Ever wonder how someone could transition from a career as an electrician to a successful real estate investor focused on philanthropy?
Welcome to the “Inspired To Invest” podcast. This week we have Randy Molland with us.
To tune into the episode, click here for video and here for audio options.
From the humble beginnings as an electrician, Randy Molland completely changed direction and paved a path to become a successful real estate investor.
During his episode, he tells us about the personal tragedy that shook him to the core and propelled him to push his limits, starting an electrical contracting company and hosting a monthly meetup to build connections and learn the ropes of the real estate business. His story is a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit and the transformative power of mentorship.
Let’s face it, the journey to success is never smooth sailing.
Randy Molland opens up about the ups and downs, and the unexpected turns his career has taken. He shares how the global pandemic forced him to adapt his monthly meetups to a virtual space, opening up opportunities he never saw coming. Hear his sage advice on handling delays, rising costs, and other hurdles that are part and parcel of the real estate investing business. His emphasis on adaptability and pacing oneself couldn’t be more relevant in today’s ever-evolving business landscape.
Beyond financial success, Randy Molland is a man on a mission – to leave behind a meaningful legacy and give back to the community. He talks about his commitment to donate a portion of his profits to charity and reflects on his journey towards finding purpose after achieving financial freedom. It’s not just about making money, it’s about making an impact.
Don’t miss out on Randy’s insights on mentorship, investing strategies, and the importance of continuous learning – it’s an episode that’s sure to leave you inspired, and ready to make your own mark in the world.
To connect with Randy directly, he can be found on Instagram @randymolland or on FB under his name.
We also have a page dedicated to this podcast on Instagram and Facebook where we preview guests each week, highlight their episodes, top takeaways, tips, quotes and more.
Are you a full-time real estate investor with an inspiring story to share? Apply now.
Thank you again to our sponsors Francis Five Properties & Maynada Media for bringing us this episode! To learn more about them, go to:
✨ @francisfiveproperties on Instagram or LJ Francis on Facebook
✨ @getsocialwithaleks on Instagram or https://maynadamedia.com online
Tune back in on Wed., Aug. 2 for Episode 8 with Melanie Robinson, a super inspiring real estate investor from BC who has been focused on scaling her portfolio while also supporting other real estate investors master their mindset to do the same.
Thanks again for tuning in! And remember, “when you invest in yourself, the sky’s the limit”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 100:02
Welcome to the Inspired to Invest podcast, where we’re sharing stories from real estate investors and how investing has changed their lives. This episode of the Inspire to Invest podcast has been brought to you by Francis Five Properties and Maynada Media. Hey everybody, welcome to the Inspired to Invest podcast. I have an amazing guest with me today, named Randy Molland. You’ll have to just forgive me because I’m a little bit under the weather, but I’ll introduce Randy with a short bio and then I’ll let him do all the talking.
00:35
So Randy is joining us from Victoria BC. He lost his best friend several years ago and he attributes this to leading him into real estate And in spite of his success, he just didn’t feel fulfilled. So he has subsequently made his mission to go big, to give big, and through his business he’s been driven to bigger and bigger opportunities. He’s done more than $20 million in deals and now he’s using his platform and his company to inspire others. So welcome, Randy. You can obviously share a little bit more about your background, but where I want to really start is what life looked like before real estate, so maybe you can fill us in on all of that.
Speaker 201:13
Yeah, and thank you for bang through the tough sickness. I admire that, and you mentioned before the show you might have to take on a bit more of the talking. That’s okay with me, I love to talk. So my stories started when I was a little bit younger and in high school I ended up starting in getting into the trades. So I started out as an electrician in high school and I was very fortunate to get early on experience in that. So by the time I was 22, i was a journeyman electrician, so I was managing job sites and having to manage people and learning skill sets that allowed me to just be a leader in life, and so that really helped me grow as a young entrepreneur, i’ll say, or as a young human. And then I was doing a bunch of side jobs and working very hard and was mentored by one of my best friends in the industry And he kind of took me under his wing. He saw that I had a lot of potential, i was a hardworking young guy, and so we did everything together. We worked out of town, we did a lot of stuff, and he encouraged me to just work my face off until I got to 25 and buy a house. And so I did that And at 25, i bought my first home, which was really exciting and was kind of on top of the world, and I thought, hey, this is it.
