How This Couple Built Freedom: Rentals, RVs & a Media Agency | Shane & Victoria Childress

What is up, the Entrepreneur DNA?

Welcome back to another incredible episode.

I have a dynamic duo here.

They are a couple that was able to make a way out of nowhere.

Everything was working against them.

However, they decided they wanted something in life and they went for it.

And now they've created an incredible business, great rental portfolio.

And now they have a whole lot of options because they can RV around the U.S.

doing what they want, when they want with each other.

We have Shane and Victoria Childress here.

What's happening?

Yeah, thanks for having us just yeah so I started that by saying you made a way out of nowhere and we were talking off camera just about your your start of all this and you guys wanted something different you wanted something more you were at home you were working in the tech field and you just made a decision and from that decision you now have a life that I think most husbands and wives and children would like because it has a connective tissue.

It depends on the day.

It depends on the day.

Yeah.

And I want people to understand your story.

So I want to kind of start from the beginning a little bit about you being in the tech space you having your nine to five you being at home starting to buy real estate breaking into this entrepreneurial world which was not normal so let's start there and then we'll get that whole story all the way out go ahead

yeah so we were living in dallas at you know i guess almost 21 years ago now right 20 21 years ago and and how old are you 16.

Okay.

That's our daughter Ava.

Off screen here.

Off screen.

Our son.

We have a son that's 18 as well, and he's actually traveling.

He's just landed in Mongolia yesterday morning.

So cool.

They're going to the Eagles.

I feel about that.

I feel great.

Like, he graduated and he went straight to travel.

So they've, yeah, he's been traveling since May.

Like, I think.

And maybe you'll agree.

I think boys, they should graduate and like not be able to go to college.

I don't think we're ready.

Maturity-wise, mental-wise, like we're a mess with all the hormones.

I think

either military or like go travel, get life experience.

Exactly.

Go to work now.

Go do something.

College isn't it, in my opinion.

Yep.

No, that's 100% where we are.

Like college is great if you have a very specific practice you're going after.

Like Ava wants to be a chiropractor and then eventually work in the equine.

So that's a little different story, right?

100%.

But I 100% think she needs to go travel for at least two beer for males.

Yes.

That's

a different trap.

What were you doing graduating high school?

Exactly.

My dad.

I was an idiot.

I was like,

how much more beer can I drink?

Right.

Like, that was me.

Yeah.

You know, and so, anyways, back to your story.

I love that you guys have a son that's like going out to Mongolia of all places.

Like,

you know, that's it.

No, it's great.

It's the adventure, right?

So we started.

I was, you know, I had a dream.

I went to college and about a year into it, I realized, you know, school was never for me.

College wasn't for me.

So I left and joined the tech space.

Got really lucky, worked my ass off.

got into some really good companies.

It's funny how luck works, right?

When you work your ass off and you tend to get harder you work, the luckier you get.

Yeah, it's weird.

So I worked myself into a position where i was traveling all over the us and kind of owned my own schedule and had larger accounts and was doing some really good things it was a great it's like textbook story life that's exactly what people work for and then i met victoria st.

Patrick's Day at the Dallas Parade on Greenville Avenue and we we met one day and we've we haven't left each other's side since then, right?

Sam, let's do this until it's not fun anymore.

There you are.

And here we are 20 trader.

Oh, yeah, that's fun.

Yeah.

That's great.

Well, and so that was not not the whole story is, is you didn't stay in tech.

You now.

No, yeah.

So we started rolling through.

As we started, you know, build, getting closer together and we started building a family together.

I realized as like, holy shit, as a father and a husband, like, if I'm down, what does my family do?

She got to go work on the corner.

Like, what, what's got to happen?

Right.

What are the options here?

So I was like, you know, it's my job, if I leave this world to make sure they're taken care of.

So we started looking at, you know, all these different options.

Do we start a business?

Do we buy a business?

Do you, do we get a rental house?

Like, what do we do?

And after a ton of research, and, you know, there's a little bit of history before that, too, that we've looked at some other properties and stuff.

But we started, we found a location.

We started buying houses in that location.

And we got to a point where we had, we had three properties and then like all the realtors, we were finding realtors.

I'll back that out too.

I grew up really, really poor and in housing and stuff like that.

So one of my goals in life was to, yeah, yeah.

So one of my goals were, was to own like properties and be the landlord.

Yeah.

So that's kind of how we got.

So you knew that when?

When did that start for you when you looked around as a cat, your child and it was like, I mean, I remember, so, you know, my, both my parents had substance abuse issues.

So I remember negotiating with landlords and being like, hey, rent this property to us.

Like, I promise it's going to be taken care of.

And she was doing all this at like 11 years old.

Yeah.

So I have a similar story where my my family, my mom, my dad, and stepfather were all alcoholics.

So like not the negotiating landlords, but like I was always fending for myself and doing the things that I needed done.

And so I can, I can empathize greatly with that.

Right.

And so as a kid, you were able to see kind of like

that side.

Yeah.

But then real estate to some extent was appealing.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

100%.

And like, I wanted to be on the other side and help people.

Yeah.

