Moments pass, and I begin to wonder if he’s not going to answer me. But then he speaks. “I was flipping houses, still. Making a killing on it, too. I had good taste, and an eye for the houses that would flip well and the ones that wouldn’t. I was getting to the point that I’d started hiring guys to do the actual construction work, and I was just picking the houses, buying them, and selling the flipped ones. And then I took a gamble on a huge mansion that had been foreclosed. It was outside Chicago a ways, in this gated community. On like six or seven acres. It was a fucking mess. It had been bank owned for several years; no one wanted it. It was old, some pipes had burst, and it was just ugly, you know? That sort of overly gaudy decor rich people think they need to show how rich they are. Plush burgundy rugs, gold-plated door handles, thick dark walnut everywhere, too much furniture and not enough floor space. Ugly as fuck, but it had beautiful bones. It was a huge project, which was why no one wanted it, you know? It really was a complete gut job; all the grass would have to be ripped out because it was all overrun with crab grass, all the beds were overgrown. Most flippers have a sweet spot of around two or three hundred thousand as a max purchase price. Once you get higher than that, you’re entering a whole new tier of things. You buy at four or five hundred, to get a good return you have to start seeing a sale price of nearing a million, and that level comes with its own complications. Well, this property was a huge risk. I got it for four hundred, because they were fucking desperate to unload it at any price. That was a huge chunk for me, and I knew I was in for at least half that much in reno costs. It was worth easily double what I paid for it, just going based on previous sale prices of that property and area comps.
“So I went for it. I gutted the place, ripped every stick of flooring out, knocked down every single non-load-bearing wall, the stairs, the ceilings. Ripped out all the landscaping. I mean I took that fucker down to bones. This was six months after I found out about Leanne cheating on me with Marcus, the man who’d been a sort of flipper-mentor for me, as well as my business partner. I walked away with nothing but what I’d saved and the return on the house I was in the middle of finishing. And this huge risk, it was the first job I was doing without Marcus. I was in a bad place. Fucked up emotionally, having flashbacks from the war, not sleeping. I got myself in over my head, really. Looking back, I should have gone smaller. Done a couple properties of the type I was familiar with. A ten-thousand-square-foot mansion on six acres, one that needed a complete gut and rebuild? It was idiotic of me.”
He rubs his face, crosses his legs, and covers his lap with the sheet.
“To this day I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. I was drinking all the time, like, the whole project is kind of a haze, because I was half wasted the whole time. I was a goddamned mess. But somehow, I scraped together the money to finish it, pulled a lot of all-nighters. Point is, I finished the flip in like three months, which considering the size of the job is pretty incredible. I finished over budget, though. By a lot. Bought it for four, spent another three hundred thousand on reno costs, most of which went to rewiring and redoing the kitchen. Get the kitchen right, and you can sell just about any house. So I had an overhead of seven fifty. Highest comp in the area was a flat million, but that place was fifteen hundred square feet less than my property, and was on half the acreage, and wasn’t updated.” He glances at me. “Shit, I’m boring you, aren’t I? You don’t give a shit about the flip. Short version for real now. I sold the house for one point eight. Made a killing. But I was burned out, by then. That job just . . . fried me. I didn’t want to touch another flip. So instead of sinking that money back into another flip, I went a different direction. One of the guys I’d hired for the flip had an uncle who was selling his computer parts manufacturing business. I bought it. Streamlined the business, fired a bunch of people and rehired better ones, put in a manager I trusted, got the place running like a top. Started churning out a profit in no time. One of the people I’d hired was the main sales account manager, and she got us six new accounts that were insanely lucrative. That process landed me a lead on a computer supply company that was going under, so I bought that and, essentially, flipped it. Made cuts, hired new people, got new accounts. Used my parts supply facility to get the computers built more cheaply, so I turned a higher profit on each sale. And then a real stroke of luck for me. I met a guy who owned a whole chain of used-car lots, a couple restaurants, and a gas station. Dude had terminal cancer and was selling everything at a bargain basement price. Bought him out lock, stock, and barrel. He was a hell of a businessman, so his stuff was all in good shape. Saw a return on that investment in a matter of months.”
He glances at me. “Seriously, babe, just bear with me. I’m almost to the interesting stuff. Once the companies I bought were all turning a profit, I sold them. I wasn’t interested in the actual running of the business, just the buy, improve, and sell. I kept that one guy’s chain of business, though. Sort of out of posterity or something. He died a few months after I bought him out, but I still own all those businesses. Well, anyway, I kept making bigger and bigger investments. Buying larger companies for larger payouts when I ended up selling them. Finally, the business took me to New York. A research and development company working on future tech for cell phones and such. Better touch screens, holograph displays, all sorts of stuff we won’t actually see for years yet, even now. The owner of that company, right after we signed the deal, pulled me aside. Said he had a good lead for me. Couldn’t tell me much, but it was a chance to buy into a company with real earnout potential. Millions, he said. Hundreds of millions.
“Well, of course I was skeptical. Someone says shit like that, you gotta throw some side-eye, you know? Like, what’s your angle? He put me in touch with Caleb. The investment opportunity was a partner stake in a futures trading company. Stocks. Hard to explain if you’re not into business. Point is, there is a fuckload of money in futures, if you do it right. Caleb, it seems, does it right. This was new, for me. I was still a builder, essentially. I just built businesses instead of buildings. Stocks, futures, market indexes? It was all new.”