02:28
You know, i’m buying my house at 25 and 25 years I’ll have it paid off and I’m going to be able to retire at 50. And you know, i’m looking at my parents, who were just like 50 at the time, or just 50 at the time, and I’m like man, they still have to work another 15 years. I’m going to be retired at 50. This is amazing. And my best friend came to my house, we celebrated, we took a whole day off work and celebrated, and then unfortunately yeah, literally, and then a few days later, unfortunately, he passed away in a job site accident And kind of just changed my whole perspective.
03:02
I went from being on the highest of highs of you know, working so hard to get to this point, to then he was 42 and he passed away, realizing that it can all go away so quick and that I might not even get to 52 retirement, i might pass away at 42. And so that kind of led me down the journey of so what’s next? And within a few days I kind of was just like you know what? I don’t think I want to be an electrician for the rest of my life. I don’t want to work and just go through this grind again.
03:29
So I just googled how to make a ton of money and never work again, and that’s where I found real estate investing. Obviously, through a lot of passive investing, it came up and that’s where I started studying and researching and just kind of went all in And so I’d still like to work. So I’d still go to work from seven to three, but from four am to seven am I was in self-development mode, and from three pm to 10 pm I was in real estate mode, and so I just became a very good human. I studied a lot of self-development and I studied a lot of entrepreneurship and that allowed me to kind of go down the journey of entrepreneurship, feel confident where I was going and just explore this path of real estate and entrepreneurship.
Speaker 104:10
So then, what was the catalyst of, like, making that move? So obviously you’re grinding it out, you’re learning, and then what was your first move? like ready to get started.
Speaker 204:20
Yeah, so I then started by creating my own electrical contracting company because I realized that I was losing so much of my day And we had bought our first property with. So we did joint venture partnerships, so somebody else would put up the capital, we’d do the work and then we’d split the profit. And so we started with running a monthly meetup. This is all I was working, but we started running a monthly meetup So we were able to bring in people into a room and we weren’t the experts, but we brought in the experts. We brought in the mortgage brokers and the real estate agents, the accountants and the lawyers, and they would come in and speak and we’d say, hey, welcome to the re-investors meetup, here’s our expert for the day, and the expert would speak for 45 minutes to an hour and then we’d say, awesome, if you have any questions, email us and we’ll chat with you later. So we learned while we were in the room. That started giving us some credibility. That’s how we got connected to one of our partners, and so we started buying a few properties while I was still working, and then it was like it was one of those things where I was like I just can’t sustain this anymore. I need to go on my own.
05:16
So I realized that by creating my own electrical contracting company, i could make more money, work less hours and control the hours that I was working. And that was my first taste of entrepreneurship where I realized, wow, it’s kind of interesting that now I’m getting paid not per hour because I was just throwing money at jobs and saying, hey, i’ll do this for X amount of dollars, and then I was a very efficient lecturer, so I go to them pretty fast and then had the rest of the day to go do real estate. So I did a lot of that And then eventually I think it was in 2017, my business partner, steve Arneson, and I decided that we were going to go full time into this gig. We had found some ways to make some income and decided that we were going all in. So I kind of transitioned from working full time to being my own entrepreneur and half time real estate to then going full time real estate after we had bought probably four or five properties.
Speaker 106:01
Now, how long did that whole journey take at that point?
Speaker 206:05
Yeah, so from 2015 is when my friend passed away in about my first home to about 2017. So it was about a two year transition and was a lot of exploring. I’d never been an entrepreneur, i’d never ran my own business. I was 25 years old and it was just learning a lot of life still, so it was quite the adventure to go down.
Speaker 106:24
Yeah, i’d say now, when you look back, you know, in the last five, six years, what do you think is your biggest success to date out of that whole portfolio and that experience?