So really, that's what it, that's what I'm saying.

You know, it's, I find that when people like, I'll give you a quick tidbit about me is, is I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur because when I was a kid, I would drive around on recycling day and I'd go pick up the bottles and the cans and bring it to the recycling so I can make one penny or five pennies depending upon the jar or the can.

You must have been in Oregon or Washington.

I was in California.

California.

Okay.

Yeah.

There it is.

Yeah.

Same, same.

Okay.

Right.

Or like when I got a little older, like eight years old, I would ask my mom to take me to the baseball card shop.

I'd borrow $20.

I'd say, hey, mom, I'm going to go buy a box of cards.

I know how to flip them and sell them and I'll give you your money back.

And she's like, whatever, kid.

Right.

So she literally would sit in the parking lot.

I'd buy a box of baseball cards.

I would open them in front of the store owner.

I would sell them the ones he would want back.

And almost every time I would double my money.

And I'm sure he made a great profit because I still sold it wholesale so he could sell it retail.

But like, I would come back and I would have my own $20 and she would get hers back.

And she was like, she was always like, oh, great.

Right.

Now, meanwhile, she'd end up going to the bar, but neither here nor there.

But that was always ingrained in me.

And it's interesting to hear your journey of like your life actually became entrepreneurship in real estate because of your experience of it.

I had none, but when I lost everything, when I was personally as an adult, like destitute, sleeping on a couch,

real estate was that like, I could make it with that.

Like I could really make it.

And so that's a very interesting story that you had that at at such a young, young age.

Yeah.

And what, did it like continue to exist or did you lose it a little while?

And then as you guys started to build a family, like, I really think real estate's my thing, or did you always have an interesting?

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

So I just, we just keep moving and grooving and trying stuff.

So we hit goals and we put like, you know, one-year goals, five-year goals, and we always crush them early.

So then we're like, that's it.

All right.

What's next?

What's next?

I don't think I'll ever be satisfied or, you know, even when you hit that goal, I don't think I'll ever be satisfied.

Yeah, I think probably here over the last, probably 90 days, we really set down our kids are leaving the house.

They're getting older.

What do we want to do?

Who do we want to be even after they're gone, right?

Because Shane and Victoria still have to move forward is that we've always hit, we've set goals, you know, like you said, one year, two years, and five years out.

And we've always crushed them.

So we're like, well, shit, now our goals are just way too small, right?

We got to go way bigger.

So it's, I think what we realized here over the last 90 days is that it's not the goal that we, that makes us, that fulfills us because it's not.

Like everybody, if you have a home and a white picket fence and two kids and a dog, that's perfect.

When we achieved that early on and it wasn't, it wasn't it.

It was boring.

So we sold everything.

That was way boring.

Boring, right?

And I mean, we literally looked at each other's like, hey, if we stay here for another 10 years, we're not going to make it.

Like this shit is boring.

We got to shake this.

I think it's going to lose the journey.

Like, I bet when you thought about getting the house, the white picket, the kids, the dog, and that's exciting.

And you start building to it and then you get it and you go

that's it that's it it's boring yeah great but it you know growing up with you know her background and mine was a little bit different but i didn't come from a wealthy family or anything like that nothing at all right my parents didn't really give me anything except for the opportunity to go do what i get to go earn it myself and the support and the yeah the support to go earn it myself not financial support but just the you know if you do fail you got a place to come back home as long as you got a plan you ain't got a plan you ain't coming back yeah i failed i ain't got nowhere to go that's it yeah so you couldn't yeah You didn't have an option.

Right.

Sometimes that's the best place to be.

It is.

Right.

When your back literally is against the wall or you are at a place of like rock bottom.

Yeah.

Like

there's only one option.

There's not really a lot of angles.

And I find as someone that I've coached a lot of entrepreneurs in a lot of different sectors, primarily in the real estate space, but like when people have options, it is a lot harder for them to be successful.

That's where we're sitting right now.

Okay.

We've hit, we've reached those goals.

It's kind of boring.

We love the stress.

We love the journey.

You know, we have some

we own an RV dealership.

We're not from the industry, right?

We've bought a piece of real estate that was zoned for it.

We're like, fuck it.

Why not?

Let's go.

Right.

We actually started a car dealership on it.

Yeah.

And it made money, right?

But it's so slimy.

It was so backstabbing.

Do you have any experience in car dealerships?

No, actually.

Any experience?

Our experience in a Car V dealer, in a, in a car dealer, in a car dealership was one day when we lived in the white picket fence house in North Texas.

We were driving down the road and victoria wanted a new car and she's like why don't you just buy a car dealership and then i can just drive what i want every day that's the owner of the car started that is exactly i just want to i don't want to negotiate with a salesman like tell me the price and if it works let's go like i'm very black and white this back and forth stuff like it doesn't work for me yeah like i just want to go buy it i want to click a button yes or no yeah And so you went and bought a car dealer.

Well, we bought the property.

Like it was a piece of real estate that was a great deal for us.

So we bought it.

It was zoned.

We started the dealership.

It was doing doing good, but we hated it.

So we put our personal RV on it that we were living in.

