“Anybody who has the money, or the connections could go out and buy a property, whether it be just one unit or 25 or 200 units if they have that type of capital, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a great real estate investor.”
Joseph and Jasmine Mims are owners of Abundant Culture, a private equity investment company that buys, funds and grows small businesses. They strive to spread abundance throughout the world using conscious capitalism. They also host Abundant Culture Podcasts, where business owners learn how to grow the value of their businesses and investment portfolios.
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Creating Wealth Through Value-Added Opportunities With Joseph & Jasmin Mims
Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. They are a couple, and they are a rock star couple out of the great state of Illinois. And they’re going to share with us ways to buy businesses, right? And so a lot of people know how to buy real estate, and that’s cool, but what about buying businesses, right? What about making wealth through value-add opportunities? Most people think just real estate but think about value-add for businesses. So I’m excited to welcome Joseph and Jasmine to the show. Hey, Joseph and Jasmine, how are you doing?
Jasmine:
Great.
Joseph:
We’re doing excellent. Yeah.
Jasmine:
Thank you again, Brett, for having us on the show.
Brett:
Excellent. And their last name is Mims, M-I-M-S, and you can find them at AbundanceCulture.co. That’s, I’m sorry, abundantculture.co. That’ll be in the show notes. But maybe just start, give listeners a little bit about your background and your current focus.
Joseph:
Our story and journey started a few years ago when we were in the military. The reason why we joined the military is that Jasmine and I both came from backgrounds where there wasn’t an abundance of money. Do you know? And we made it. It’s not like we never enjoyed Christmas. I never tell people that we were impoverished the whole time, but there were definitely some really, really hard times where lights were cut off, water was cut off, for whatever reason, because our parents, they weren’t necessarily financially together the whole time when we were younger. But what they instilled in us is the desire to further our education. And one thing we were always taught was that through education, you can make your life better. And that was something that was really attractive to me, because like I said, there were times where we struggled financially when I was younger. And my parents showed me that if you get a good education, you can alleviate that. You can make that situation better, and you don’t have to go through those things. And I was like, okay, that sounds great to me. So we didn’t really know how we were going to pay for school, though, because when I asked my parents, they said they would be willing to help, but I knew their financial situation, and I was like, I don’t want to put that burden on them. And then her parents just knew flat out they wouldn’t be able to help. So we had to figure out our own way, and we found out that the military paid for school. And we were like, okay, that sounds great. So we ended up joining the military just to pay our way through school. And right after basic training, we ended up joining the military reserves because obviously, we didn’t really want to do it full time, we just wanted the benefits, to be very honest. But after getting out of basic training, I think we were there for five months or whatever, we were home for about a month, started getting jobs, and were planning to go to school and stuff like that. But then we got a call basically saying that we were going to get deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was not within our plans at all. So we went on that deployment, and that’s where we actually met up and started dating. And us meeting each other was the nice part about it, but being there, we knew that this military thing wasn’t something that we were willing to do for 20-plus years. When we got back home from that deployment, we were kind of happy because we thought, oh, we’re veterans now. We had saved up quite a bit of money from the deployment. We got all these great benefits coming to us. So we thought we were going to start living this American dream that we always heard about. But when we got home, we figured out that the opposite of that would actually be true. We spent several months unemployed after applying to dozens upon dozens of jobs, both of us. And I remember when she was going to school. She did get to go to school, so that was the upside. And I was driving her either from or to her school one day, and I remember seeing this homeless person, but it just wasn’t any homeless person, it was a homeless veteran. And that’s the first time in my life where I realized, oh, I thought there was something always wrong with those guys, but maybe they were just really unlucky. And I felt that I could possibly end up in that same position if I didn’t actually change the course that I was taking because I was totally functional. I could work a job and do really, really well, but it was hard to find one. So I remember getting home and just remembering that I had done all of those things up until that point because I was searching for financial stability. I didn’t even have a concept of what financial freedom was at the time, but I wasn’t even financially stable. So that led to me reading that very, very pivotal book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It changed my perspective about a lot of things. And that book led to the next book, which led to mentors, which led to other mentors. And I literally spent almost two years of my life straight studying nothing but wealth and finance for anywhere between four to sometimes 16 hours a day. And I studied under various people in real estate and the stock market, and I spent tons of money on actual training. And then that’s when I started my… At first, it was a real estate investment company, and we ended up raising capital for a deal in Jacksonville, Florida, which was really cool. But I felt like that still wasn’t the thing yet, so I actually ended up buying a coffee shop franchise. And then I was like, okay, this is it. This is more so my speed. And not that I don’t like real estate, I definitely love real estate, but I like to have the two investment vehicles really work together. So that’s when I started my private equity company, which buys and grows businesses. We raise capital from investors, and then we help them get the returns from businesses that they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily be able to invest in because they don’t have the expertise in the operations. So that’s kind of the CliffsNotes version of the whole store. And today, that’s pretty much what we do. We buy businesses and we help other people do the same.
