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The real estate investing industry is not without its ups and downs. In fact, the highs and lows are simply a part of the journey.

In this episode Kevin Bupp, a Florida-based real estate investor and serial entrepreneur, shares his story of building a 120-home $30 million portfolio before the Great Recession and how losing it showed him that nothing in life is so bad that you can’t overcome it. Today, Kevin manages a $200 million portfolio of mobile homes and has recently entered an area of real estate that is new to many: parking lots.

Listen as he shares his story and wisdom!

Watch The Episode Here:

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Ep. 47 Investing In Mobile Home Parks And Parking Lots With Kevin Bupp

Investing In Mobile Home Parks And Parking Lots With Kevin Bupp

This show is sponsored by MFIN Summit. That’s the Multifamily Investor Nation Summit coming up on January 21st through the 23rd, 2021. Do you want to learn how to buy an apartment building? If owning and managing or being an investor is better for you, perhaps you want to learn more about the asset class in general. The MFIN Summit is a three-day information-packed event for multifamily investors with over 1,000 attendees and over 50 speakers, including yours truly.

You’ll hear from experts about finding deals, raising capital underwriting strategies, selecting markets and so much more. You can hear me as well as dozens of other speakers during the event. Go to MFINSummit.com to grab your ticket and use the promo code NEXTLEVEL to get $100 off. Whether you’re new to multifamily investing or a seasoned investor, you do not want to miss this event. Join me at the Multifamily Investor Nation Summit in January 2021.

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Welcome to the Next Level Income Show where it’s our goal to take your income, your investments, and your life to the next level. You can get a copy of my book for free at NextLevelIncome.com and click on the book link. In this episode, we have Kevin Bupp. Kevin is a Florida based real estate investor, top iTunes podcast host, and serial entrepreneur with over $200 million real estate transactions under his belt.

His extensive investment experience spans the gamut of multifamily, office retail, raw land parking lots, and his favorite and by far the most profitable mobile home parks. You’re not going to want to miss this show as Kevin shares how he built a $30 million empire, lost it all in the Great Recession, and has rebuilt what he has now. He also shares what has been the core focus that allowed him to pull through that time and also what his inspiration was to have him start his 72 Hours to Key West Annual Bike Ride that helps feed thousands of families a year. You’re not going to want to miss this episode.

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Kevin, welcome to the show.

Chris, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Likewise. It seems a whole eternity ago when we last saw each other in February 2020 before COVID hit out in Colorado, but I’m getting fired up. I’m looking at taking trips out west to do some skiing here.

Me too. As we’re talking about February 2020, we went out there and skied after the best ever conference and did a trip to Park City. In two days, we got back to Park City and everything shut down and we’ve been stuck ever since but looking forward to getting back out there. I have three trips planned out west here to get back on the snowboard, not skis.

My boys have been skiing. I picked up skiing again with them, but I told them once they can ski the whole mountain and I figured it would take a few years then we’d start snowboarding. Son of a gun out there at Keystone, my son did the whole mountain with me. I was like, “That’s it.” Kevin, I feel I’ve known you for four years because I’ve listened to your podcasts in the past, all your work with mobile home parks. I admire the charities that you support and we share some similar passions and not only cycling but also bourbon. For those in the audience that don’t know about your story, perhaps you could share more with us.

Thanks, Chris, for having me here. I’ll try to keep it somewhat condensed, but I’ve been investing in real estate since I was twenty. I got introduced to real estate when I was nineteen. I studied underneath a gentleman who became my mentor. It was an accidental situation. The right place at the right time because at that point in my life, I was tending a bar going to school in a local community college. I had ambition.

I always hustled at a younger age. I’d go the paper route. I would mow lawns. I’d shovel snow. When I was fourteen, I learned how to install car stereos for my brother’s cars and build speaker boxes. I would like to make my own way and be able to buy my own things. As I got a little older and graduated high school, I started going to school. I knew I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I knew I didn’t want to go away to school and waste my parents’ money. I knew that if I went away, it would be $25,000 a year. I assure you that my parents weren’t rich at all. We’re middle of the road blue collar so I did the responsible thing and stuck around. However, I didn’t know what my future path was going to look like.

