How a Real Estate Contractor Earns Investors’ Trust After 93 Flips | Mike Villacis

Mike Villacis (00:00)

Fear kills a lot of dreams, and pursuing my dreams… I still have more dreams, and I don’t give up easily. I thought maybe when I was younger, I’m like, “Man, I’m too scared to do this, I’ll never do that.” But now that I look at myself, I’m like, “Nah man, I have it in me to do more and to keep going.

Quentin Edmonds (00:49)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I am excited today. I’m excited about my guest. This gentleman has done 93 flips. He is an investor. 17 years as a general contractor for investors. And so I’m excited about just peeking through his lens, gleaning through his experience, so that we can take and just add that to our experience. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Mr. Mike Villacis. How did I do, Mike?

Mike Villacis (01:25)

Perfect, man. He got the name spot on, man. I appreciate it, man. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here, man.

Quentin Edmonds (01:31)

Man, so glad you’re here, sir. So glad you’re here, man. And listen, Mike, I’ll be honest, I’m the type that likes to dive right in, right? So I would love for you to tell the people what your main focus is these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little origin story, kind of how you got into the spaces that you’re in. And then tell them where you are in the world—people like to know where people are geographically. And so, Mike, my friend, sir, you have the floor.

Mike Villacis (01:57)

Cool, man. All right. Well, again, Mike Villacis, that’s my name. Name of my company is Bang It Services. That’s B-A-N-G-I-T Services. Bang It. I got into the roofing business back in 2009. That’s where Bangit came from. But by 2010, we were working with a ton of investors doing full remodels, full rehabs. And that’s kind of where we’re at still now. That was our main niche. That was our specialty, and that’s where we stayed.

But we do it at a volume level. So we work with hedge funds, we’ll work with the City of Dallas, City of Houston. They’ll give us a lot of properties, but also a lot of investors—a lot of people that just buy one or two properties a year—and we focus on doing basically a large volume of properties. Again, we’re in Houston, Texas, we’re in Dallas-Fort Worth, and anything in between. So we’re basically from south of Houston, which is Galveston, all the way up to the border of Oklahoma. We do single-family properties, we’ll do multifamily apartments, and we do a lot of commercial work as well. But yeah, that’s basically how I started working for investors. And then by 2015, I started investing myself as an investor. And that’s where my 93 flips are in.

Right now, I have five that I’m currently working on, three that are active on the market, and two that I closed last week, thank goodness.

Quentin Edmonds (03:24)

Love it, man. Thank you, sir. Thank you for walking me through kind of where you are and what you do. Mike, I often say destiny has no wasted moments, right? Meaning we learn from each leg of our journey. We learn from the failures, we learn from the successes, and it just reinforces who we are, reinforcing the decisions that we make, the niches that we find—like all these things, we learn from the journey. And so, Mike, I would love to know, sir, for you, what has the journey revealed to Mike about Mike? Has it made you more disciplined? Has it made you more humble? Has it increased tenacity? Like, what has the journey revealed to you about yourself, sir?

Mike Villacis (04:07)

Yeah, that’s a good question. So yeah, I feel like when we make mistakes sometimes, we call them failures. At the end of the day, they’re just lessons, and we learn from them every day. We make mistakes every day—small ones—but we still make them and we learn from them.

Real estate, running my own business, and doing the investment stuff—I’ve learned about myself that I’m more capable than I thought I would be. I feel like a lot of people have that fear inside of them, until you realize fear can’t stop you, man. Fear kills a lot of dreams. And I love pursuing my dreams. I still have more dreams, and I would just say I don’t give up easily. I thought maybe when I was younger, I’m like, “Man, I’m too scared to do this, I’ll never do that.” But now that I look at myself, I’m like, “Nah man, I have it in me to do more and to keep going.” That’s more accomplished than I thought I would be.

Quentin Edmonds (05:12)

Man, thank you, sir. Thank you for that reflective answer. I appreciate it, man. And you’re right, the failures are just lessons. I often say failure is fertilizer. If you allow yourself to plant seeds within the failure, beautiful things can happen. Absolutely. With fertilizer, if we research it and know about it, some of it’s just dung, right? It’s dung mixed with dirt, manure mixed with dirt. But the beautiful thing is, it may start off smelling, but nutrients can literally come out of that. And so it’s just allowing yourself to plant—allowing the seed to be planted. So yeah, I appreciate you, man.