Brett:
That’s amazing. What a story. What a journey of perseverance, mind shift, what may be the traditional way of doing things thought that it would turn out. But it still led to the journey of figuring out a way to become an entrepreneur, become a business person, and buy businesses. And so I’m so excited to dive into those exact things and those types of returns, and how they compare and contrast. I love what you said, getting the two to work together, real estate and business. Beautiful. Let’s dive right into that. Or even more so, when did you become fascinated with, instead of just real estate, because it sounds like you started in real estate, and then you went to the business path. What was the coffee shop, and then, hey, okay now business is working well, now let’s focus really on buying more businesses? Give me a feel for that. What’s the biggest person who’s in real estate listening right now who doesn’t realize the opportunity for businesses, if that makes sense?
Joseph:
What I realized is when I raised capital for this deal in Jacksonville, Florida, I got a chance to take a look at how real estate runs as a business. And I think a lot of people when they’re first getting into building wealth and investing in things of this nature, they’re really product-focused. And what I realized is that, at least to me, and this is my opinion, that real estate in itself is a product, and what you do with that real estate is actually the business. Now, anybody who has the money, or the connections could go out and buy a property, whether it be just one unit or 25 or 200 units if they have that type of capital, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a great real estate investor. That just means that you had the money to buy something, and you were able to buy it. So I was like, huh. There’s a manager. There’s technical customer service involved in this. The real estate itself, that’s inventory. I just started to make all of these connections between real estate and other businesses. And then one day I came to the realization that real estate and other business models aren’t very different. What I started to realize is that… And actually, I met this guy at a meet-up one day, and he had run other businesses. He had multimillion-dollar exits, and then he became a real estate investor. And this guy, the way he ran, he didn’t know everything there was to know about real estate, but he created systems that allowed him to be a better real estate investor than most people who have been in real estate for a very, very long time. I was like, wait a minute. And you ask some questions, and then he’ll answer it kind of like a guy who is more of a business owner as opposed to a real estate investor, but his product, what he did was, he took all that business knowledge that he had, and then he just applied to a different product. So after realizing that, I’m like, oh, so real estate’s a product, but most businesses actually are related in the types of systems that they have in use. I was like, so I wonder what other businesses I could run. And Jasmine, at the time she was applying kind of just for a part-time job just to bring some extra money in, and she applied to this coffee shop. And then they said, “We’re not hiring at this time, but once we do start hiring, we’ll let you know.”
Jasmine:
I also told them that I was a real estate investor at the time. So then they were like, “Hey, we’re expanding. Do you want to talk about that opportunity?” And it’s so funny, because I didn’t reply to that email, and then a couple of months later, they were like, “Hey, we’re hiring now.” And then that’s when I was like, “Well, I don’t want the job anymore, but we can talk about the opportunity.” So the coffee shop kind of just landed in our lap. We were not looking for businesses at all.
Joseph:
But what we really found is that a lot of the knowledge that we gained from real estate investing transferred right over into the coffee shop so smoothly. And we were like, wow. It was just an amazing realization. And we didn’t even have a background in… I knew nothing about coffee before I bought the coffee shop, let’s just be honest.
Jasmine:
We didn’t know what a latte was or espresso. We just knew what iced coffee was.