Speaker 206:34
Yeah, one of our flagship properties was the first fiveplex that we did. You know it was our first big property. I like it just because it was so monumental for us in the sense that we had done some single family, put some sweets in them and had some success with that. But then we found this rundown fiveplex that was super beat up. It was an older property, early 1900s. It had, i’ll say, some crackheads living in it and was just one of those like bad properties And it was the worst property in a nice area. It was on a small lot, so it was not a big yard, so a lot of people weren’t looking at that way. And we just looked at it and went, hey, if we can remove the tenants because this was quite a few years ago when you could really not have as much trouble with evicting tenants for massive renovations and we’re doing a massive We would gut at the whole thing and we did all new electrical and plumbing and stuff. But we only had to give a few months notice to get them out. And so we did the math and we’re like, hey, if we bought this property, for I was using like $900,000 and we put, let’s say, 200 or I’ll say 300,000 into it. That takes us to 1.1. What’s it worth? And we figured it’s probably worth about 1.2, 1.3 somewhere in there. And so we thought, or 1.4,. I’m like this is a pretty good thing. It’s almost a full burr And this is again 2017, 2018. So it’s still pretty new into the industry and we’d never done a big project.
07:54
And we found one of our investors to say hey, if you pay cash for this project, so if you write us a check for a million dollars, we’ll go buy the property cash, renovate it cash, and then we’ll go put the mortgage on it after And we’ll be able to get you back the majority of your money on a mortgage and it’s going to cash flow. And so we had an investor write us a check for just over a million dollars. We bought the property, we renovated it. We did it for about 200,000, i think I’ll just keep it simple as, like, we bought it for nine, we put 200 into it, we’re in it for 1.1. And we got a mortgage for a million I’ll say a million dollars. So our investor had only $100,000 in this deal and it produced, i think, like $2,500 a month in cash flow.
08:36
It’s now worth $2 million and has just been this incredible property that some random guy that came to our meetup that got to know us took a chance on a 27-year-old and a 29-year-old to trust his 1.1 million dollars to go do this property. It was a very big turning point in my life. That age meant nothing and experience didn’t mean a lot, but we sold who we were and what we were capable of, and that the numbers just speak for themselves. The guy understood the math and said, hey, this math makes sense And if you guys can deliver on what you say you’re going to deliver on, let’s do it. And to this day we still go golfing with that investor. We’re still in the same partnership with him. We bought a few more properties with him, he’s funded a bunch of our other projects and he’s just become a huge advocate for us because of how we delivered on it. That’s amazing.
Speaker 109:21
Now, obviously not everything goes according to plan. So when you also look back, what would you say is probably one of your biggest lessons that you’ve learned and some of the biggest obstacles that you have faced?
Speaker 209:33
Yeah, we got into some development over the past three years and we knew what we needed to know about development, but one of the biggest challenges we faced was the partnerships. You can trust so many people in so many ways, but if you don’t have control of the project or a way to step in, or if you don’t trust your own instincts, it can sometimes put you in a very hard situation. So, as working partners with capital, we partnered with someone to do the developments for us and it was just a very challenging partnership that we couldn’t control what they were doing. We could only control what we could control, and so it put us in a very challenging situation and position. So the biggest challenge we face is partnering with the right people to get the scale that you want to scale. It put us in a you know we’re developing 100 and something units, which is amazing. It just comes with this challenges along the way, and so experience wise 10 out of 10.
10:28
But for profitable growth is not going to be a 10 out of 10 for us, and it’s something that we just learned. I mean, everything happens for a reason. We gained a ton of experience. We learned how we want to do partnerships and how we’ve handled our side of the deal has been absolutely incredible, and a lot of people are recognizing that, and so it’s actually building stronger relationships with people around us that want to continue to support us and want to continue to invest with us and want to do business with us. They recognize that. You know, that project or those projects don’t represent who we are as a company, but how we show up every day is. So we tried to take one of the most challenging things we’ve faced and are trying to somehow come out of it with a positive spin on the other end.
Speaker 111:07
Yeah, i think transparency and accountability are so important when you are dealing with people’s money and stuff like that right Now. I guess, looking back at that situation, is there anything that you know now that you would look back and be like, well, i could have looked at this partner in this way, or like different due diligence that you could have done to maybe avoid going into partnership with someone that wasn’t aligned with her values in that way?
Speaker 211:30
Yeah, it was hard. We were both kind of new into the industry. They had a lot of experience for what they were bringing to the table, but they hadn’t done a lot of building themselves as an independent company. So they were a new company And we were fairly new at what we were doing And honestly I don’t know if I’d change much.