Because after we left Texas, we sold our home and everything, kept our properties.

We moved on to a sailboat, traveled, lived in the Caribbean for a while, came back for hurricane season, put the sailboat up for sale, and then we moved to Asia.

So our kids went to, what I don't know what, sixth grade, fifth grade, relevant equivalent over there.

They went to school in Thailand.

They speak Thai.

She could probably sing a Thai song for you right now.

Speaks a little Russian.

That's amazing.

So, and so we came back, bought another boat.

I mean, we had a bunch of different things that we were doing there for probably about a five-year period, just traveling and living.

And it really, as a, from my perspective, she and I got a lot tighter, a lot closer.

We worked together.

There's the traveling part.

The traveling piece of it, you have to be close together, right?

When we're on the boat, I mean, she spent her 32nd birthday 600 miles offshore, like five days in a row.

We didn't see that.

She had to have Some champagne.

Actually, Ava baked her a cake while we were underway offshore and stuff like that.

But when you're offshore in that capacity, like I'm the mechanic, I'm the medic.

I'm the fire chief.

We are everything, right?

We make our own water, we do our own sewer, we make our own electricity, everything.

So one person can't do it.

So it put us in a position where, you know, I was the captain, everybody had a very specific role to do and play.

And we just came together as a family, like really tight.

And for us, that was a really great thing.

And that has carried on.

And it lets it lets you shed like all of what kind of car do you drive?

How many garages do you have?

Oh,

you know, you know, what kind of shoes do you have?

Like, you know, we lived in a we lived in North Dallas.

And I mean,

our house was smaller than most of our friends' garages.

Yeah.

Let's put it that way.

So we've always lived well below our means, very humble.

You know,

stuff doesn't matter to us.

Things don't matter.

The more I interview people and the more

elevation I get in success and whatever, there's always some level of a common theme.

And one of those tends to be the ultra successful for a very long period of time, more than reasonable, live below their means until there's like this break of like, okay, we can really afford to not do this anymore.

Like it's unreasonable for us.

Right.

And so I love to hear that level of success that you guys had came from kind of this fundamental, like

you would live on a boat, right?

You didn't need the biggest and best and nicest.

I mean, we're so caught up in the U.S.

on

what are you wearing and where, what zip code do you live in and how many bedrooms do you have and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, it's literally just ingrained in us through and through.

I believe the next 12 months is going to get pretty tricky for people.

And I think the government's going to have to address it.

Oh, yeah.

Because it is such a thing right now.

Yeah.

So let's go current state of affairs.

We're in RV.

Current state of affairs.

We still have our properties in Texas.

We've sold a few of them.

How many do you have now?

We're down to 12.

Down to 12.

Your peak was almost 40?

50, 55, 55.

55.

That's right now.

With no real estate background, just kind of like...

learning as you go some basic economics like if you buy it for this and rent it for this it seems pretty good right

that's one thing that kind of irks us all the time is when like victoria's some different mastermind classes and groups, and they talk about cap rates and NOI and all this stuff.

It's like, no, look, it's keep it simple.

Very simple.

The simpler it is, the more profitable it is.

How much are you paying for it?

What's your mortgage, what's your insurance, what's your taxes, what's your maintenance, and how much can you rent it for?

And if that's the profit you want to make, that's what you do.

Then you buy it.

It's simple.

Yeah.

All the other stuff to us doesn't matter.

Yeah.

The only downside, just because I've done it for 20 years is the maintenance of it all, right?

The unforeseen, like everything was was great for 18 months and then month 19, you know,

AC or whatever.

You know, oh, that, you know, well, you got to have 20, not two.

Economy is a scale is the only way to do it.

I tell people all the time, like, if you're going to go buy five rentals, do something else with your money.

Yeah.

It is a tough game.

Like, I actually believe economy is a scale in the single family space just because that's my vertical.

You need to have 100 doors before it's even a little bit sexy.

Like, it can exist at 50 doors and you did fine but like it was good but a couple things happen you take the whole year's profit out of that year because you know a roof here and ac here and hurricane windows and whatever right and you're just like that kind of sucks but

so now we're liquidating maybe pressing reset what's what's the we're pressing reset because it's become

the management of it since we're not there locally anymore and she's not there when she's met she's an excellent operator yeah so in in all of our businesses so we're liquidating that a little bit we're going to go a little bit bigger into either rv parks or larger apartment complexes yeah that we've been looking at um different things here so we had a 29 unit uh townhome complex that it was

rents were like 350 400 bucks we exited out around 1300 bucks uh you bought it when it was renting at 350 400 and i changed i changed and and i did it myself like i would never tell people i owned it i would always go there and be like i'm the manager but I mean, I would knock on people's doors.

You know, I grew up pretty rough.

You have to remember.

Yes, you're not scared.

You're not scared.

What part of where was that?

Was that in Texas?

North Dallas.

Okay.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

And so as you guys, you're liquidating for what purpose?

Change.

Well, just changing.

Like, so we, we own a bunch of commercial properties in here in Florida.

You're in Florida now.

And just

we're building some offices.