Joseph:
Yeah, I had no idea. So to be able to buy that company and grow it really, really rapidly once we bought it, without having the background in it, it kind of opened up this whole world of possibilities that I think a lot of people are kind of shut off from, from a mentality standpoint. Because what I tell people is, “You can buy a business and gain the knowledge about that business to run it, but you don’t necessarily need a background in that business in order to buy it and run it successfully.” It’s kind of one of those things that come… Just like you learn to ride a bike by riding a bike, business ownership is very, very similar, just more money involved, obviously.
Brett:
Wow. So much there, and I’m going to try to encapsulate some of it here. So instead of just buying something to buy it, you got to look at it like it’s a product, whether it be real estate, whether it be the coffee shop, whatever it might be. And really what you’re doing is you’re like a system owner or a system builder or a system expert. That’s really the vision. I want to be that. I want to just own a coffee shop or own real estate. Those are just products. I want to know that I know the systems, I know the dialect, I know the language, I know how to communicate, I know how to build these things. Is that a fair summary?
Joseph:
Yeah, absolutely. Because one of the things I’ve started to see a lot in real estate, there will be these guys who own a few units, and they own enough units to where you would think that they would be financially free and that they wouldn’t have to really do very much. But they were at their units all the time. They were always having trouble with tenants, toilets, termites, all those good things. And there’s a lot of real estate investors who know how to buy the product, and maybe they can get it cash flow, but they don’t have the systems in place to where they can go out of town, and there can be an emergency and they can get that emergency handled without them actually being there. So that’s where the realization really came from, is it’s about systems. And I feel like, personally, and this is just my opinion, real estate is the best product, or at least one of the best products, because everybody needs it, and there’s such a huge market demand for it. So it’s a very safe product to create a business around, but at the end of the day, it’s not something where it’s like you just do it, and it works out. You can still screw it up if you don’t have the correct systems in place.
Brett:
Perfect. So what’s the top business, though? Because a lot of our listeners know real estate, they’re in real estate, or they’re helping people buy and sell real estate. So they kind of get that. But let’s move to the business. If Joseph and Jasmine were to move to Northern California and buy a business, we want to see how that’s running or that’s running. Do you know what I mean? Because you guys have obviously been successful in what you’ve been doing there in Illinois and in Indiana, but that’s like, oh my gosh, there’s such a big gap between technology and systems, and people are kind of doing it the old way… I like to call the old way the Blockbuster, right?
Joseph:
Yeah.
Brett:
The old Blockbuster way. People are stuck in the Blockbuster days, and it’s like, “Hey, guess what? There’s a thing called Netflix.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, no. I’m used to doing it my own way, driving, getting to Blockbuster, looking for that video behind the thing, having to rewind it.” But there’s a Netflix, so what is the best Netflix opportunity out there that you’re seeing?
Jasmine:
I would say it really depends on the person because a lot of people are really interested in franchises. And to be honest, we are not really a fan of franchises anymore because we like to have control. And we know that we grow faster than a lot of the franchise orgs. would be growing at. For some people, franchises may be the best thing for them because the systems are already in place, the product is there, so they really don’t have to do much but run it. But on the other side, someone like us, where they don’t really care to have a franchise because they want to have total control over what they’re doing, then really, I mean, they can get into anything. As long as it’s making money, it pretty much makes sense. Right now we’re not really looking too much into restaurants, but if we see a really good deal for a restaurant, we’re not going to turn it down.
Joseph:
Yeah. And also, another thing I will also say is that when it comes to business types, I mean, on a very, very high level, you have products, and then you have services. And this is just from my experience. What I’ve seen is that it’s really easy to have high profitability in a lot of service-based businesses, because the main expense that most businesses have is the cost of goods, cost of goods sold. And what that really means is, let’s say if I wanted to start selling laptops. I’m talking to you on my laptop. How much does it cost? How much does the material for the laptop actually cost me? If I know I could sell a laptop for 500 bucks, but I can get the material for let’s to say 100 bucks, that’s about a 20% cost of goods, which is not bad at all. But when I’m doing a service, let’s say I prepare people’s taxes or I’m a bookkeeper, I effectively don’t have any cost of goods, so the only variable there is whatever my labor cost is. So in products, you have the cost of goods sold, and a lot of times that can include the cost of the materials and also the cost of the labor. But in service-based businesses, you only have the cost of labor, and there are not many material costs that go with it. It’s really simple for those types of businesses to have high-profit margins. Another thing is eCommerce businesses, like a lot of dropshipping stores. People buy and sell those things all the time, and it’s because it’s such low-hanging fruit. You can start one for a couple of thousand bucks and can scale it almost infinitely. So service-based businesses, online businesses are really, really good businesses to get into just because of high-profit margins and how easy it is to actually start in those companies.