So listen, I gotta ask: operations is a big thing when it comes to business. So Mike, I would love to know, what is maybe one operational thing you’ve put into place, let me say in the last two years, that has really helped you be successful in running your business?

Mike Villacis (06:46)

We have a lot of systems in place, and operations is definitely my thing. The last two years, I would say the biggest thing that we’ve improved on is that we have a really good CRM called BuilderTrend. We use that for all of our operations, whether it’s Houston or Dallas—we do some properties in Waco and Austin as well.

And having BuilderTrend just kind of makes everything more organized for us. When you’re working on properties that are hours and hours away from your office, you wonder, “What’s really going on out there?” BuilderTrend really helps us by having our project managers and our clients have a portal so we’re all connected. They can just log in, look at other properties that they have, look at photos, look at videos. If there are any change orders, or they want to see how much they owe on this property or how much they owe on that one—everything’s on there, and it’s great, it’s awesome.

It really helps. A lot of our clients are actually out of state, so we’ve got a lot of clients from California, New York, Atlanta, Colorado. It just brings everyone together for the main goal, which is their investment property, making sure that they’re being taken care of. They’re trusting us with their money and with their investment, and we don’t take that lightly. So we want them to feel like they’re there. So BuilderTrend would be the biggest thing that we’ve done operational-wise that’s helped us get a lot more organized.

Quentin Edmonds (08:15)

Love it, man. Listen, man. Thank you, sir. Thank you for sharing. Organization, operations—I mean, they are the bedrock. One of my favorite books that I keep handy is Atomic Habits. What does it say? “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems,” right? And so, yeah, systems are everything, man. So I thank you for dropping that nugget, man. Mike, what’s next for you, sir? Like, what’s the next real goal? What are you looking to solve or scale next, sir?

Mike Villacis (08:43)

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that we started doing some properties in Waco and Austin. So we’re going into those markets. Our goal was to be there by the end of Q4. We started a little early in Q3, but we’re not currently marketing that on our website or anything like that. We’re just getting started there. So hopefully by the end of Q4—it’s still a goal, and it’s doable. If not, it would be the first quarter of next year. But we’re already there, working out there, and scaling towards Austin and the Waco area.

Besides that, we’re working on a lot more commercial properties and multifamily apartments. That’s been helping us a lot. Right now, a lot of investors are not buying as many houses—there are not as many opportunities. That doesn’t mean that there are none; there’s definitely a lot of opportunity out there, but a lot of investors are just being more careful, as they should be. So a lot of the commercial and multifamily jobs have come to us, and we’re just grateful for that. It’s definitely helping us grow and scale.

Quentin Edmonds (10:24)

Yeah, yeah, I love it, man. And I love how you talk about it. I always like getting people’s unique perspectives when they come on the podcast regarding relationships and relationship building. So I would love to get your unique perspective on building healthy business relationships, healthy client relationships, and even healthy employer-employee relationships. I would just love to get your perspective on relationship building, including some of the relationships that have helped you be successful and some relationships whom you’ve helped be successful.

Mike Villacis (10:58)

Yeah. Man, relationships are everything. It’s not what, it’s who—and it’s also what you do with it. At the end of the day, relationships have made us and helped us grow. They’ve introduced us to new markets.

For example, I always tell this story: when I first started as a roofing company—I set up Bangit as a roofing company in 2009, 17 years ago—I had this guy. He worked for another, larger construction company at the time, and he asked me to give him a bid on his roof. A week later, I followed up: “Hey, just following up on this roof.” He said, “Man, call me in like two weeks.” Called him back in two weeks—I wrote in my notes: call back in two weeks. Called him back in two weeks, and he’s like, “Man, I haven’t made a decision yet, man. Give me another two weeks.” “All right, put it on my calendar, I’ll be back in two weeks.”

I called him back in two weeks, and he’s like, “Man, you should have called me a week ago. I got my roof done a week ago.” I was like, “Man!” I felt like I did everything right—did all my follow-ups, everything I was supposed to do. I said, “All right, cool, man. I appreciate it, Sean. If you need anything else, let me know.” You have to be respectful and courteous.

