Kim Wendland & Chad Sutton

“My childhood was amazing in the sense that my parents were flat broke, but I had no idea, because the household was filled with love. I grew up as a football coach's daughter. I was blessed with being able to learn early that you cheer for everything and you persevere as a team to get things done. That foundation, I would say, has been pi”

Interviewed by Jonathan Rozek for Ten Paths. David Lindahl was not involved in editing these interviews.

Jon: You guys are related, right?

Kim: Yes, Chad is my nephew.

Jon: Could you give me some idea of your early years?

Kim: My childhood was amazing in the sense that my parents were flat broke, but I had no idea, because the household was filled with love. I grew up as a football coach's daughter. I was blessed with being able to learn early that you cheer for everything and you persevere as a team to get things done. That foundation, I would say, has been pivotal for my entire life.

Jon: Where did you grow up?

Kim: I was born in Silver City, New Mexico, which is nowhere in New Mexico. My dad became a winning football coach, so there would be a state championship and then he'd move to the next town. Eventually he was recruited to Texas schools. In a small town south of Amarillo named Hereford, he coached AAA and AAAA-level sports like football and track, plus he was a math teacher.

While Dad had his football career, Mom earned her beautician’s license. She actually had a fascinating amount of common sense and business savvy. Dad was fantastic relationally and I would say very motivational—a bigger-than-life kind of person. But Mom had the business savvy: she opened her own salon after just a year of being a stylist. She figured out real fast that you needed to own the business, and so she was the entrepreneur in the family.

This was a transformational period. It was really a huge turning point for my parents and for my sister and me, when they went from 97 cents in the bank at the end of the month and walking to work, to suddenly having enough money to have a little extra. They had finally cracked the code and began to realize the American Dream.

Dad decided to leave coaching, and he entered the insurance business. Long story short, he started out as an agent and by the time he left, he was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Texas Farm Bureau. He climbed the ladder all the way up.

Mom ultimately sold her business in order to be a fantastic executive wife, because they always believed in teaming up on everything. They were better together working as a team. We were growing up in the midst of those kinds of experiences. My parents believed they could have it all, and they ultimately did reach their goals.

After Dad retired, they got into real estate. As usual, they didn’t do things halfway, but instead jumped in with both feet. They bought an entire portfolio for their first transaction. Dad passed a few years back, and in fact, that portfolio now provides my mom's retirement income. She still has that business, and it's thriving and growing. Any time you talk with her about a puzzle, she's very decisive because she intuitively knows business.

My life is not so much a story of overcoming some huge obstacle, but instead it's a story of being given so much. It’s a feeling that I want to do well because so many people have invested in me. It’s a deep desire to be a good steward over all I’ve been blessed with by so many. That creates a bit of performance pressure, but that’s not a bad thing when kept in check.

After college I jumped into the technology industry, which was the biggest growth industry of my era. I learned to program. I wanted to be in an industry that was filled with jobs and opportunity, and I was.

Jon: You must have been kind of a rare breed, right? I mean, you were in that industry before all the emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) out there these days.

Kim: I was one of two women in the whole computer science lab. Yeah, it was not the norm. I felt like I was not a great programmer, in the sense that it did not come easily, but I knew I needed to understand it well enough to build a career there.

My theory was there were businesspeople making decisions every day and they didn't understand the technology. If I could find a way to bridge the two groups, the geeks and the execs, then I would always have a career.

It worked out beautifully for me. I spent 30 years in IT, and worked on multi-billion-dollar projects toward the end. In fact, it wasn't unusual that I would have 10 or 11 billion-dollar contracts going at the same time.

Ultimately I did grow weary of global travel and the 24/7 nature of technology, and the constant political aspects. So after 28 years I just threw up a white flag. I didn't have a plan. Honestly I just needed to exit and exhale.

In doing that, I was blessed to have had time to help my mom through my dad's passing. Also during that time, real estate started to figure in my thinking. I had the opportunity to see in three families how real estate had an impact. The first was an aunt and uncle who lived in town. They were working-class people who owned their own house. He was a grocer, and she was a bank teller. The only reason they had any wealth at all is that they inherited land. When they sold that land, it provided for them and then ultimately for their heirs.

Jon: Where were you living at the time?

Kim: I was in Austin. The second example relating to real estate was a dear family member who was close to Mom and Dad in their later years. She was a teacher, yet in her after-hours career of investing in real estate, she had amassed a portfolio of over 100 properties. She began selling them off, but then had a better plan. She was the person that sold the remaining portion of her portfolio to my parents. So she's making recurring income because of seller financing she put in place; and my parents operated the properties and got to a place where they could make income from that. I therefore saw three examples of how real estate had completely changed the trajectory of people's wealth and provided for their retirement.

The interesting thing is before having my eyes opened to real estate investing done the right way, I had a negative opinion of real estate. The only money my husband and I ever lost in the stock market was in a REIT. I was not impressed with the idea of owning apartments. Like everybody else, I had visions of unclogging toilets, slum lords, and all the other yuck factors. I didn't want any part of that.

Later, when I was settling an estate, I had the chance to look at the economics right there, in black and white. And it was an epiphany moment for me: I’d had the wrong understanding before.

But here's the cool part and this is where Chad starts coming into the story. Mom and I were leaving a closing in 2019. She had just sold a deal and we were reinvesting funds. We were driving across town, on the way back home, when we passed an apartment complex. She said: “I wonder how you can buy one of those?”

That was mind-blowing to me because who thinks like that? And here she is, in her retirement years, wanting to expand. Not to wind down, but to expand. I said: “I don't know but I bet they make a lot of money.” She looked at me and said: “Well, if they're not, they must be pretty stupid.” She could immediately see the compound scale there.

I kid you not: it was within two weeks that Chad called me and said: “I really want to get into this real estate thing, but it's dumb to buy single-family real estate here in Nashville; let's do multi-family.” It was April—tax season—and I said: “That sounds great. I want to learn with you, but I first need to finish nine tax returns. Can we do that in June?”

A week later, Chad called: “I know you want to wait until June, but I invested in a program and I didn't realize it had room for two people. Do you want to go with me to San Diego?” I agreed. But I will stop there and turn it over to Chad, so you can hear his story up to that point.

Jon: OK, but one question first: was your parents’ portfolio single-family homes?

Kim: Yes.

Jon: OK, so Chad, you came up with this idea of multi-family independently of Kim?

Chad: I don't think it was fully independently, but I think I deviated from the single-family path that the family and now Kim had quite a lot of experience with. At this point I was trying to figure out how we might replicate and expand that business, and kind of set up the Tennessee division of it, where I was living.

Jon: Before you talk about the Tennessee division, what is your background?

Chad: My mother Tammy is Kim’s sister. I also grew up in a house full of love. We also didn't have any money in our early years. When my parents met each other, my mother had me and I was about five, and my father had my sister, who was about two. So they wound up getting married and forming the Brady Bunch, and had a third kid. Here was this family of five, with lots of love in the household, but college degrees weren't exactly front of mind at the time.

My parents always wanted better for us. They always went after the next level in order to support the family. My parents not only supported a family of five in a suburban neighborhood of Austin, but they also went to school at night. Between the two of them, I think my parents have five or six degrees at this point.

All of this taught me a couple of things. First, take care of your education or degree before you have kids. And second, you never have to finalize what you want to be when you grow up. I mean, I watched my mother go from the legal field, to education, to owning franchises in the hair-salon industry, to real estate, constantly reinventing herself. My father did the same thing: he worked in IT, like Kim, but more on the manufacturing side. He worked for Samsung, Dell, Motorola, and others before bridging into different roles as CEO, COO and in sales.

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