So we, we now own, we took the car dealership and converted it into an RV dealership.

And it's actually been doing extremely well.

So your income comes, not all of it, but that is.

Part of it comes from the RV dealership.

So when we started the RV dealership, we didn't want to be just like every other RV dealer.

Like the top four largest RV dealers in the world are all within a two-mile circle around us.

So we can't compete with that, right?

So I took, how do I leverage this?

They're marketing geniuses.

They're just, I wouldn't say they're geniuses.

They are the gorillas in the room when it comes to marketing.

And they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it.

They outspend everybody.

They're not genius.

So I went out where we went out and hired our own in-house marketing team, social media team, and we just started getting after it.

And it worked.

We went through some iterations and we finally fine-tuned it down to where it's starting to make a difference.

Our competitors are coming to us saying, hey,

why are my customers walking in with your ad?

They're asking me to compete with your ad.

These are like $100 million companies, right?

Like, well, pay me X amount of money and I'll show you how we do it.

And that's exactly how it started.

So now we have a Sava Media Group as our media company.

And it's not a big, sexy online presence and everything, but we have just good, solid businesses that come to us that we're running campaigns for.

We got a customer now out of the Indiana area that's got five locations, a dealership, a big dealership, got five locations.

And we're running their full social online profile for them.

We got med spalls.

We have some dentists that we're working with now.

We got a couple of retail shops that we're working with.

And it's completely off the radar.

So, earlier on, you were asked, like, who are we?

What are we, what kind of target audience are we going for?

It's our online presence, even in my own social media company, sucks right now.

So, we're looking to expand that networking bigger.

This is something that we've never done before.

We've never put ourselves out there, we've never networked.

We've always just looked at each other and said, What do we want?

Let's go get it together.

And that's exactly how we've gotten to where we are.

Well, listen, I lean into, so I really am from a believer of what you guys are about to start your journey on, which is the networking and building the people

capital, right?

Because the people capital will last you a lifetime.

It'll feed you for a lifetime, right?

Yep.

And, you know, you're, there's good and bad years in business, right?

Everyone has them.

But if you have good people capital that can last throughout the bad years and the droughts and whatnot,

this, this media company came out of

nowhere.

It was born inside the RV dealership.

Yeah.

Because someone said, hey, how are you doing?

What you're doing?

Yep.

Again, it never ceases to amaze me when I sit here in front of individuals and I go, how great is that?

Right.

Like you had no agenda.

You weren't trying to become some social media agency.

It was never a plan.

Didn't draw it up.

And, you know, okay, here's how we're going to launch it.

It was because someone said, hey, you're doing something.

I'm not.

Can you help?

Yep.

And you said, all right, I think I can.

Yeah, I can.

Definitely.

We can do it.

So we brought him on board.

And then that happened.

And then another vendor that we use that supplies us with parts and stuff for RVs came in and said, man, I see your TikToks and Instagrams everywhere.

I want to do that.

How do I do that?

It's like,

pay me this much and we'll do it for you.

I'll send the people down.

Yeah.

And it just, the light bulb went off and we broke it out.

And so now we're running the RV dealership.

We have Sava Media Group.

That's, that's growing, actually.

Who's who's a, I mean, it sounds like you're from dental to RVs to auto.

Like, what's an avatar that you could do?

Can you do it for anybody, anything?

Is there kind of a

we're not a fit-all end-all-be-all for everyone.

Like, we focus on results.

So, when we have people that come to us quite often and we're like, what result are you looking for?

If they're after impressions and views and all this kind of stuff, well, that's not us.

Okay.

Like, I want to be able to say, you gave me $10,000 this month.

I put, you know, 50 back in your pocket and we track it to

real straight results.

100%.

Black and white.

Black and white.

Keep all that right.

Cost of acquisition.

That's it.

And you want to keep yours.

So, in this sense, your agency fee is not the same as the the marketing spend.

So you would say, I'll do this for 10 grand.

Does that include whatever

spend is going on?

Or is it shooting?

No, ad spend is on top of that.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

We do organic and then ad spend on top of that, depending if we need to get ad spend out of it.

So we don't pick up every organic.

We're getting pretty good at it, yeah.

That's ours.

That's not my wheelhouse.

No, but but which is incredible because as someone who does a lot of content, obviously,

organic is the hardest to break.

It is very hard.

And it changes so fast.

Failure, right?

And every platform's different, right?

I mean, so talk about masterminds and being a part of communities.

My buddy, who's done a really good job with TikTok, which I've done,

and Instagram, and I've done pretty good.

He's like, hey, I'm just going to create a group to mastermind around everyone's success.

And because whatever, someone I'm happy to introduce you guys to.

Yeah, that'd be great.

But I'm always, you know, everyone has said a couple things recently, not everyone, but some people I've interviewed slash billionaires, brand and AI.

And if you lead into either a personal brand or AI, you're going to do really, really well in the future.

And if you don't, you're going to have a tough time because everything is going into AI service-based, whatever.

But your personal brand is your personal brand.

And no one can be you, right?

And so.