11:48
I did what we did and we did what we needed to do to get ahead and fast track it. I mean, the one thing that caused all the problems is that we took on four projects at one time. If we just stuck with one project and completed it and then done the next one, then we would be in a lot better position. It was just the fact that we had four projects when COVID hit and construction costs going up on four projects and delays on four projects, and all it multiplied so fast over the four projects. If it was just over one, we would have been able to manage and handle it. So through the partnership, I mean, the challenges really came because they expanded so fast and we were riding with them and then they just couldn’t keep up to the growth that they had created. The overhead gets higher, the payroll gets higher, but you’re not making a ton of money until the program is complete.
12:39
So the advice I would give to anyone is like, if you’re going to do a partnership, do one project and get it complete before you continue on to the second, third and fourth and fifth, getting excited that you’re going to make a lot of money and do a lot of fun things. Just try one project out and just do one-on-one partnerships, as opposed to long term.
Speaker 112:55
Yeah, no, I think that’s really smart advice. Now we’re just going to take a really brief word for our sponsors, So we’ll be right back. Introducing Francis Five Properties.
Speaker 413:03
Hello everyone. I hope everyone’s doing great. My name is Leo Francis and this is.
Speaker 513:08
Jacqueline Francis.
Speaker 413:10
Together we are called LJ Francis from Francis Five Properties. We are real estate investors, business owners and entrepreneurs. Some of the real estate investing strategies that we’re involved in are multifamily, we’re involved with replication, rentals, and now we’re also doing a small development.
Speaker 513:31
So if you’d like to learn more or get involved with any of our projects, please reach out to us. We would love to share what’s going on. Our socials are Facebook at LJ Francis, Instagram at Francis Five Properties, LinkedIn at Francis Five Properties or you can email us at FrancisFivePropertiescom. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you scale your business.
Speaker 413:56
Take care for now, bye.
Speaker 114:01
Thanks again for following along with this episode of Inspired to Invest. In addition to real estate investing and running my own brand experience agency for 18 years, I also published a book called The Accidental Entrepreneur in October of 2021. This is my story and it chronicles how I turned tragedy into triumph to embrace my destiny in entrepreneurship. If you’re interested in picking up a copy, you can find the link at SerenaHolmesRealtor.com and you can also find my link tree with all of the retailers in the details below. Thanks again for your support.
Speaker 314:37
Hi, i’m Aleksandra Sydorow. As a social media strategist, brand builder and business consultant, i help real estate investors grow their reach and build their brand. In today’s digital age, having an online presence is critical for the success in the real estate industry. If you’re looking to grow and elevate your brand, visit www.maynadamedia.com to book your free discovery call. Let’s work together and take your brand to new heights.
Speaker 115:07
Hey everybody, welcome back to Inspired to Invest. We have Randy Molland here. We’re talking about successes and challenges that he’s experienced as a real estate investor. So now my next question is what’s the craziest thing that you would say you’ve ever experienced? Would it be that situation or would it be something else?
Speaker 215:25
The craziest thing. The craziest thing comes actually not from real estate. I’m not going to go in the direction that you think I’m going to go but it actually came from when the pandemic hit and we had our monthly meetup. It was in person. We had done it for seven years and we had built this huge community And, as an entrepreneur, it was one of the hardest things we had to do to pivot this. Our meetup was how we generated a little bit of income. It’s how we generated our investors. That’s how we got our message out there. That’s what we’re known for in the community. We had over 100-something people on a monthly basis.
16:00
And then all of a sudden we had to shut it down And so we had to then go virtual with everything And all of a sudden everybody else was going virtual.
16:08
But what that did was that expanded our reach across Canada now as opposed to just localized, and so we had to pivot and change And all of a sudden we lost some revenue, lost some stuff, but now we had investors from across Canada that were really recognizing what we were doing and how we were doing it, and that has since turned into an incredible new business venture where we recognized that there wasn’t a lot of training and education that was nationwide for high-level investors, so we started just creating this incredible opportunity for those people to join.
16:38
That was one of the craziest things that happened to us outside. I mean, i just shared a little bit about some of the stuff that happened in COVID with our developments, but from a business standpoint because I don’t think enough people talk about business and real estate investing, of how hard it is to actually pivot and change and adapt, and that was one of those things One of my favorite quotes is adapt or die, and COVID came in. You either need to adapt or die, and in our educational space. We adapted very quickly and had a pretty incredible endeavor come from it and has now been a lot of funds to build.
