Redneck Economics: Mining for Success and the Power of Radical Tenacity

Thanks everybody for joining the Hunt for Success today. I’ve got Aaron Chapman, the author of Redneck Economics. He’s a mortgage originator and one in the top 1%. But you’ve done a lot of things.

It’s kind of one of those things — do you really wanna be known for doing bank loans? But it’s cool to be me, the individual who’s definitely not your quintessential banker, to also be ranked at one point number one in the real estate investment lending space and number seven nationally in loans, period. Now I’m the executive vice president of investment lending for a firm out of Vegas.

You’ve been in the real estate finance space since ‘97. But you were also in mining and trucking beforehand.

Oh, dude. Yeah. High school years were running cattle — about 500 head of beef cattle. Then I went to welding in the oil fields of Wyoming, running heavy equipment, driving truck, and worked in the mines in northern New Mexico. I’ve been on a top fuel pit crew. I also ran the technical rescue unit for the sheriff’s office here in Arizona from 2009 to 2018.

Do you take anything from those previous jobs into your work as an entrepreneur?

I would say what I’ve taken most is a tenacity to keep going. With cattle, they have their own minds and not everything goes as planned. When you’re breaking rock underground, sometimes the rock’s working with you and other times the earth is different that day. Heavy equipment breaks, job sites are different than they told you. You have to exercise patience and tenacity in every situation.

My wife handed me a coupon for free diapers because we couldn’t even afford them. I swiped my debit card at the gas pump and got a decline. So I walked that big parking lot picking up coins — a nickel, a dime, a quarter. After a couple hours I had enough for two gallons of gas. Then I went inside with that coupon and heard the worst thing I could have heard — my own name. Someone recognized me. He introduced me to the mortgage industry over dinner at Red Lobster in December ‘97.

Had the timing been different, there wouldn’t have been that change laying around to pick up. Had people dropped more, I would’ve picked it up faster and wouldn’t have seen Keith. Had people dropped less and it took longer, I wouldn’t have seen Keith. The timing was absolutely perfect to take me down a path I didn’t know I was supposed to walk.

We set up a family trust that has holding companies that own the real estate. Each member of the family rents and pays back to the trust even though they’re also a beneficiary. We’ve been very successful at helping people build wealth and build something for their family to take that same structure and be able to grow it.

How do you take some of the principles you’ve learned from either side — business into hunting or hunting into business?

What I like most about hunting is it takes all your senses. In business you’re scattered all over the place, pulled a hundred different directions. But on the hunt, you intentionally shut everything off — sight, hearing, smell, touch. And not just to find the prey, but to also not become prey yourself. I love to hunt places like Alaska where they’re looking for you just as much as you’re looking for them.

We went on a moose hunt in Alaska — seven hunters, one cameraman. Got dropped for ten days in unit 18, right along the Yukon River. We killed six moose in six days. I was involved in all the skinning, de-boning, and hauling. We’re talking 100 to 150 pounds on your back, going back and forth several miles. It was one of the greatest adventures of my life.

August 8th, 2008. I left home that morning at 190 pounds, a marathoner, rock climber, mountain biker. Net worth just shy of $4 million. Seven-sixty credit score. A kid in his dad’s truck put me into another vehicle at 80-plus miles an hour. I went from all that to 156 pounds, bound to a wheelchair, credit score in the four hundreds, and a negative $1.5 million net worth. My memory would recycle every three minutes.

One of the things I really liked about your book — one, you talk about ass whoopings, but two, the thought process of pain is the ultimate teacher.

I showed up on Christmas morning 1998 for a client who insisted on meeting. I sacrificed Christmas morning with my children because I needed to close a deal in January. He signed with another lender for an eighth of a percent lower. He said, “Hey, it’s nothing personal, just business.” I realized business is very, very personal. And the outcome would have been the same if I’d stayed home.

The greatest lesson is there’s not a single beating you can take that will cripple you completely — unless you choose for it to. It’s a hundred percent on you. Every lesson from every ass beating makes us better at what we can do if we apply them. If you lay there and lick your wounds, everything will crush you.

My assistant Chloe said, “Life is hard. I need the cheat code.” I told her: you just found it. Life is hard. Pick your path, get your ass on it, and stay on it. When you get knocked down, get back up and keep moving forward. Nobody has a cheat code. Define success for yourself and understand that the road is gonna be long and hard, but full of amazing experiences.