By accident, I started dating a girl, and this girl’s mother had recently gone through a divorce and started dating a guy by the name of David. He was a local real estate investor. Being over at their house on a regular basis, I became friends with David and got to learn more about his business and what he did. He lived a different lifestyle from what I was used to growing up. He drove a nice car, always dressed nice, and seemed to have a lot of flexibility in his day. I would come to see him over at the house during odd parts of the week like Wednesday afternoon at 1:00 when my parents are at work. They worked a 9:00 to 5:00 so it was odd for me to see him around. He wasn’t unemployed. He had money, but he chose his days and how he spent them. That was intriguing to me.

Long story short, David and I struck a friendship and got to learn a little bit more about what he did. I didn’t comprehend or understand it. I understood the basics from a high level, but I didn’t know the micro-level details of how he did what he did and how he accomplished all that he had. A few short months after our friendship, I always ask him questions. I was always interested and I tried to peel back layers. He noticed that and he invited me to a three-day workshop or boot camp down in Philadelphia. Ron LeGrand is still around, but I went down to this boot camp. David invited me and paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. His business partner couldn’t attend and made me go. I had no idea what it was and what I was going to learn, but I said yes. I didn’t even hesitate. I said yes and went with him.

During those three days together, I realized that number one, there were a lot of people there that were making, to me was a lot of money. A couple of thousands of dollars a year was a lot of money to me. My parents both made somewhere between probably $25,000 a year. My dad, maybe $60,000 a year, a blue-collar middle of the road. Neither of them ever broke that six-figure annual income. This was a whole different world to me. What I realized in making a lot of money, number two, a lot of the people I’ve met over those three days didn’t seem to be all that much smarter than me.

They knew a lot more about real estate because they’ve been doing it, but generally speaking, they didn’t seem to possess any additional skillsets that I couldn’t ultimately learn with a little bit of help from David and guidance. I left that three-day boot camp excited, overwhelmed, and seeing dollar signs. More so feeling like this was something I could wrap my arms around. Nothing had excited me up to that point in my life as far as my future dreams, goals and career. Nothing else that excited me and I surely wasn’t all that excited to go to school. I’ve never been an overly studious person, at least back then I wasn’t, now I much more am but going to college was a waste of time for me.

I continued going to classes, I tended a bar part-time, but what I did is I went back to David. A couple of weeks after we got back from this boot camp, I knew that I would lose this energetic feeling if I didn’t have the help. It would leave me. I would be back at the beginning stages understanding this real estate thing but not knowing what the next steps were. I continue with that enthusiasm with David. David was about 25 years older and I went to him with a plan. I want to be around him more. I want to be in his business during the day, but how could I help him? How could I give value to him so in turn he would teach me what he knew, I could be around him more and get to learn his business?

Being that he was a little older than I, he wasn’t as good with technology. He wasn’t as good with even setting up an email or creating a PowerPoint presentation. It wasn’t his thing. He was a paper guy. I offered to help him in his business and I did find that void existed on the technology side. I offered to be his admin assistant or whatever he needed from me. I did a little bit of everything, from delivering leases to picking up signed leases from tenants, doing showings for him on his properties. He was a one-man-band. He oversaw everything. I’d go on meetings with him with contractors. I was around him as much as possible.

About a year thereafter, I learned a ton. I was engulfed in it on a daily basis. I learned a lot and I felt that it was time. I’d saved up bartending money and it was time to buy my own property. A leap of faith and that was scary as hell to me because I never bought anything more than maybe a car, a dirt bike, or something like that in my life. I never spent tens of thousands of dollars on something. I had money saved up, but it was all I had. It took me quite some time to save it. I bought that first single-family home when I was twenty years old. It was a completely rundown mess in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania downtown area. It’s a rough area. It’s even a rough area now.

It’s right off 83?

Yeah. It was your typical three-story row home. I purchased that property and utilized a lot of David’s resources to renovate it. He had a lot of those relationships and I had gotten to know them over that year of working together. It allowed me to leverage a lot of those resources that he had already created. My intent originally was to follow David’s model. I didn’t want to fix what isn’t broken and David’s model was a buy and hold. He was much further along with his business. I didn’t understand that right away, but I was like, “I’m going to be a buy and hold investor as well. I’m going to buy it for cashflow.”