Speaker 117:08
Yeah, that’s amazing. I think that’s so important in any industry. I mean, obviously I experienced it in my business because we were in events And unfortunately it just wasn’t the kind of events that you could adapt. We had one client that went from, i think, five or six full-time employees to like 30 because all they did was conferences. So they could do conferences virtually, so they were able to grow. But for us we’re more of like a face-to-face kind of business. So that’s where real estate investing kind of saved me And I’m grateful that I was proactive, like I’d started it before, and it kind of led me down that path. No, i guess when you look at your career in general, it doesn’t necessarily have to be real estate specific. But what’s the best advice you’ve been given so far?
Speaker 217:51
My dad gave me some advice early on when I started just working in general, and he always told me to build your reputation, not your bank account, and that is something that stuck with me forever.
18:01
My dad’s a very old-school, hardworking guy. You show up early, you first in, last out, and you just make it so that you become unfireable, right? You just know everything about the business, you everything about the organization, so that you just can’t get fired And you just be the best human you absolutely can, so that people just want to be around you, and so that is something that I’ve just taken with me forever, and anything that I do is just my reputation. It means a lot more to me than the money that I’m gonna get in the back end, and I think a lot of people see that when they work with us through investments or coming to our masterminds or work with me on other consulting projects. I care more about the outcome of how people view me than I actually do about the investment that’s coming in, because I only ever get one reputation and once it’s gone, it’s gone And it’s very hard to build back. Money is very easy to come again if you ever to lose it.
Speaker 118:50
Yeah, And I think that speaks to your integrity, not only as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, but also as a person. Now, in terms of financial freedom, what is your financial freedom number? And it doesn’t have to actually be money, It could be the number of people you impact. Monthly cash flow volume. What matters the most to you?
Speaker 219:12
I don’t have a financial freedom number. Mine is the legacy that I want to leave, and we had a coach one time ask us are you interested or are you committed? And that was a really interesting question to ask ourselves Are we interested in just doing this or are we committed to doing this? And what I’m committed to is building a legacy that people will remember, and that is why I’m on this journey of go big to give big now, because it’s not just about how much real estate I can buy or how much money I’m going to make or getting to financial freedom. To me, it’s about the impact that I’m going to leave in this world, and one of the ways that I’ve done that and have learned is that I learned through some mutual friends that the best way I view it is that at my funeral there’s going to be hundreds of people that I’m hoping, and what I would want is that not a single person is sitting in the seats sitting there watching. They’re all fighting for the microphone, sharing about the impact that I made on them, and so that is kind of how I live my life and make a lot of my decisions is based on.
20:14
You know, at the end of the day, when my turn is to go, what are people going to say? Will they say, yeah, he was a cool guy and we had a lot of fun? Are they going to say, oh my God, every single person that Randy spoke to had a massive impact and he changed their lives or left them feeling more inspired? left them feeling more, and that, to me, is a freedom thing that I will probably never hit what I want to hit, but that is the driving force for me to want to grow, and I love family and I love being free, but I’m just so inspired by what I do every single day that it is not a job for me. I will never retire. I will do this until I die, and that is just. the financial freedom for me is when I know that I’ve officially got there, is when I’ve made that big of impact.
Speaker 121:02
Yeah, i think that’s important. And just to your point about retiring, i think that’s a challenge that a lot of people experience is that they reach this pinnacle, they finally retired and then they realize like they have no sense of purpose And a lot of times people you know they can go downhill at that point or they go back into working because they need something to find fulfillment and like purpose in their day to day life. When you talk about going big to give big, like, how do you see that materializing now as you go forward?
Speaker 221:26
Yeah, so one of the things that we’ve done inside of our portfolio is we donate $10 per door per month. So our fiveplex that I talked about donates $50 a month to charity. To me, that is one of the coolest things on the planet. As long as they own that property, it will forever make a donation, and as we scale our portfolios, so does our donations, and I’ve got probably a dozen other people onto that program as well that are donating $10 per door per month. A bunch of people like yourselves might be donating forever all the private lending they do. They donate a portion of all their private lending profits And it’s just a very cool concept. To me, that’s very simple but can have a very lasting impact in this world. So that is something that’s just got me very excited. Right now is this $10 per door per month type legacy that I want to build and continue to scale, and to me it’s something that people can really look at it and see the impact that it’s making and give them the drive to scale their portfolios.
