leases on the Dollar Generals that you own, what you’re doing now to help mitigate risk for the future on that, and then obviously the other transactions that we talked about… So thanks so much for being on the show. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Dan Gorman: Okay, thanks Joe. It was nice talking to you, too.