A week later, he calls me. He’s like, “Hey man!” I’m like, “What’s up, Sean?” He’s like, “Hey, I got some leftover shingles. Would you like to buy them?” I’m like, “Man, I don’t want leftover shingles. I have plenty of those in my garage.” But I didn’t just say, “No, screw off.” I was just more like, “Okay, well, I’ll let you know if I need them.” I didn’t call him back, obviously.

Then a week later, he calls me again, and I was like, “Man, this guy really wants to sell these shingles now.” I’m like, “What’s up, Sean?” He says, “Hey, look, man, I don’t think I ever told you what I did, but I work with a large construction company and we got a contract with FEMA. I was wondering, could you handle like 150 roofs this year?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! We could handle 150 roofs.” He said, “All right, cool. Can you come to my office next week and let’s have a meeting?” I was like, “Cool.”

Went out there, and sure enough, he gave us not just 150 roofs. He’s like, “Hey, I also need all this construction stuff afterwards, and all Section 8 homes.” And we did 150 homes from roofing to flooring to windows to cabinets. I mean, we did a lot of it, and it all came from just following up, but also being courteous and respectful in a scenario where maybe most people wouldn’t be.

Quentin Edmonds (13:19)

Yes, sir. Mike, incredible story about relationship building. I mean, incredible. Literally the nutrients and the steps that it takes to build a relationship: it’s not always just the one call, not always the second call, not always the third call. It’s literally those calls building rapport, keeping your name at the top of their mind. And I can just imagine your demeanor—not being too pushy, not being too overbearing, just keeping the conversation open. So man, incredible story about relationship building. Thank you for sharing.

Mike, listen, I want to make sure we cover all bases. So I don’t know, you may have come into this podcast with something on your mind that you wanted to make sure you shared—maybe about your business or maybe just about inspiration or whatever. I just kind of want to open the floor: if there’s something on your mind, I want to make sure you land that message for the people before we talk about how people can get in contact with you.

Mike Villacis (14:29)

Man, my message—obviously I want everyone to know what it is that we do, but I also want people to know that there are trusted contractors out there. A lot of contractors have a bad name for themselves, and that’s one of our things: we want to be that trusted contractor. That’s where we want to be different. We have our ducks in a row, we know what we’re doing, and we do what we say we’re going to do. It’s one of our core agreements.

And I believe we bring value to a lot of investors. We’re very honest, too. So if, for example, we go see a property and it’s a new investor and he or she is in over their head, our goal is to make sure that they know what’s going on. If they’re still under contract, we’ll try to walk them through it to avoid them losing a lot of money. At the end of the day, it makes us lose money because we’re losing a client at that point, but we’re not really, because now you’re trusting in us that you’re making a rational decision. So yeah, that’s it, man. We just want to be known as a trusted contractor for everybody out there.

Quentin Edmonds (15:34)

Absolutely. Well man, I appreciate you so much for coming on and sharing. Mike, I want to say three things to you sincerely, sir. But actually, before I do that, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, or learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, sir?

Mike Villacis (15:54)

Yeah, so our office number is 832-864-8340. The name of our company is Bang It Services, and our website is bangitservices.net. It’s got all of our contact info on there. And then my email is mike@bangitservices.net.

Quentin Edmonds (16:16)

Gotcha. Love it, man. Again, sir, three things I’m going to say to you:

One, thank you for your time. I think time is our most precious commodity, so I appreciate you giving us some of your time today.

Secondly, man, thank you for your authenticity, even what I call the gift of your integrity, right? Showing up as your authentic self. I believe when we show up as our authentic self and just talk about what we do, it sprinkles seeds for people. And those seeds may plant at any given time. We don’t know what the thing that was said is really going to penetrate, but we plant the seed, right? So thank you, man. Thank you for planting some real seeds today.

And lastly, man, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I really appreciate you coming on today, sir.

Mike Villacis (17:03)

All right, appreciate it. Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (17:05)

Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Mr. Mike. His information is in the show notes. Please get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here, because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring on amazing people, just like Mr. Mike Villacis. Thank you so much, man, for coming on, sir. And everybody else, y’all have a great day.