I think leaning into that, leaning into those type of communities and being a leading source there, that could be something special for you guys yeah when it comes to ai like that's a big that's a big market big focus for me that's what i do a lot of research on going forward and how do we get better at that

whatever the reason or for however we fell into ai so if you go into some of your your your top ai search like i use ai for everything when it comes to search and if you search certain parameters on rb dealerships we pop up first okay so that's caught the attention of you know in google i'm not first not even close but in these ai engines which are the future we are first

So we, I wouldn't say we've cracked the code.

I don't know the process on how we got there.

I know what we did to get there.

So we're doing that with some of these other businesses.

So when you go on ChatGPT and type in certain things, now these other, our customers are starting to pop up in that, in that chat engine as well.

Or the AI engines.

It is so funny to hear like.

Google is the 800-pound gorilla interims search engine, right?

It owns YouTube and it's just,

but I mean, gosh, is ChatGPT not just going to like

speed by them 90% of my stuff is GPT or I use Grok a lot first

cloud yeah just straight search I just this is gonna be wild to see because we're all old enough that like internet didn't exist to now where we're at and you go like we're like how is anything ever I mean I'm not saying my age or anything but I mean you go back to my tech days I was I was the guy that was walking into a you know a Fortune 5 company telling them the 14 data centers you have in the US where everything's on premise, we're going to move it to the cloud.

What's the cloud?

Everybody was scared of the cloud.

And we, well, cloud is just outsourcing.

It's all that.

Now here we are, right?

YouTube was coming out when I was sitting in Orlando with one of my customers.

I remember this like it was the day.

And he was like, YouTube is where it's going to be.

We're going to be uploading all of our content.

And it was a state and local agency that I was meeting with.

They were like, there's no way we're ever going to put our information out there.

Now, it's all it is, right?

So you're right.

AI, ChatGPT, Google, better,

they got a lot of work to do.

It's going to be wild to see how fast it blows by Google.

And they're the 800-pound gorilla.

And I think chat and these other guys are going to speed by them.

Not like

traditional tech.

It's going to be

like within 18, 24 months.

And I'm not a tech guy.

Like, you were way smarter than me when it comes to tech.

I'm not.

That's not my thing.

Man, I got him fooled, huh?

All right.

So what I think is really cool that I want to speak to here is you guys currently are living in an RV.

No.

No?

No, we have a house.

We lived in an RV.

I thought you guys were living and traveling with your daughter and kind of do something.

We do.

We have an RV that we travel with.

We do it more for fun as she travels.

You do it with her.

We go with her.

Oh, yeah.

We're part of it.

But this is still the same storyline.

Whether you live in an RV?

We did live in an RV for a year.

So we traveled over 10,000 miles in the U.S.

in 2020.

Yeah.

So during COVID, we were on a boat.

going to Colombia and all the countries locked down.

Of course, we're disconnected from the world.

We didn't have Starlink.

We didn't have any of that stuff then, right?

So we were disconnected.

We didn't,

we had no idea what was going on.

And that was only five minutes.

And they're like, sorry, you can't.

Well, we were

cutting out south and Coast Guard.

And everybody's like, hey, you're not

about Turks and Caicos.

You're like, you guys aren't getting in the country.

Like, you either have to stay where you are or you go back.

You're a U.S.

flag boat.

You go back to the U.S.

And so we hung out.

There's some remote islands down there.

And there's another family that we were with.

There's a lot of families that do this.

It was

pretty eye-opening.

But we hung out for another six or eight weeks.

And then all of a sudden, it just, it got born.

It was on our second boat.

So we did start in a, let me back up because he jumps a lot.

We were on a cell boat

with no AC, no generator.

We did make our own water on it and it was amazing.

Like it was great.

The thing went six knots.

And I was like, dear God.

Is that essentially like 10 miles an hour?

You walk faster than that

down the hallway.

Yeah.

So I was like, you know, you go from driving up and down the the highway and flying all over the U.S.

to going like max speed of like seven miles an hour.

Yeah.

Best case.

So that that boat ended up, we plus our, we had a chocolate lab on the boat at the time and she wasn't doing well.

So we we came back

actually

Fort Lauderdale area.

Yeah.

And got a new boat.

Well, we put that one for sale.

We moved to Asia

for a year or so.

We bounced all around Asia and different countries and different things.

And they went to school for a little while.

Then we bought a power cat.

We actually did buy a bigger boat, a two-foot power cat.

And it had all the bells and whistles.

And it was very nice.

That's the boat that we were on in during COVID.

Okay.

So the lifestyle play is where I'm leaning into.

Yep.

That's when the light bulb went off for me.

It's like, we, why am I, like, we were getting to a point where it was fun, but being retired was boring too, right?

We were on a boat like this, but it wasn't, it wasn't fulfilling like we thought it was yeah so we were coming back we were going to reset get our properties back in shape we had started a

property management company that was taking care of that we owned and everything so and a lot of the employees that that started with us day one are still on the same we still have the exact same team in place um so i looked at you know i did take another corporate job for about a year in there and it just It wasn't the same.

I mean, I was making tons.

I could have made a killing in this company.

I could have, it could have been so easy.