22:30
I think so many people get burned out right now trying to buy real estate and get financial freedom and make that number of. Hey, i got 100 doors. It’s like cool. But what does that mean? Nothing. If you start adding $10 per door, that’s like cool. I’m donating $1,000 a month. That makes me feel really good, really inspired and want to do some more good in this world. So by attaching a giving component to the doors that you’re buying on your month basis or your developments, or your flips or whatever it is, it will actually help you feel more inspired, create less burnout and want to go, do and create more in this world.
Speaker 123:05
Yeah, that’s amazing. Now, i know you mentioned a quote earlier, but talking about quotes, motivate you. Is there any one in particular that you feel like really gets you going and makes you feel a certain way?
Speaker 223:18
One of them is money doesn’t impact you, or money doesn’t change you. It disposes who you already were. So that is something that I heard and I was like that’s really cool. So money as I make more money, if I’m a good human, it’s just going to make me a better human Right, and that’s why I’m starting to do this donating now and teaching business to do it from the beginning, because if you start from the beginning as you make more money, you continue to make that kind of impact. If you’re a bad human or you don’t do good for this world and you make more money, you’re typically just going to do more bad in this world, and so I truly believe that money doesn’t change you. It just exposes who you already were. So just become the best version of yourself now before you make money, and then, as you make that money, it amplifies how great of a human you actually are.
Speaker 123:58
Yeah, i had a mentor, actually probably 10 years ago, that used to say the same thing. So he’s like if you’re a greedy person, it’ll amplify all of that, and if you’re naturally generous in giving, obviously it makes that tenfold. So it resonates with me as well. Now, just in terms of wrapping up, is there anything that you want to share with anyone that could be watching, or any projects that you’re working on right now that you want to shed some light on?
Speaker 224:20
Yeah, i’m really inspired by the scope to get big mission. I envision a world where people are no longer sitting around talking about their fancy cars and fancy houses, but they’re sitting around a table talking about the impact they made and the volunteering they did. That is my dream, yeah, and so I’m just really inspired by that. I’m running a community on it on Facebook called GoBitGibbit Community, where I’m just growing the conversation, allowing people to come in, and a lot of people are challenged by it. They don’t know where to give, they don’t know what charities to donate to, they don’t know the processes And they feel like they’re kind of salesy, gross, scammy people for doing it. Yeah, and we’re really just shining a light on that and how you can actually be a good human and make this work, and so that is something that’s just got me very inspired right now.
25:06
And building communities I think through COVID we saw that community was really big and we all got online on communities And now we’re starting to see that come back in person And I think it opened up a little bit of the global network. So kind of combining the two of those of like, hey, how do I just take the best humans on the planet that love to give and want to make impact and grow communities where we can actually make a really big difference and support each other and love on each other. And you’re part of one of our communities And it’s like you know. You’ve just seen the culture that we create inside this stuff. When you come to an event and you get inspired, there is nothing more empowering this world than leaving an event like that with all new friends and all new people. So, making impact through, go Big to Get Big and then building communities of just inspired, incredible humans coming together and doing a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 125:54
Awesome. Now how can somebody find you? Obviously, we’ll share it below, But what’s the easiest way for anyone to kind of get on board with you and follow you on social?
Speaker 226:02
Yeah, our website is thereinvestorsca, or gobigtogitbigcom, and on social media, again at the underscore reinvestors on Instagram, or Randy molland m-o-l-l-a-n-d on Instagram or Go Big to Get Big Basically all kind of interconnect. If you go to one, you can find any of them.
Speaker 126:20
Awesome. Well, thank you again for your time. Obviously, we’ll share that below. If you’ve liked what you’ve just seen, make sure that you’ve subscribed and you’re following along on Inspired To Invest podcast And remember you invest in yourself. The sky’s the limit. Thanks again for tuning in. Thank you again to our sponsors, Francis Five Properties and Maynade Media, for bringing you this episode of Inspired To Invest. The views represented on this podcast are for general information only and does not constitute investment or other professional advice or an offering of securities. The host and guest featured on Inspire To Invest make no representations as to the performance of any particular investment. Should you decide to make an investment, you are responsible for conducting your own review and analysis. It is recommended that you obtain independent legal accounting and tax advice from licensed professionals.