Mikey Taylor started his career as a professional skateboarder, barely making enough money to make ends meet.
A friend taught Taylor the basics of real estate investing when he was saving early in his career.
Today he manages a real estate fund and shows investors how they can create a path to financial freedom.
Growing up in the 1990s, Mikey Taylor would skate through the family-friendly streets of Thousand Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles. He had no idea how far his wheels would take him.
Today, Taylor is President of the real estate investment firm Commune Capital, which manages over $200 million in real estate including warehouse properties and apartment buildings. He uses his social media channelsto educate other people about “financial freedom.” He is a member of the Thousand Oaks City Council. And he even jumps on his skateboard from time to time.
Taylor, 40, credits his successes to the early challenges of skateboarding. Skateboarders naturally see the world through different eyes. For her, obstacles become opportunities – an attitude that has helped Taylor get to where he is today.
“There was one part of skateboarding that really changed the way I saw the world,” Taylor told Business Insider. “I had never thought of a railing as anything other than a device to help you go down or up a flight of stairs. When I saw someone skating on a railing, everything changed.”
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Taylor laid the foundation for his life after skateboarding earlier than most
Before Taylor on his TikTok– and Instagram accounts about financial freedom strategies like the FIRE-Bewegung (Financial Independence, Retire Early) spoke, you could do it especially when shredding in Skate-Videos see or and at the popular extreme sports competition The X Games.
Taylor landed his first sponsorship deal with Duffs Shoes while he was still in high school. Shortly after graduating in 2001, he turned pro at the age of 19. “My original plan was to skate for a couple of years and then go back to college,” says Taylor. “Then skateboarding just exploded.”
He continued to skate into his early 30s, not only surviving longer than most, but longer than he himself had anticipated. He initially made about $800 a month, he said. But by the time he was 24, he was already making six figures a year.
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Taylor knew he couldn’t skate forever: “A hundred thousand as a pro skateboarder doesn’t feel like a hundred thousand in a conventional career because our careers are so short,” Taylor told the insider. “It might be over by 30.”
Taylor’s parents did not approve of his decision to skip college after high school. They urged him to get in touch with family friend and financial adviser Randal Sanada. “He taught me how to keep house. He taught me that I have to pay for myself first, and then what to invest in,” says Taylor. “He taught me how to look at an investment through the lens of risk and reward.”
Laying the foundation for his post-skate life, Taylor began investing in the stock market and bonds at age 20. In 2005, Taylor took Sanada’s advice and invested in a self-storage company that rents storage space.
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Sanada’s brother Jerry ran a private equity firm that had self-storage properties in its portfolio. Admittedly, Taylor didn’t know much about real estate other than seeing his father Ken own a rental and commercial property. But he learns quickly.
“Mikey is an exceptionally smart guy — he’s a really fast learner,” Jerry Sanada, who now serves as Commune Capital’s co-president and CFO, told Business Insider. “What impressed me about him is that he asks good questions and surrounds himself with good people.”
As Taylor began receiving quarterly dividends from his real estate investments, he saw what lay ahead: a life outside of skateboarding. “I was obsessed with the idea of finding financial freedom through real estate investing,” he says.
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Taylor’s early investments got him into real estate
Taylor made good money as a skateboarder but lived like he was broke to invest as much as possible. “I was probably living on $20,000 and then investing as much as I could after taxes,” he said.
Taylor and two partners founded Saint Archer Brewing Co. in San Diego in 2012 with investor money. Three years later, the partners sold the brewery to MillerCoors, the US arm of Molson Coors, one of the largest brewing groups in the world. The “Wall Street Journal“ valued Saint Archer at more than 35 million dollars (around 31.9 million euros).
“We went through the cycle,” says Taylor: “raise money, use the capital to build a company, sell the company, and return the money to investors.”
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This sale allowed Taylor to become financially free at age 33. (He defines financial freedom as passively making enough money through existing investments to live comfortably.) That made the real estate mogul leap a whole lot easier.
He made the move to real estate investor to show other skaters how it’s done
In 2018, Taylor went full-on into the real estate business and used the money he made selling the brewery to start Commune Capital. The company began buying and developing apartment buildings, primarily in California.
“The idea of buying a bunch of houses seemed difficult to me,” says Taylor. “I liked the idea of buying a 50-unit apartment instead of buying 50 individual houses.” The company is now also investing in self-storage facilities across the country, including in Connecticut, Iowa and Washington.
The company offers investors the opportunity to invest in its asset-backed lending portfolio, which makes loans to commercial real estate owners. Investors, in turn, receive distributions and must already have net assets of at least one million dollars (910,000 euros) or an annual income of 200,000 dollars (182,000 euros).
Taylor originally founded Commune to inspire other skaters to chart a path to a successful post-skate life. He uses the company’s social media accounts to share financial advice that he’s found lucky himself as a skateboarder.
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On his personal accounts, Taylor preaches and teaches financial literacy to his more than 821,000 and 659,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok respectively. His videos aren’t just about real estate – he also gives talks about it Career Advice and the world reserve currency. “On some of these platforms, I have a bigger following than when I was a pro skateboarder,” he says. “It’s crazy.”
“A man who thinks outside the box and can quickly reorient himself”
The hard skills learned from grinding on a park bench don’t translate to a desk. But Taylor made the transition seamlessly. “I’ve never worked with anyone who has achieved as much success as quickly as they did with such a significant transition,” Sanada told Insider.
Resilience is a must-have for skateboarders. Failing to do the same task over and over again until you get it right can drive some people insane. But Taylor believes it prepared him for his current position. “For the most part, business is about a bunch of problems. And it’s about the ability not to let those problems drive you crazy and to solve them over and over again,” he said. It never gets easier, but skateboarding brought with it a certain joy in chaos.
This article was translated from English by Steffen Bosse. You can find the original here.