But I would walk in the office every day.

I was like, God damn, why am I letting somebody tell me I have to be in San Francisco Monday morning?

I don't want to be in San Francisco Monday morning.

It ain't me anymore.

So that's when we started having.

I started starting the dealership.

Yeah.

So we started having a white shirt in the back.

So you'd put it on.

Oh, I'd be on a Zoom call with, you know,

here up.

She's taking, you know, running credit applications out front, you know.

Yeah.

And then I'd take my share off, run outside and watch an RB and they'd come back in and take another call.

But it came to a point, it's like, what are we doing here?

Like, this, this isn't us.

We're not happy.

This isn't going to end well.

So let's build businesses and properties and portfolios that feed into the lifestyle that we want.

And that also kind of helped us get into the RB side of the place too, right?

Because we were still traveling a lot with our kids.

We were still traveling back to Texas a lot.

How do you, this is a big issue in our space.

I deal with it a lot in terms of

building building a business that satisfies the life you want versus your life having to try to satisfy the business you build.

You guys have done it, in my opinion, the right way.

Have you ever been addicted to anything?

Coffee.

Cut coffee.

Can't.

You know how hard it is?

Yeah.

That's how hard it is to do that.

Because, like you said earlier, right?

We are so conditioned to have a bigger house and have nice clothes and what kind of car you drive.

We're conditioned to go to work and build this and work, work, work, you you know, night, oh, a 40-hour week.

No, you need to be putting in 90.

You need to be doing this.

And then whatever you have left over is where you live.

Breaking that habit of building your companies to support your lifestyle is just as hard.

And it takes a tremendous amount of focus every day to stay on task.

And I will say he never did it when we were traveling on the boat or the RV.

He had a very hard time with it.

I did it.

Now I'm back in like grind mode and he's trying to pull back.

So it's kind of a, I couldn't let go.

You were still in grind mode.

even when you were traveling even in the rv

i think some of that is is nature yeah i think men are built this way right i mean we are the lion we have to go hunt and feed the tribe and protect the tribe and some of that i would argue is going to be nature more than necessarily him i don't think it's a shane thing i think it's a man thing

um

but i think the other side is maybe how you're raised and yep and that thing of i still kind of want these things or the ability to get them at least yep or when you didn't have anything growing up, you want those things, you know, there's certain things that I, stupid things that I've checked off my list.

I'm like, that's it.

Like, I don't want to, well, you know what?

What I, it's funny because I've, as you guys follow me now, because of this, I'm going to go through an interesting journey in my socials and it's going to be a totally authentic, congruent, like exposure of the truth of what happened in the last 18 months of my real estate business.

The reason why I really want to do that, and it's going to be like stressing out talking about it, because it's like, it was, it's definitely not pretty yeah let's say it that way and it wasn't because the the interest rates it wasn't because of the political climate and what was going it was literally just personal things that i could have controlled that i didn't control that because of that created a catastrophic scenario right and i say that to say Part of all of the things we want or the things that we build come out of a pride and our ego side.

And I will tell you, if I have to take a 30,000-foot foot step back, which is a large step back, I could probably pinpoint that if I removed my ego and my pride 18 months ago,

I'm not in the scenario I'm dealing with today in the real estate space.

And I say that because I think if people can also realize like you can build a business and create a lot of financial success without the ego or pride being involved, in talking to you two, I feel like that's really a high mark on your agenda.

It's not about the things.

It's not about the ego.

It's not about the pride of what we're doing.

We want a really quick life.

We want stories.

We want to travel with our daughter.

We want our son to go travel.

Like, that is a unique characteristic in the entrepreneur space.

And you guys, seemingly, whether you feel like you have it all under control or not, like from the outside perspective, I applaud you.

You guys should apply yourself because I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs.

This is quite literally what the show is about.

It is very rare,

very rare to have the qualities you guys have of what is most important

and being on a boat being the rv right and like creating more of a life than creating a thing or a pride or ego statement that's that's that's that's true it's very tough because what i can say in our aspect probably for both those but for me for sure right i had i had a big ego when i met her

i was charging and you know i was that's what you got to do right you got to put your blinders on and fuck everybody that maybe you also loved that about him when you guys were.

I was attracted to that.

Yeah, for sure.

But finding the right partner means the world.

Amen.

There's, I will give every single bit of it up today.

No questions asked because I know that we can build it back together.

No questions.

Come on.

Yes.

I love that.

Yep.

You got to keep your sand.

Yeah.

No doubt about it.

I mean, that is the best thing about it.

And so when you're talking about egos and stuff like that.

Good or bad, you know, there's been there's days that we do not like each other at all.

There's drives in the morning because we do everything together.

We don't own a car, right?

The dealership has cars that we drive and stuff.

We own our kids' cars, but so we drive in together.

We do everything together.

We shower together.

We eat breakfast in the morning together.

We brush our teeth together.

I swear to God, it's everything.

But we chose each other for that reason, right?

So there are drives in the morning when we're talking about our day or week or

what is apple.

And I'm like, dear,

if you don't stop eating when you're young.

I didn't know my breathing could get on her nerves so much.

