Scott McCaig

Founder and Director, Apartment Wizards, 2010

Founder and Principal, Nova Strategic Investing LLC, 2005

Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Media Luna LLC, 2004

Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, 2010

Background

Scott has always enjoyed the opportunities and challenges presented by different investment options – from Wall Street derivatives through private micro-loans, tax liens, and self-storage – but has especially connected with multi-family investing given its dual-benefits of being able to be treated as a business but unlike many other businesses also having a well-established valuation. Technically, Scott started his multi-family journey in 2004 with a four-plex. After surviving several near-catastrophic mistakes (such as attempting to manage it personally), he successfully turned it around (and it’s still producing nice cash flow today), combined its many lessons with Anthony’s training and coaching and moved up to commercial deals. His multi-family investing peaked in 2015 at 832 units comprised of properties in Shreveport, LA, Indianapolis, IN, Jackson, MS, Aurora, CO, Wichita, KS, and Longmont, CO.

Why

Scott’s Big Why is two-fold. First, he wants to provide security and opportunity for the McCaig family and its members to pursue their dreams with few financial constraints and to pass that opportunity on to future generations!

Second, Scott’s dream is to one day teach financial fluency to high-school students. He’d like to help better prepare them for the real world and teach them that while Wall Street would have them believe that it is the only path to financial security and wealth, there’s a much more diverse set of options for them to utilize. Maybe part of the class will even be to help them do their first multi-family deal together!

Formal Education

• University of Michigan, BSE, Computer Engineering
• Stanford, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certification, coursework
• MIT, Supply Chain Micro-Masters, coursework
  

Corporate Career

Scott’s corporate career started by carrying forward his degree into a software development job, then management, then broadening into marketing, finance, sales operations, HR, supply chain, strategy, and managing a P&L. In 2012, he joined Verizon to help start a new Lean Six Sigma deployment (i.e. process improvement) which generated benefits of $28B since 2012. Also at Verizon, Scott stepped into an individual contributor role personally developing a discrete-event simulation model for Verizon’s supply chain which quickly produced a benefit of $40M in working capital. Scott retired early from his corporate career to devote full time to his real estate and investing endeavors.

Strengths

If you were to put a $/hour value on every major aspect of multi-family deals (i.e. value created in the deal per hour related to a given activity), Scott feels that his most-highly paid value on most deals is negotiations, and analysis of the numbers. Of course, negotiating must encompass all buyer-seller communications, and analysis of the numbers is worthless unless coupled with the best use of the analysis. These two strengths can make a bad deal good, a good deal great, show that a deal that looks good at first really isn’t, or identify and mitigate substantial risks.

In addition to being honored to be one of Anthony’s founding Gold Coaches, Scott is the developer of the Certainty Analyzer™ as well as many other multi-family tools and templates.