However, I used all my money to buy that property. That couple of hundred dollars a month I received in cashflow once I rented it out, it was going to take me a long time that I quickly realized to have enough money to buy another property. I’ve quickly changed that model to wholesale a couple of properties, buy one and keep it. It became my model until I had the ability to focus more on long-term holds. It took a couple of years to get there before I had the capital sources. We became a buy and hold investor. For the most part, we bought with the intent of holding.

Mobile Home Parks: A wholesale deal is tying up the paper and selling the paper at a below-market price to where there’s enough room for that next investor to come in, do the rehab, and make a profit on it.

There’s so much about your story that I love, Kevin. First off, both of us came from fairly humble beginnings. I grew up south of Baltimore, not too far from you down there. You got me beat though, I was 21 when I bought my first property. The young investors that I mentor now we have this conversation. They look and they’re like, “I’m going to build my passive income and I’m going to make $200 a month off this property.” It’s like, “How many do you have to buy to get there and shift from that mentality?” For those that are reading, what do you do with a wholesale versus a buy and hold? How is a wholesale deal different than going to buying a rental?

A wholesale deal is tying up the paper and selling the paper at a below-market price to where there’s enough room for that next investor to come in and do the rehab and make a profit on it. That’s ultimately wholesale. For us, we’d buy it and renovate it. You’ll get it in move-in condition and you’ll turn it into a long-term rental.

If you’re reading, you’re not familiar with this and you’re trying to figure out, “How am I going to get some capital?” maybe this is your side gig. That’s a great way to go out and meet other investors that are looking for buy and holds and doing that. You’re going along and wholesaling deals. You’re buying single-family, Kevin. This is all in Pennsylvania. When did you make your move to Florida?

I moved to Florida in 2002. I wrapped up school. I bought a number of properties up in Pennsylvania and even growing up there. Pennsylvania is a beautiful place, don’t get me wrong, but I never ever got used to the cold. I never got used to the gray winters when the sun doesn’t ever come out. It’s a gloomy day. It drove me crazy from the time I was young until I was old enough to say, “I’m going to get out of here and go somewhere else where it’s sunny.”

I chose to move to Florida. It wasn’t like, “Let’s go to the sun and fun.” I did some research on vibrant markets where real estate was trending upwards. For Harrisburg, I wouldn’t call it stagnant, but not a lot of action happened there. It’s a little different place now than what it was many years ago. Back then, you would be lucky if your home jaded 2% in any one given year. You’d be doing well. It’s a linear market and slow-moving.

I wanted to go somewhere a little bit more progressive, where there was an opportunity for me to plug in with even real estate investor groups. I had to drive to Philadelphia or Baltimore to get to the closest real estate investor meeting, which is, for those that don’t know, it’s about two hours to either one of those cities from where I grew up. I identified Tampa, Florida, as an opportunity. Tampa was different many years ago than what it was now. I had a lot of growth potential and plans. They’re revitalizing downtown Tampa and downtown St. Petersburg. There were multiple different Fortune 500 and 100 companies moving here or plans to move here. It was close to the beach. It was close to the Gulf of Mexico and an absolutely gorgeous area.

I moved down to Tampa and meetly plugged myself in. There are four different weekly real estate groups. Within a 45-minute radius, I could go to multiple different groups and plug into a lot of different networks. I came down and hit the ground running. Within a couple of months, I started buying property and establishing those relationships in it. It went a lot faster down here because I felt like I was the oddity in a small-town Pennsylvania. You knew the other handful of real estate investors that own more than maybe three properties, but in Tampa, it seemed there were a lot of people that owned investment portfolios. Finding those private money resources and private lenders seemed to happen a lot quicker for me down here. I started buying up a frenzy. From 2002 to about 2007, I ended up acquiring over 120 single-family homes as rentals, ones that I kept like rental units that I had to wholesale a number along the way. My focus when I got down was buy and hold. I want to stay true to that model.

That was over how long of a period there?

It’s 2002 to 2007.

For five years, you bought 120 properties.

I also had shy of 500 apartment doors and some miscellaneous odds and ends commercial real estate, but mostly the model is built around the single-family stuff and the apartments, both of them were joint ventures or partnerships that got involved in. I did a lot of great things in a short period of time and everything was going up. That’s all people do. The floor was on fire. I was conservative about my leverage. My average leverage across the board was about 66% so I wasn’t over-leveraged. However, Florida had gotten to a precarious situation leading up to the crash in 2008. There was a lot of speculative building going on. I don’t know if you remember back in the day when a pre-construction home would get flipped five times before it was fully built. Things like that were down here left and right.

