0
🖼️ Resim
I bought a 54-acre ranch to teach my kids: self-reliance. Then I lost millions overnight and learned another lesson.
Brent Phillips bought a ranch for his family and ended up a short-term rental owner.Milk & Honey RanchBrent Phillips transformed his Texas ranch into a rental to support his family financially.He first rented out space above his garage to help pay his bills and expenses.Phillips' 54-acre ranch now has 40 units and can fit 150 guests.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brent Phillips, 47, a software engineer who started renting out units on his guest ranch in Burton, Texas, to help pay bills. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I've been a software engineer my whole career.I had built a couple of companies and worked for some companies, always doing software engineering.I'm originally from South Africa, but my brother got recruited to play rugby in Aspen, Colorado, so that's how I came to live in America.His daughter had a stroke several years later, and we moved to Houston to be by the medical center. My brother and I ended up starting a company together to help people with complex medical cases — I was the software engineer behind it, and he was the business mind. It ended up doing really well, and we sold it to a public company. I became a multimillionaire.I got the idea to buy a ranch after we had that huge freeze in 2021 in Texas that shut everything down.I had this awakening that I was useless in society because once electricity went out, I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to fix a water pipe. I didn't know how to grow my own food. I didn't know anything. And now I've taught that to my kids.The whole premise behind buying a farm was for us to learn how to actually take care of ourselves. We were pure consumers, and I wanted us to learn how to produce. I wanted to teach my kids gratefulness. I wanted us to become better people, because all I knew was Uber Eats. And if Uber Eats wasn't working, I was in trouble.In April 2021, I found a 54-acre ranch and bought the land. It had sat on the market for over a year. Nobody wanted it because it was in such disarray, but I just loved the land.Milk & Honey Ranch. in Burton, Texas.Milk & Honey RanchIt had a house, but the house was destroyed during that freeze in Texas. The pipes burst, and the house flooded. The only thing there was a barn, which is still here today.Everything needed work — every fence post, every building, everything.The ranch was supposed to be just for my family, but I started renting it out for extra cashWhen I moved my family here, I literally moved them into the barn. My wife was sleeping on a blow-up mattress, my kids in hammocks across the horse stalls, and I would sneak out at night and sleep in my Tesla because I could put dog mode on and at least have some air conditioning through the lot.About four months in, we ended up buying a three-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home so we didn't have to stay in the barn.But living in the barn was a great reset. Everything after that was an upgrade, and we were grateful.Phillips and his wife, Daniella.Milk & Honey RanchEventually, I had built myself a house. I had built my mother a house, and I had built my brother and sister-in-law a house, and that was all the houses that the ranch was going to have, because it was just a little family thing. And then we had this six-car garage for all of us who lived on the property to park our cars.At the time that I bought the ranch, I never had to work again. We were building these buildings, and I didn't have to worry about anything.Everything that I was basing my future on was. still in public shares from this company in a lockup period.It's like having money in the bank, so you make certain decisions. Except I went to sleep a multimillionaire and woke up one day and it was gone. The stock price dropped from $55 a share to $5 a share. I'd leveraged other trades, and I'd leveraged other things off that. So when that crashed in 2022, I lost it all.I tried a bunch of things to make money. I went back into software engineering, but some of those doors had closed.The only thing I had as a way to make money was the potential to put this thing on Airbnb. So in September 2022, I put our attic above the garage on Airbnb in a Hail Mary attempt to save the farm.I was embarrassed but desperate, and people booked it.A Western-themed. town built on the ranch.Milk & Honey RanchEvery bit of money that came in, I just kept reinvesting and reinvesting.In January of 2023, I put the mobile home up for rent. Then, in June, I'd taken the money and built three casitas.That year, we earned over $300,000 in bookings by the end of the year — just enough to pay off all our debts.Then my wife had a huge car accident in 2024 that wiped us out financially again.During that time, we stopped all marketing, and people still booked the ranch for a year and a half into the future.That was the moment when I was like, "This is something real. People actually want this."Up until then, I was still thinking, "I need to go back into tech, I'm just trying to pay some bills with this short-term rental thing."After nursing my wife back to health, I was like, "I've been given an opportunity here, and. I need to grab it with both hands."I still can't believe all the successNow we've got 40 units, sleeping 150 people total.We have casitas — the first unit I built is now called "The Origin," and it did so well that we built a second attic. We have a tree house, and more.We've been renting the ranch going on four years now, and every time a guest shows up — even today — there's a part of me that's still like, "You wanted to come here? You could have gone anywhere in America, and you wanted to come to Milk & Honey Ranch?"Phillips and his family.Milk & Honey RanchI often have people come to me and say, "You must be living your dream."I'm like, "This was never my dream." I was deep in the tech world. All I'm trying to do is pay the bills.I would never have chosen this path. It was nothing I ever dreamed about. I got shoved into it, just trying to provide for my family.Even after we added three casitas, I still didn't think this was actually going to be a business. I was just trying to balance out the expenses with the income.In the past 12 months, I've hosted over 8,000 guests.I have to have. a reason to get up in the morning and do something big, not just be idle.This business is the hardest thing I've ever done. But I discovered something about myself: The best version of myself is when I need to take care of my family. That's the most unselfish and unwavering I am. I'll push through all the barriers needed to take care of my family.Read the original article on Business Insider