So that stuff happens, but we have learned each other and read each other well enough and respect each other enough in that aspect that we can't put each other's ego in check.

Because there are a lot of times that it, that ego comes out, and you just want to like, and they're like, hey,

six months from now, what do we want to be?

Does that matter?

Does this matter?

And we're able to keep that in check.

So, that's why I have a strong personality myself.

I'm pretty spicy.

That's not talking about her keeping my ego in check.

I'm talking about keeping her.

Yeah.

Really, the reverse.

Backwards now.

Yeah.

So it's big.

Yeah.

If I didn't have her, it would be, who knows what would be going on.

It's, it, it makes a huge difference.

Yeah.

Huge difference.

And the fact that we're both locked in on keeping it fun.

Like we're, yeah, we're married.

We have kids and all this kind of stuff.

But at the end of the day, we're like, hey, if it ain't fun, we got to change it up or it won't last.

Period.

So we always keep that core.

We've been together 20 years.

So 20 years.

Yeah.

That's a whole lot.

20 years.

So building on like building the lifestyle, right?

When the media company came out and people started, you know, businesses started coming to us as it's growing.

I was like, well, holy shit, you know, we have the RV dealership that allows us to travel all over the U.S.

and go to these barrel races.

And we'll be in Las Vegas in December.

She qualified to run and race in Las Vegas.

So we'll be out for probably three weeks doing that.

So all this stuff.

And so you'll grab the RV.

You'll be in the RV.

And we'll have the horse and a trailer on the back of the RV and we're driving out.

And you're working and hanging and working

and doing the dinners and going to her shows.

We're always working.

People ask me, like, do you take days off?

No, I work eight days a week if I like it.

Let's talk about this.

Genuinely, I think it is something that the outside world doesn't really understand about entrepreneurship.

And it's not really working.

We enjoy it.

We love it.

But it's constant.

You're on your phone or you're on your laptop or you're dealing with something where a nine-to-fiver can be like,

and fuck off.

That's part of the network I want to grow that drives me freaking nuts.

What?

The nine-to-fiver.

You want to grow that network?

No, I want to grow the network of owners who can help me deal with that.

Because right now, I'll cut it quick.

I want a result.

I don't care if you got something on the weekend.

I hired you for a result.

That's right.

But I don't get that with nine-to-fivers.

And it drives me freaking nuts.

And part of what I do love about real estate is, for the most part, it's a seven-day week.

Like you can always kind of get somewhere.

Holidays, every realtor takes off for whatever reason, which is annoying.

Fridays end awfully early for realtors as well.

But,

you know, I would tell you, I'm the same way.

And I think that is something that entrepreneurs,

at least people that want to be or maybe aspiring as they sit here and listen or watch this, I would encourage those to take a lesson from these two because it is not, you know, nine to five.

It is quite literally like 24-7, 24-8, like all day, every day.

It is a hustle.

It is a grind.

Now, there's a certain level you can hit that maybe you guys don't even want to get there.

And that, that could be a reality of like building a big enough business that you can remove yourself.

But to do that, what it takes to do that.

And that's not for everyone either.

Bigger is not always better.

Yeah.

It's about, yeah,

that's very key, right?

It's not about being a big giant company.

So on the media side, I set out and we don't do big pushes.

We're not trying to be the end-all be-all to everybody because I want a good core of great employees, which I have

some now.

And I want them to have growth.

I want them them to have future.

I want them to have freedom.

And I want them to love being in the company.

I don't care if I'm billing 400 grand a month or 100 grand a month or 50 grand a month.

If we're happy and it's giving us the freedom to do what we want, that's the, that's what I want.

And part of the success, like we love to see people win.

If you want to win or you want to better yourself, like we are all for it.

Like, I want people on my team to win.

I want them to, you know, like make more money than me.

Like, I want that.

Yeah.

So when people have that drive and stuff, like, I want to push that.

I want to love that.

We love that fire in the ass.

Yeah.

The, the next chapter going into the next, let's call it three years.

Give you guys a three-year target.

What do you see you guys doing for the next three years?

Where do you think your push, your goal, your agenda will be for the next 36 months?

Stabilizing, growing and stabilizing the media company.

I mean, we love that from a travel perspective.

Like, I was able to, we wanted to travel.

We wanted to go to Iceland.

So I was able to pick up the phone, make some phone calls.

I found a couple of rental companies in Iceland that rent RVs out.

I said, hey, here's who I am.

I have a marketing company.

We want to come shoot some content.

Which it was only three weeks old at the time.

Yeah, the media company is only three weeks old.

But the experience was there.

We had it.

So we, next thing I know, boom, we booked flights.

We took off.

We spent seven or eight days in Iceland.

Victoria and I had an RV that we were driving around.

Our son and daughter had an RV.

So we had two RVs.

We caravaned all around Iceland for like eight days.

It was incredible.

We shot incredible footage and we were on that vacation.

We call it a vacation.

That trip was great because it wasn't just going to the pool and sitting by the pool on the beach or it wasn't just going on vacation, right?

We were working, but it was a working vacation that was just excellent.