Brett:
Excellent. So now let’s walk through a sample, right? So you guys are like, “Hey.” A new coaching client comes in, and they’re listening or they’re interested right now because they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need these systems. I need something. I need someone to coach and guide me on this.” Walk us through maybe the top one or two systems immediately you want to make sure is either dialed in or started. What would that be for… A lot of our listeners are business professionals, right? They’re luxury realtors, they’re commercial real estate brokers, they’re business brokers, they’re commercial real estate syndicators, financial advisors. Walk us through, for the service, for high net worth individuals that they’re serving, what would be the system to start today, or to improve upon?
Joseph:
Yeah, so when it comes to systems, really the hardest part about buying businesses is actually… It’s not even really finding the businesses, it’s about finding the right owner and the right broker. Because I’ve seen really, really good deals, and I mean deals with 50 cents on the dollar, over a half a million dollars worth of equity already built into it, six figures of cash flow after management is paid.
Jasmine:
It makes you salivate at the mouth thinking about it.
Creating Wealth Through Value-Added Opportunities With Joseph & Jasmin Mims
Joseph:
Yeah, so ridiculously good deals, probably get into it with 10% down or less. But I’ve seen those super good deals really fall apart and fall to the wayside because the broker of that business or the owner of that business was really, really hard to work with. And what I mean by that is that… I did a deal, or I was working on a deal where I told the guy, “Hey, I’m raising this capital from investors, and blah, blah, blah. Here’s how we’re actually planning to do the deal.” And the problem that really came in was that they required 20% earnest money, which is not something that people would usually ask for. It’s usually between one and five percent. 20% earnest money, and also personal financial statements, which at the time, it didn’t really make too much sense because we weren’t actually going to be financing it through a bank at all. It was really, really difficult to work with that broker and the seller of that company because they require so much. And the earnest money and stuff wouldn’t have necessarily been a problem, it’s just that it was a problem before we actually got a chance to do the rest of our due diligence that we needed in order to make an offer. And usually, with me, I can make an offer on a business if everything’s moving along smoothly within probably two to three weeks. But that’s kind of the thing that falls through. So I think the first thing that you would need to look at in order to really pursue buying companies is to make sure that you have optimal deal flow. And for me, there’s a couple of ways to do that. There’s kind of the low-hanging fruit and the automated way where you get a large quantity. You might not get all the quality, but you’ll get a large number of deals. You can go to places like Biz Buy Sell, Biz Quest. There are a couple more, but those are kind of the top two.
Jasmine:
You can just search businesses for sale, and a whole bunch of sites will pop up.
Joseph:
Yeah, you’ll have a whole bunch of sites pop up. And then you put in your criteria, and a lot of times, a lot of people want to put their criteria for revenue or cash flow, and that’s great because I mean, that’s really what you’re looking for. That’s what you’re trying to buy. But also keep in mind that a lot of the revenues and cash flows a lot of times can be misrepresented for whatever reason. I’ve run into that plenty of times where they’ll say, “Oh, we make $1.2 million in revenue,” and it’s really eight or $900-thousand for whatever reason, at least for the prior year. So keep in mind that whatever you see for revenue and cash flow, you really have to validate that, because it might not necessarily be true. I’ve seen people be $100-thousand off on the low side, and also $100-thousand off on the high side. A lot of times with my criteria, what I look at is just purchase price. And right now I look for businesses that are $750,000 and under, and honestly, I just pulled that number up, because I could probably go a little higher or a little bit slower, but that’s kind of where most of the opportunities that I see. So go on these sites, put in your criteria. And a lot of these sites will have a tab in the corner that will basically say, “Do you want to get daily updates for businesses that hit this criterion?” I would say click that. Right now I have dozens of businesses that I have to look at because they get sent right to my email. So it’s really simple to get deal flow. And then after that, once you get deal flow… And also, make sure you tell everybody that you’re actually buying businesses. I mean-
Jasmine:
On your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, networking meetings. Tell everyone.