Strippers are buying 2 and 3 houses.

It was crazy. There were thousands of rooftops being built for populations that weren’t here and necessarily coming. They never came back. People left because there were no jobs here for a period of time. All the construction workers left and things like that. We went through a period where we lost a great deal of occupancy. One of the big things that killed us was we own a lot of older properties like 30 old homes in areas where a lot of these spec homes are being built and allow these builders to cover the costs that no one knew how long this was going to go on. They’re renting these brand new 3-2-2s out for not much more than what we were renting our older home.

We had a big hit in our occupancy and that was the nail in the coffin. We lost a good percentage of occupancy. We weren’t renewing leases. We had to give concessions and it leaves us a spiral effect. I’ll leave it at. We got to the point where we couldn’t pay debt service. We had to make some tough decisions with our property and gave it back to the banks. We worked with a lot of the lenders. We did as much as we could to work through it, but it was ugly, to say the least. Within a period of 1.5 years, we lost the majority of a $30 million portfolio. I took a couple of years hiatus after that. It was damage control for a couple of years.

I started a few other businesses outside of real estate to keep a roof over my head. My personal home was in foreclosure and day-to-day, I tried to mentally work through and stay tough trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel. When you got a sub 500 credit score, credit knocking and server processors knocking on the door all the time. It became challenging, but I turned to my health and fitness at that point in my life. I started a few businesses that were directly in line with health and fitness. I figured that if I could keep my mind and my body strong and put the right things in it and I felt at least good physically every day when I woke up, I’d be able to get through this a lot better than if I turned to the bottle and started drinking like crazy, eating crap and feeling crappy. That’s what I did. I tried to maintain a positive focus. I knew that things would awesomely turn around at some point in time.

Long story short, the fire of real estate never left my belly. I wasn’t in a position, I wish I would have been to get back in 2010 to 2011 and buy up a lot of the opportunities that were there but we ultimately dove back in late 2011. At that point, I look back at what I would have done differently given the opportunity. What I realized is that I worked my butt off to buy those 100 plus properties of single-family homes. I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. I had the time to do it and had fun doing it, but I had 500 apartment units. I always had five times the amount of apartment units and I didn’t work hard at all to buy those, but I worked incredibly hard to buy the single-family properties. The single-families are the ones that challenged me the most when times get tough. I vowed to turn to multifamily to rebuild things and that’s when I stumbled across mobile home parks. That was back in 2012.

You hit a couple of points there and a ton of good information there. A lot of people whether it’s your health, your family, your career, if you have something that’s the cornerstone, and for me, it’s always been my health. If you have something you can constantly focus on, stay in that routine. It’s amazing how that can pull you through the tough times. If I’m listening to you correctly, you’re looking at the single-family versus the multifamily. I went through the same transition. I didn’t have 120 properties, single-family, but I realized that cashflow property would withstand these downturns a lot better because I took a huge hit as well years ago. You started in mobile home parks, that’s in 2012. Where are you now with your portfolio with mobile homes?

We’ve got communities in eleven different states. We sold out a few states and where you are steering clear now of some of the more blue states with rent regulations and things like that so we’ve scaled down. We’re in eleven different states. We’ve been teetering this 2,000 total lot number for a few years now. We buy some and we ultimately sell some or what have you, but we’ve got around 2,000 lots throughout nineteen communities and closed on another community.

It’s interesting because we had intended to roll out another fund offering. We typically do funds so we intend to roll that out in March 2020. We all know what happened in March and we put that on delay. We focused on our existing portfolio for the most part of 2020, making sure that it was in good shape and we were making it through that. There are many unknowns and uncertainties. Going through this before, you can imagine. I’m probably much more risk-averse. Even my business partner hadn’t gone through a downturn so I’m like, “Let’s put the brakes on. It’s okay. There will always be deals to buy. Let’s put the brakes on. Let’s find out how this is all going to play out.” It’s about 2 or 3 months after March 2020 when we started getting a little more comfortable with our portfolio doing great. There’s still a high demand and inevitably, we started buying again.