We all had roles.

We had, we're going to this waterfall and we're shooting.

So we were working while we were doing it.

And it was great.

We really enjoyed it.

It was great.

So that piece of it going three years out, I want to see Saba Media and like in the Middle East.

I want to see this overseas a little bit more.

I'm talking to some boat manufacturers uh in eastern europe right now so they'd be clients for you they'd be clients for us yeah they'd allow us to travel they would allow my entire team to travel so they'd be a client for you in return they give you they're paying us as a retainer and paying travel and you know how do we work it out right maybe a boat or you have to pay them for the boat that you take for three weeks that's right yeah so whatever it is right it's all about the barter system that's a loss system by the way there's a lot of bartering that should be done these days don't you think like i'm down have what i want i have what you want why don't we barter for for that yeah you can pay me x amount of money or give us access to this for so many months and then that's it yeah why not so we're open the media company is going to be a head-down venture for the next 36 months to build it yep you don't do you have a goal do you have like i want to get it to this this is where i'd like us to be i have a revenue number yes but no

yes but no i got to enjoy the journey is what she's telling me don't focus on the end result i agree that

keeping keeping in check that's what she because otherwise you're going to get there and say yeah but now what yeah but if you enjoy that whole journey, it is a struggle.

It is a fight every day for me, and I'm sure it's for you to really take,

like,

be aware of the moments in the journey because we're builders.

That's who we are as men.

I'll go back to like that nine-to-five job.

Yeah.

So there's days that I wish I was on a salary, like where I didn't have to do anything.

Cause I would say the first, the first year we opened up our car dealership,

probably the first 13 deals that I did, I didn't realize like I'd never done financing before.

I'd never done like sales tax.

I'd never done title work.

None of this stuff.

Like I'm selling cars.

I'm like, I'm selling these cars.

First 13 cars that I sold, I owed them thousands of dollars, you know, like

that was like, oh, we did it all backwards.

I was like, it was great.

Like, there's days that I would grab my purse.

It would be me and Shane.

I'm like, I quit.

I pack my purse up and I'd go home.

She'd cry in the car on her way home.

And I'm sitting like, like, Well, damn, I ain't got a car to get home with.

But I sold all the cars, but we actually have to pay them to take them.

And now I don't have a car.

Exactly.

Yeah, sales tax was a tricky thing.

We had to learn the hard way.

Luckily, we were in a position where we could pay it out.

And we, we got an accounting firm now that pays it monthly and all that stuff now.

But man, that was that was that could have been.

You said something that I almost want to end with this just for the sake of time.

By the way, everyone, make sure you're following them on socials.

Would you like them to follow you specifically anywhere personally?

Or

nothing personal.

Sorry.

Well, no, like Instagram, linkedin you can follow us at sava media group savva sab s-a-v-a media group savva media group make sure you're following this to incredible company a couple you said something that um

you made all kinds of mistakes when you started this rv

I say something in today, like even as I start to go through this journey of what happened to me, you know, in 2024 and tell everyone and expose it all and say what happened.

Part of that is the authenticity of like, I don't care how long you've been doing it, whether it's your first day or it's your hundredth year, you're going to fuck some shit up.

But there's a quote called, or that says something about doing it wrong enough, long enough.

And if you just keep going, even though you're doing it, you learn from it.

And that's such a powerful statement for you guys to say, now we still have this RV dealership.

It's profitable.

We pay ourselves.

But to start that, you weren't like crushing it and you didn't realize you had the taxes that you were gonna owe like but people don't realize that they're like oh look at this couple now they're amazing they're traveling the rv and they're yeah they don't remember those days they don't know the days that you get in a car and you're crying and you're freaking out and like oh my god yeah or the days like in the early days the rental properties you know like my painter wouldn't show up and i was like

i got tenants that are moving in in two days i gotta go clean this house and i gotta go paint the damn walls and i'm there till 1 a.m painting and he's like literally have our kids at six and eight years old in there with a scraper scraping the old we're lowly them up so we can lay new flooring down at like one in the morning you know you guys are just so endearing because that's what it takes regardless how built big you want to build it or not like entrepreneur this isn't easy it's not for everybody it's really not just not people like i have a couple friends are like oh everyone should be an entrepreneur and i'm kind of like it's not really

psychos i think it'd be a lot easier for us if everybody was we could learn from their mistakes and they'd fall out right that's what i'm doing the base live dude this audiobook game i'm just like constantly listening to these things trying to learn from these mistakes, man.

We need more people failing so they can blaze a little bit of a trail and show us what not to do, right?

Guys, you're incredible.

You're going to have a great journey.

I'm excited to now get closer to you guys and your family and to see where all this goes.

And this has been great.

Yeah.

We've been doing it.

Perfect.

Thanks for having us.

Shane Victoria.

Yep.

Sava Media Group on Instagram.

Yep.

Or Shane Childress.

Or Shane Childress.

Yep.

Instagram.

Check it out.

Guys, if these two were pretty cool, if you learned something or just like this episode, share share it with two of your friends.

I'd greatly appreciate it.

See you on the next episode.

All right.

See ya.