Joseph:
Yeah, because a lot of people, struggle with getting deal flow sometimes because people don’t actually know what they’re looking for, so you have to kind of put it out there. And one thing I’ve learned is if you always position yourself as the person who has access to capital, people will bring you deals because people who have deals need the capital. There’s a lot of things that you can do to position yourself like that. But once you have a sufficient amount of deal flow, you also need a way to analyze these companies. And that is even a process that I’m still kind of learning the technicality about, but for the most part, I’ve had people who bought and sold businesses professionally either as brokers or actual buyers, and I was able to get my hands on the calculators and spreadsheets that they use in order to analyze them. And what you want to do when you’re analyzing a business, the main thing that you’re trying to get a hold of is what’s the real cash flow. Because just because it says $50,000 in net income or net earnings or whatever doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the cash flow that you’re going to get when you buy it, because they may have bad debts. Let’s say they have $1-thousand in bad debts. You have to add that $1-thousand back into the cash flow because that’s not going to be an expense that you yourself incur because those bad debts are going to go away once they’re paid off. There are things like owner’s health insurance. Owners can spend thousands. I think I saw one owner spend $6-thousand per year on health insurance. Well, that’s not a real expense for a new buyer because the owner is not going to be there, so you won’t have to pay for that.
Jasmine:
Or if they write off their cars, and if they’re trying to pay zero in tax, they probably have a lot of add-backs that you can get.
Joseph:
Yeah. And those things are called add-backs. So you’re looking for the expenses that won’t be your expenses, and then you add that back into the cash flow. And once you do that, you actually get the cash flow number, and usually, that cash flow number is multiplied by a factor of maybe anywhere between three and six. I think usually it’s about four. And that’ll be pretty much around the purchase price of the business before you factor in the assets. So the most important part, what you’re going to spend 90% of your time doing is actually getting the deal flow and analyzing deals. And usually, if you do it correctly, you can get a deal and analyze it probably within two days if you’re busy, as long as you have the… The first thing you want to look for is obviously either the P&Ls for the last three years or the tax returns for the last three years. Once you have those three documents, you can analyze a company, and it shouldn’t take you too much more than a day.
Brett:
Excellent.
Joseph:
After you have those documents.
Brett:
Excellent. This is really very helpful and detailed too, so I appreciate that. And by the way, Jasmine and Joseph, provide coaching for this, right? So talk a little bit about your service and what you do. Because someone will be hearing that being like, “Okay, I got some of that, but I need someone to kind of hold my hand.”
Joseph:
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett:
So walk us through what that looks like.
Joseph:
Yeah. The first type of coaching that we give is just kind of really, really surface-level wealth coaching. And what that coaching really entails is just pretty much everything that we’ve learned, or at least the important things that we’ve learned for the past three years. I mean, we spent well over $30-thousand on different coaches, mentors, and courses, and different things of that nature. And what we really do is take the best parts of each of those things and put it into our course, and package it for a fairly low price so that people can get started. And I think that’s the most important thing, is that people get started educating themselves. What we go over is, we talk about micro and macro-economics, and how that actually applies to you as an individual. Because in school, you’ll learn a little bit about economics, and then it’s like, it has nothing to do with me, because of the way they teach it. But what we actually do is scale it back and say, “Here’s how all of these things actually apply to you.” So we teach a little bit of economics, not too much to where it’s overpowering. We talk about real estate, business, and we teach people the financial jargon that they’ll run into if they decide to get into real estate or buying businesses. And we really just guide them through like, “Here are all the things you need from just a general wealth standpoint.” And we package it up into about a 19-step from beginning to end. And then from there, if somebody wants extra coaching, we have coaching calls that they can get on with us, and we can walk them through what they should be doing right then and there and give them actionable steps to actually take. And then if they won’t really, really high-level coaching, I mean, the type that I’m still going through myself, that’s when we introduce them to my partner and mentor, Ed, and he’s the guy who goes way, way, way more in-depth about the intricacies on actually talking to brokers, talking to sellers, how to do that so that you can actually get deals actually closed and done.