Personally, mobile home parks are a phenomenal option for affordable housing, which is becoming a true issue in this country. What are the criteria, Kevin? In my book, I talk about how we target different MSAs and different metropolitan areas, and how we develop our criteria for multifamily. What are your criteria for buying a mobile home park? How do you figure that out?

I will say that for the criteria, it’s a little bit more expanded than that of a typical multifamily investor and the reason being there’s not the sheer number of mobile home parks like the rest of multifamily. I don’t know the accurate number, but this number gets tossed around. Fifty thousand mobile home parks in the US. Of that 50,000, there are probably only about 25,000 that are 50 spaces or larger. It’s a fairly small number in comparison to that of multifamily. We’ve got to be a little bit more expansive. That’s why we’re in eleven states. For us, it’s not a matter of 1, 2 or 3 markets. We will go to where the deals are so long as they’re in the Northeast, Southeast or the Midwest.

Mobile Home Parks: As long as there’s a demand for affordable housing, there’s still a diverse employment base in Michigan, and jobs are either staying or coming, not going away.

We won’t go out on the West Coast. A lot of our emphasis is on the Southeast, the Sun Belt states. That’s where the migrations are heading. Outside of that, our criteria have evolved over the years. The smallest park that we ever bought was 34 lots. We still own that one up in Atlanta. Nowadays, for 100 spaces are larger, we might consider smaller if we own something nearby, if we can get some scales of economy there, but the minimum that we’re looking for is about 100 spaces. We want to know that there’s a huge demand for affordable housing.

Most people would say that there’s a demand for affordable housing nationwide. There are markets that housing is affordable. I always give a hard time to Flint, Michigan, but you can go and look at the demographics from Flint, Michigan, the median home is $28,000. It’s a rough market there. I want to make sure that there’s a demand for affordable housing. I want to know that our parks are in a good school district and I want to know that jobs are coming there that aren’t leaving the area. It’s the basic high-level criteria. Outside of that, 100,000 populations, which is a fairly small MSA. For mobile home parks, we’re okay with secondary, even tertiary markets. Some of our best-performing communities are in tertiary markets. As long as there’s a demand for affordable housing, there’s still a diverse employment base there and jobs are either staying or coming, not going away.

What’s your average rent across your portfolio? I know it’s market-specific, but what are you seeing?

I’ll go from the low end to the high end. On the low end, we’ve got some communities in the Gulf Coast region up in the Panhandle and over the Mississippi. They’re in the $250 range. On the high end of our scale in our portfolio, we’ve got some parks up in New York and Maryland, both where the rents are over $500 a month. It averages from there, in the mid to high $300 range.

For your typical mobile home, what are people paying for their monthly payment for something like that?

If they own the home, you mean in total?

Yeah.

It’s market-specific but on average, if you lump together a house payment with a lot of rent, probably on a used home, something that’s maybe 15 or 20 years old, it’s somewhere between $695 to $800 a month for a three-bedroom, two-bath. For a brand-new home, which we do, we bring in brand-new homes, their total monthly payment between lot rent and the house payment could be somewhere in the range of $800 to $1,000, sometimes potentially more in some of the higher expense markets.

You’re overlapping there with some of those C-plus or C-grade apartment classes that are out there and doing that. My uncle lives in Colorado. We drive through and I see these mobile home communities and I’m like, “These things are fantastic.” It’s impressive how high end some of these communities we’ve got now.

We’ve got the broad spectrum. We’ve got some C-class communities, hard work, and blue-collar communities. We’ve got some high end where we’ve got some of the communities in New York, the mobile homes sell for $120,000 or $130,000 and I’m talking about used mobile homes.

That’s more than the first house I ever bought.

I’m speaking to one, specifically. The village that this community is located in, you could buy a stick-built home in this village for less than what some of these mobile homes sell for. It’s more of a lifestyle choice and decision to live there than it is affordable housing.

Can you say where that is in New York?

It’s in the Buffalo area.

Kevin, you’ve started to look at some other cashflow areas of real estate, namely parking lots. Tell us a little bit about this. This is an area that’s fairly new to me. I’m curious about how you decide to target that area and where you are looking for those?

