NFA Finance

For me, the answer isn’t one particular thing.

It’s opportunity.

I’ve probably been trained to see it differently than most people because I’ve spent most of my life buying and selling things—especially cars.

When I was younger in Michigan, we were literally street buyers.

Before Facebook Marketplace, before everybody carried the internet around in their pocket, and before nearly every car for sale was searchable online, one of the ways you found inventory was by getting in the car and looking for it.

On weekends, we’d drive a big loop through Michigan. It might take a couple of hours. We’d run down M-50, through different towns and back roads, looking for cars sitting in front yards with FOR SALE signs in the windshield.

You were hunting.

A car catches your eye.

You turn around.

You look underneath it.

You knock on somebody’s door.

You ask what they want for it.

You start talking.

Sometimes nothing happens.

Sometimes you buy a car.

Sometimes you find a deal that makes your entire weekend.

That taught me something long before I ever thought much about it:

Opportunity is everywhere, but you have to be looking for it.

And that never really left me.

After I moved to Florida following my divorce, I needed a kitchen table.

My former wife had taken the table we had. That was fine. I wasn’t emotionally attached to a kitchen table. I just needed another one.

Around that time, a house down the street had sold and there was a table sitting outside that they were getting rid of.

It was a good table.

Maybe somebody else saw something sitting by the street that needed to disappear.

I saw a table I could use.

So I grabbed it.

There was no business plan. I wasn’t thinking about flipping furniture. I wasn’t calculating my return on investment.

I needed a table.

Later, I reconditioned it.

Once it was cleaned up and brought back, it was a beautiful piece of furniture. When I eventually moved and didn’t need it anymore, I sold it for a surprising amount of money.

The value had been sitting there the entire time.

Somebody was simply finished with it.

Recently, basically the same thing happened with a bicycle.

I saw it and immediately saw what it could become.

Clean it.

Fix it.

Recondition it.

Make it right again.

Now something somebody else might have overlooked can have real value.

Cars are the exact same way.

So is real estate.

So are businesses.

So are ideas.

And this is where I think it gets much more interesting.

The more you build your own machine, the easier opportunity becomes to see.

For years, my machine was cars.

When you know how to buy a car, recondition it, price it, finance it, market it and sell it, you don’t look at a used car the same way somebody else does.

Most people see a car.

You see inventory.

You see acquisition cost.

You see recon.

You see margin.

You see who the customer might be.

You see the finished product before you’ve even bought it.

That’s what having a niche machine does.

It gives opportunity somewhere to go.

Seeing an opportunity is one thing.

Having a system capable of doing something with it is completely different.

If you know how to sell cars, suddenly cars that other people overlook become interesting.

If you understand real estate, you start driving through neighborhoods differently.

You notice the house that hasn’t been touched in twenty years.

You notice the strange lot.

You notice the building sitting half empty.

You notice where businesses are opening and where people are moving.

And now I’m experiencing the same thing with content.

Once you’ve built a machine that can create content and you have an audience paying attention, the entire world starts looking different again.

A conversation can become a video.

A car on the side of the road can become a story.

A problem at the dealership can become a lesson.

A road trip can become a series.

A property can become content.

A question someone asks you can become a short, a long-form video, a blog post and a conversation with thousands of people.

The opportunity was always there.

But now I have another machine capable of capturing it.

That’s the part people miss.

Opportunity doesn’t necessarily become more abundant when you become successful at something.

It becomes more visible.

You’ve developed the eyes to recognize it.

And more importantly, you’ve developed the infrastructure to capitalize on it.

That creates a flywheel.

You build a niche.

The niche gives you knowledge.

The knowledge helps you recognize opportunity.

The system allows you to act on it.

Acting on it creates more experience, relationships, money, content and attention.

And all of those things expose you to even more opportunities.

Eventually, you start seeing them everywhere.

Two people can drive down the exact same street and experience two completely different worlds.

One person sees an old truck sitting in a driveway.

Another sees a potential $5,000 spread.

One person sees an abandoned-looking building.

Another starts wondering what the rent is, who owns it and what could operate there.

One person sees an old table sitting by the road.

Another sees something beautiful underneath a little dirt and work.

Neither person is necessarily wrong.

They’ve simply trained themselves to see different things.

Technology has changed tremendously since those weekends when we used to drive around Michigan hunting for cars.

Today we have auctions on our phones.

Marketplace.

Zillow.

Social media.

YouTube.

Search engines.

Artificial intelligence.

More information and more reach than we could have imagined back then.

I use all of it.

But I never want to lose the old habit of simply looking around.

Because the world itself is still the best marketplace there is.

Look at the cars.

Look at the buildings.

Look at the businesses.

Talk to people.

Listen to their problems.

Pay attention to what people are throwing away.

Pay attention to what they’re trying to sell.

Pay attention to what they desperately need.

And most importantly, keep building machines that allow you to do something when you recognize an opportunity.

Because the best thing I’ve ever found randomly on the street wasn’t a car.

It wasn’t a table.

It wasn’t a bicycle.

It was the realization that value is everywhere.

And once you build the ability to recognize it, improve it, package it and put it in front of the right people, the opportunities become almost impossible not to see.

I’m still a street buyer.

The street is just a whole lot bigger now.

— Nicholas Francis
Modern Day Dealer