You can buy a business and gain the knowledge about that business to run it, but you don't necessarily need a background in that business in order to buy it and run it successfully. Click To Tweet
Brett:
Love it.
Joseph:
Because we actually bought, and what a lot of people don’t know, is we bought businesses before we had any formal training in buying businesses. And even though we did pretty well, we would be so much further ahead if we had guidance in doing that. And it’s something where this guy has helped me tremendously. And I went from, it’ll take me months to figure out if a business is actually going to work out now. I could find that out in pretty much a week or two now.
Brett:
Love it.
Joseph:
It saves a lot of time, and money as well.
Brett:
It’s well worth the investment. I love that. Love that. Well, that is amazing, so much there, and so much more to unpack, which you can go to AbundantCulture.co to learn more. But in the meantime, are you ready for the lightning round?
Joseph:
Absolutely.
Jasmine:
Yes.
Brett:
All right. We’re going to start with Jasmine on this one. Jasmine, knowing what you know now, if you can go back to your 25-year-old self, what’s the one golden nugget you would make sure you told yourself?
Jasmine:
Well, I have to be honest. I haven’t hit 25 yet. We are only 24 years old right now.
Joseph:
Go back to 20.
Jasmine:
Back to 20, then.
Brett:
Go back to 20.
Jasmine:
Back to 20, what was I doing? I guess we were getting out of the military. Definitely, I would tell myself to kind of just remain open-minded and to learn more, really. Because back in the day, I wasn’t as curious as I am now. And if I had that same curiosity, then I would have explored more into business and real estate, because I kind of had an idea, and I wanted to set up a trust and stuff, but I didn’t really have anybody to go to yet to teach me how to really get it done. I kind of was just looking at my parents like, “So what do I do next?” And they didn’t know.
Brett:
Because they hadn’t done it yet, right? You got to go to someone who’s done that thing you’re trying to do. Excellent. Question two, to Joseph. What is the one book you’ve recommended or gifted the most in the past year?
Joseph:
I would say I probably recommended… Man, I recommend so many.
Jasmine:
Joseph:
Oren Klaff? Okay. Oren Klaff, Flip the Script. That is a book that I absolutely love. It has to be at least a biannually, read it twice a year type book, because it’s about how to really influence people and how to sell and how to market without being pushy or needy. And that’s so important. I don’t care if you’re in real estate if you’re in some other type of business if you have a coffee shop or a tax preparation office. Whatever you have, people like to do business with people who know how to sell without necessarily pushing them into feeling buyer’s remorse or something like that. And plus, Oren Klaff is just a really, really entertaining, very charismatic character, so that’s a book that I absolutely love. He also wrote Pitch Anything, but Flip the Script is probably my favorite book by him.
Brett:
Excellent. Question three, to Jasmine. Jasmine, give me a digital or mobile resource you recommend for your business.
Jasmine:
What do I use a lot? I guess I really like…
Joseph:
Mailchimp.
Jasmine:
Mailchimp? No. I would say I like LinkedIn a lot because I think that’s actually where I met you at. So I don’t use it as much as I should. However, I’ve been learning that I should get on LinkedIn so much more because that’s probably more so where my target audience is than Instagram.
Joseph:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Brett:
Cool. Joseph, favorite leadership quote or thing that you try to live by.
Joseph:
Favorite leadership quote or thing that I try to live by. I heard something, and I’m probably going to butcher it, but I remember somebody saying something along the lines of that, “Discipline is the bridge between where you are today and where you want to be.” And I think that resonates with me so much because a lot of people try to figure out, oh, what’s the one action, what’s the one thing I could do? What’s the one thing I could do in order to get from A to B? And to be honest, in life what I’ve noticed is that even if there is one repetitive action, you have to do that day in and day out. And I tell people all the time, “Until you’ve done something for at least 90 days straight, don’t give up on it.” Because it’s like people try it for like 10 days, and they’re like, “Oh, this isn’t working.” And it’s like, 10 days is a very short amount of time, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that. So really be disciplined. And when you try something, try it over and over again, because things take time. And I know being patient really sucks. I don’t like doing it. But it’s something that over the course of my life, everything that I’ve had success in, I feel like I’ve had success in it because I was disciplined.
Brett:
Love that. That’s fantastic. Jasmine, what are you curious about right now?