On one of my two podcasts, I interviewed a gentleman a few years ago. You’re talking about a niche. Parking lots is a niche as it gets. I interviewed a gentleman years ago, who was an owner, but he’s mostly a large broker. He’s the largest transactional broker in the parking lot niche and I was intrigued by the business model. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what the operator structure looked like or who normally handled the collections. Was it a third party, was it the owner of the property, what have you? How consolidated was the industry? As we dug a little deeper, I realized that it’s the most segmented real estate niche that’s left now. More than 70% of parking lot owners only own one lot so there are few large institutional operators in the space. Don’t get me wrong, there are, but it’s incredibly fragmented.

In addition to that parking lots, while there are a lot of technological advances that are happening and digital payment systems collections with you, a lot of these moms and pops have been in mobile home parks. They’ve been slow to adapt to changes in their industry. There are still a lot of parking lots out there that have been owned for generations, 40 to 50 years, that are in prime downtown MSAs or prime tourism areas that still are utilizing old collection methods, whether it be a lot attended or those old metal boxes where you have to shove your dollar in.

I’m thinking about those here in Nashville.

It’s crazy. The amount of loss that comes from those types of lots that don’t have a digital payment system. I don’t even carry with me rarely so if I can’t pay with a credit card, then I’m not paying.

Stick a couple of quarters in and hope they don’t check while I’m there.

That’s what happens. A lot of them assume that no one is going to check and they probably don’t. They don’t have good enforcement. There are a lot of opportunities to buy lots that are in prime locations. I’ll give you an example. Let me back up a little bit. The other thing that’s attractive to us about the parking lot space, and now I’m talking to surface parking lots, not necessarily parking garages, we like both but surface parking lots. It will never be anything of less value than what it is now as a parking lot.

Mobile Home Parks: Know that what seems mountainous like that big challenge you’re facing, more than likely, probably a couple of months, a few weeks, or at least a year thereafter, it’s going to seem like peace.

It will never be anything of less value. I know that if I can make sense of it financially, economically as a parking lot now that there’s only upside in the future. We bought a parking lot in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The owner we bought it from for over a dozen years, he was a local doctor, and on a bunch of other real estates. He bought it from a bank that had taken it back after 2008. A developer had it and ultimately his development never came to fruition and it went back to the bank.

He bought it. He had a son, who operated this thing. It’s a hard signalized intersection in the downtown Historic District on a restaurant row. It’s about as prime as it gets. It’s 27 or 28 lots. His son managed it. When we got the financials, he was only getting about $30,000 a year of NOI. He was asking $69,500 for it. Those economics don’t work. That doesn’t make any sense. He had been trying to haphazardly sell for a year or so. He hadn’t listed or anything, but we sent a direct mailer out to that market and he was one of the few that responded. I called on a couple of other larger operators in the area that knows that market. They utilize digital collection systems. They have parking enforcement. They can quickly analyze a lot and how much revenue it should produce in any one given year.

One of the operators managed about sixteen other lots in that downtown area. Within a few short days, they came back with an LOI for a five-year lease at $72,000 a year on a five-year fixed-term lease. You can do the quick math there. We paid $69,500 for it and a $72,000 double net with a prime operator, a good credit operator in that area. That’s the beautiful thing about this business model. Most of the operators in the business aren’t owners of the real estate.

Even in publicly traded companies, there are some big ones out there that don’t own real estate or most of them do not own parking lots. They’re an operational company. A lot of the owners are these moms and pops. It could be a developer, but a lot of times we’re looking for the mom and pop lot that they haven’t fully maximized the value. They haven’t let a property operator come in and take over the operations, or maybe they’ve got an operator in place, but it’s a local mom and pop operator that also doesn’t utilize technology.

This operator that we signed the lease with came and put all the digital infrastructure in place. They put the collection systems and signage in place. They did everything that was part of the lease agreement and we have to do nothing at this point in time other than collect $72,000 a year, year after year for five years. Their economics, I don’t know what that lot will produce, but I’m guessing that it probably will realistically do over six figures a year.

Their margins are typically somewhere between 10% and 20% so they’re comfortable with their upside potential and this is even during a pandemic. The crazy part about this is they signed that lease. It’s not 100% back, it’s only about 60% back to what it was the same time in 2019 as far as the parking revenue, but they believe in that area enough. They know that area enough that it will ultimately come back and they were comfortable signing a termed lease to that effect.

