60+ Hours as a CPA and Still Doing REI! by Austin Hendrickson

60+ Hours as a CPA and Still Doing REI! by Austin Hendrickson

January brings us a new year – 2018! Time to hustle and work towards some goals – hopefully everyone has their most important goals written down! Time is super important, especially for me as I am a CPA in busy season or “tax season” even though I am primarily doing audits this time of the year through mid-March. This time of the year presents some unique challenges. For one I am working at my day job Monday through Saturday, around 60+ hour weeks which takes time away from my real estate business. It is hard to answer phones, especially when I am constantly out at clients with my engagement team and I do not want to constantly take calls unrelated to the job I am working on – perhaps I should outsource the call function. Otherwise for now I listen to the voicemails and call them back. The Super Bowl is also coming to town here in Minneapolis which will be absolutely crazy – I work a few blocks away and have a very nice view of the stadium from my desk.

I cannot complain too much – life is busy but good and I am learning a lot. My primary focus area at work is construction and real estate so I get to dive into large commercial real estate investors and see how the good ones operate. For example, one large real estate company I audit made $6 million dollars in profit wholesaling a practice facility to an NFL team. SIX MILLION dollars on a wholesale deal – they never touched the property!! Everyone on the engagement team were shaking their heads and I was smiling a bit because I know how wholesaling works as I have done several of those deals. Very interesting to see different kinds of real estate companies and how each one is making money.

I currently have a condo rehab that is just about finished up. I did some demo work myself and outsourced the rest to a local contractor and am excited to see how it turns out. My mailers for my business have been off to a slow start in 2018 – I sent out one batch to a delinquent tax list and received a total of zero calls. I did get another call from a list I sent out several months ago and will be taking a look at that house in the next week – it is just tough to work around my demanding work schedule right now. I am planning on sending out several new mailings shortly to get the deal flow rolling in – I will keep everyone updated on how it goes in future blogs!