Jasmine:
Right now, we just bought a course going over how to get more into the fund world and talk to wealth managers to raise capital from the big dogs, and not just little increments anymore. So I guess it would be starting a fund because that’s what we plan on doing later this year.
Brett:
Love that. And this is the last question. It’ll be for both of you. We’ll start with Joseph. Joseph, after your success so far, military, humble beginnings, persevering, becoming a business owner and coach, how do you stay centered in your values, Joseph? And then how do you stay encouraged to charge forward to reach new goals?
Joseph:
Man, that’s an excellent question. How I stay centered in my values, honestly, I’m a follower of Christ, a believer of God, and I really do my best to try to stay grounded in the word and the teachings. And I tell people, “Even if you aren’t Christian, there’s definitely a lot of success principles that you can actually take away from the Bible.” I haven’t got to a point where I’m doing it every single day, like I said, for 90 days straight, but multiple times a week, I just listen to sermons, especially now because people need this type of encouragement. There’s a lot going on, and you need to have inner peace about yourself as you’re going out through the world and actually accomplishing whatever mission that you have for yourself. The other thing that I do, which is extremely important, is having good friends and good teammates around you. I think when you surround yourself with people who are your equal but also believe in what you can be, they won’t allow you to slack off and beat yourself up, and different things of that nature. So especially a lot of my business friends, I try to meet with them as frequently as possible, because they’re the type of people who are like, “Oh yeah, you’re doing great, but you also could be doing this, and you know that.” And they really hold you accountable, especially my wife here. So that’s something that’s really, really awesome. And the next question was-
Brett:
Stay encouraged to reach for new goals, right? What’s driving you to climb the next mountain?
Joseph:
Absolutely. The way I really stay focused on achieving the goals that I have set for myself is really, comes down to always remembering that me accomplishing things isn’t just for me. It’s about more people than just myself. I always tell people when, especially in regards to building wealth, people… I heard somebody say the other day, “Oh, I don’t know what I would do if I made $50,000 a month. I wouldn’t even want to make that type of month.” And then I challenged them on that thought, and I basically said, “Well, there’s a lot of people who can’t pay rent. I mean, you can help other people pay rent. There are charitable causes that can use some of that capital. There are people in this world that need you to succeed in order for them to succeed.” So I kind of think of my goals as not only being about me but also being about the people around me and helping them as well.
Brett:
That is beautiful. Same question to Jasmine. Jasmine, how do you stay centered in your values, and then how do you stay encouraged to charge forward to reach new goals?
Jasmine:
Yeah, so how I stay centered in my values, almost the same answer as Joe. I try to read the Bible app every single day. They have this thing in there, a streak count. So if you missed a day, then you have to start the streak all over again, and that really irritates me. So I try to read it every day, at least just the word of the day, so that might be a paragraph or something. And with that, I do a lot of self-reflection. It may not be every day, but a couple of times a week, and reading the Bible app every day helps me come up with questions to self-reflect, like, am I doing a good job? Am I remaining humble when sometimes I might be full of myself a little bit? It brings me back down, especially if we’ll go to church on Sunday and our pastor is talking about something, and everybody’s like, “Yeah, yeah.” And I’m all quiet because I’m like, he’s talking about me. I’m just going to shake my head on that one. So a lot of self-reflection, really.
Brett:
Love it. Love it. Well, I want to thank you both for being on the show, and that’s going to wrap us up here. Would you remind our listeners where they can find you?
Jasmine:
Yes. You guys can find us. We are on Instagram and Facebook. Just type in Abundant.Culture on Instagram or Abundant Culture on Facebook. Or just go to our website, and you can figure out all the different ways to reach us.
Brett:
Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for sharing your story, your gifts, your talents with us. I encourage you to keep using the gifts you’ve been given to be a blessing to others. And I also want to thank our listeners for listening to another episode of the Capital Gains Tax Solutions Podcast.
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About Jason and Jasmine Mims
Joseph and Jasmine Mims are owners of Abundant Culture, a private equity investment company that buys, funds and grows small businesses.
They strive to spread abundance throughout the world using conscious capitalism. They also host Abundant Culture Podcast, where business owners learn how to grow the value of their businesses and investment portfolios.