Kevin, I want to touch on something else that I love about what you do, which is your philanthropic efforts. I know you had to cancel your annual bike ride in 2020 and hope to make it down in 2021. Could you share with the audience what that is, why you started it, and how they could learn more if they want to join you on your ride?

I appreciate that, Chris. I started a bike ride back in 2010. It’s called 72 Hours to Key West. During those dark years following the crash of 2008, I turned to health and fitness. The things I did back in early 2010, I was trying to find a big life goal, something out of the box for me, or something that pushed my limits. I was yearning for something, Chris. I didn’t know what it was. I got married and I came with the crazy idea that I was going to ride my bike. I had been riding a bike maybe 30 or 40 miles at a time. I’m not into any big rides and I came up with a crazy idea to ride my bike from here in Florida to Washington, DC. My wife didn’t fully agree with the idea, but she also didn’t say no and ultimately I did it. Within two months, I had never ridden a long bike ride in my life. I went by myself. I packed enough, washed my clothes every night, put on the same thing the next day, and for eleven days, I rode 1,154 miles.

It was life-changing only for me personally and when I got done with it, I was cataloging on Facebook all the way. I only did it for my own purpose so I could reflect back. What I realized is I created this massive following of people watching every day and watching for updates. I got to the end and I was personally fulfilled, but I realized that I wish I would have taken advantage of the audience and done it for a greater cause. Long story short, I’ve been helping Rod Khleif. He’s a great friend of mine. He runs the Tiny Hands Foundation out of Sarasota. I’ve known Rod and his family since I’ve moved down to Florida. I’ve been helping him feed families every year during the holidays.

Rod went through the same crash as I did. Rod lost everything and he used to self-fund his charity so from feeding a couple of thousands of families a year to feeding a couple of hundred families in 2009 and 2010. He had never had donors. I put this ride together after I got back my DC ride. I was like, “I need to do something locally. I want to do something. I don’t have the money yet. I’m still broke myself but I’ve got legs and I’m in the best shape of my life. I should put a ride together here locally and let’s raise money for Rod’s charity, Tiny Hands Foundation, and help feed more families this year.” That was the catalyst for it and we started that in November 2010. We’ve done it every year again, except in 2020. We haven’t kept track, but on average, we donate between $40,000 and $60,000 a year to feed tens of thousands of families here in the Florida area. It’s exciting to meet a lot of people, do great things together and make a positive impact on a lot of families.

What’s the best way for people to find out about your ride, about your different business endeavors, and more about you if they want to learn more about you?

Go to my website, KevinBupp.com and it’s got links to the company Sunrise Capital Investors, it’s got links and information about our Key West Bike Ride. That’s a good base area to land on to learn everything about what I’ve got going on.

Kevin, a question I always ask our guests before we let you go here. If you go back to your 25-year-old self, what’s one piece of advice you give yourself back then?

It’s a great question and that’s why I always ask that question to people and I never have asked that question to myself. You’re going to run into a lot of challenges being an entrepreneur. There’s going to be some tough times and incredibly tough decisions that you have to make and sometimes those decisions that you make might not be the right decision. You’re going to have to go to face the heat of it. Know that there are few things in life that will have a long-term detrimental impact on you.

Know that what seems mountainous like that big challenge that you’re facing, that decision you have to make, no matter what decision or route you choose to go if it was the wrong route, more than likely, probably a couple of months, a few weeks, or at least a year thereafter, it’s going to seem like peace. It’s going to be small, it’s not going to be consequential. You’re going to move on with it. You’re going to move past it. Try to understand that as bad as you think things are, it’s probably not that bad.

I went through this exercise during 2008 and I learned that every time something would come up that’s challenging like a threat or a loss or what have you, I go through this exercise, “What’s the worst-case scenario that’s going to come out of this one particular event?” Whatever I came up with the answer, I forced myself to ask a question multiple times until I drill down to what is the worst-case scenario. “Am I going to lose the roof over my head? Am I sleeping underneath a bridge? Am I going to lose family members? Am I going to lose friends? The things that are the most important to me, the ones that love me and the ones that are around me, am I going to lose them? No. Then is it all that bad? Can we push passes? Yes, we can.”

Kevin, I love your background. I love the advice you gave there. I appreciate everything you’ve shared with the audience. We’ll make sure everybody can learn about you, your ride, and your other business adventures as well. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Chris, thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you for all that you do to help everyone.