Want to learn how a small-town real estate investor closed over 400 deals last year? Eric Brewer spills the beans on scaling a business with his "innovator's edge" strategy, revealing hidden profit channels and essential leadership insights.
"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Eric Brewer. Eric Brewer's company flips or wholesales over 400 houses every year. Today he shares with me some of the lessons that he's learned over that process through implementing different exit strategies and developing as a leader to help his company grow. Welcome to the podcast Eric, how you doing?"
"Doing great man, how are you?"
"Hey, fantastic. Excited to talk with you again. I can tell you, you're one person every time we talk I learn something and I appreciate that a ton. So I'm excited for you to be on this podcast, mostly selfishly, mostly just because I want to learn a few things from you."
"Cool, well I'll do my best not to let you down. We'll see how we do."
"So for people listening to this podcast that might not know you, might not know who you are, your background or anything like that, could you share just a little bit about like, you know, who are you? What have you done? Like the history of how you've gotten to where you are today and then you know, what are you doing now?"
"Yeah sure. So I am in York, Pennsylvania. It's a relatively small rural area about 45 minutes north of Baltimore, Maryland, and about 30 minutes south of the capital of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. And then about 3 and a half hours east of Pittsburgh and an hour and a half east of Philadelphia. So if you sort of triangulate that stuff, I am in the southern east portion of PA closer to Baltimore than really any other notable area. I am a real estate investor, been doing it since 2006. Currently have roughly 40 plus employees. We operate in three markets within two hours of our home office here. We did just north of 400 real estate deals last year. I got my start really in business in the automobile industry. Went out of high school, went into the army, got out of the army, got into the car business, spent eight years in the car business. Really learned how to sell there, learned how to manage, learned a little bit of marketing. Got burned out. The car business back in this would have been the late '90s early 2000s was very demanding from a schedule perspective and it's never been known as like the most enjoyable atmosphere to either sell or buy in, right?"
"I think uh most people that sell cars don't love the experience and I don't know, Consumer Reports said a couple years ago that like 98% of people that bought a car didn't love the experience as well. So I was, you know, that was catching up to me. The hours were weighing on me and I was about to have my first child. So in 2005 I left the car business, did some soul searching, decided to get into real estate, started my real estate career in finance. Was basically cold calling refinance leads at a mortgage company and after doing that for about six months, my previous mentor from the car business got into real estate, knew that I had made the transition out of the car business and called me. And uh a couple days later we partnered up and in February of 2006 we started flipping houses."
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