226: From Oil Fields to Financial Freedom Through Real Estate
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Looking to turn your career experience into real estate success? In this episode of The Richer Geek Podcast, Casey Gregersen shares how he went from working in the oil fields to building wealth through real estate. How did Casey make the leap from a corporate job to owning fitness studios and launching Bighorn Capital Fund? You’ll learn why he chose Wyoming as his market, how his engineering background gives him an edge, and how passive investing can help you reach financial freedom. Curious how you can get started too? Tune in and find out!
In this episode, we’re discussing…
From Petroleum Engineer to Real Estate Mogul: Casey recounts his fascinating career shift from working on oil rigs for Shell Oil Company to building a thriving real estate investment business.
The "Why" Behind the Move: Discover the pivotal moment that inspired Casey to prioritize family and pursue financial freedom through real estate, even while maintaining a successful career in oil and gas.
An Engineer's Edge in Real Estate: Learn how Casey's background in engineering, with its emphasis on mathematics, underwriting, and process-oriented thinking (SOPs), has been a significant asset in his real estate ventures.
Why Wyoming? Casey reveals the strategic advantages of investing in the Wyoming real estate market, including lower competition and a unique market dynamic that offers consistent stability and cash flow.
Untapped Potential in the Cowboy State: Explore the specific types of real estate opportunities Casey is pursuing in Wyoming, from single-family homes to value-add multifamily properties, and how he leverages local insights with modern investment strategies.
Bighorn Capital Fund: Get an inside look at Casey's Bighorn Capital Fund, designed for accredited investors seeking passive income and wealth building through strategic real estate investments, offering both debt and equity opportunities.
Helping Others Achieve Financial Freedom: Casey shares his passion for empowering other professionals, particularly those in demanding W-2 jobs, to achieve their passive income goals by partnering with his fund.
Resources from Casey
LinkedIn | Website | Big Horn Capital Fund
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Richard Geek Podcast. Today we have Casey Gregersen. He's the founder, CEO of Bighorn Capital Fund. He's a real estate investment expert based in Laramie, Wyoming. And we'll get into some details on why he's picking Wyoming. It's very interesting. He's got a decade of experience at Shell Oil Company and a successful transition entrepreneurship. He's managed multiple business ventures, including seven Pure Barre franchises. Now he's leveraging his industry knowledge to help professionals achieve financial freedom through strategic real estate investments. Casey, how are you doing Bud? Casey: Doing great. Doing great. Excited to be on the show. Mike: Absolutely. So I always start every episode, give us a little bit about who you are and what was that transition moment that you decided, what real estate is it? Casey: Yeah, you bet. My path was probably a lot different than most other people coming from an oil and gas background. Growing up, I didn't picture myself being a petroleum engineer. I was always a math guy, got into engineering and it was a big opportunity I had in grad school to be a petroleum engineer. Which led me to work for Shell, actually down in Houston. The nice thing I had though is when I went to work for Shell, I was an engineer, right? So after six months in the office or so, they put us out in the field, like on a drilling rig. I was out there like drilling and fracking and doing all that on site. But the cool thing I had was I would work for two weeks on the rig, right on the site. And then after that I travel home for two weeks. And on those two weeks off. I didn't have to pick up my work phone or open the laptop or do anything when it came to working for Shell. So during that time, that's when I started investing in real estate. I'd actually bought my first rental property when I was going to school at the University of Wyoming. I grew up in Wyoming, right? Bought my first rental property there in college. And then during those two weeks I got that bug right. I started listening to BiggerPockets Rich Dad Poor Dad, and listened to podcasts. I was consuming it by day, working in the field. And then on my off days I was actually going to apply for it, right? I was fine with rental properties, I was doing fix and flips and it was really like a kind of perfect storm to really get started. Mike: Yeah. You know, it's like everyone, if you could raise your hand and you're in real estate, who read Rich Dad Poor Dad. I was so lucky enough a couple months ago to go to a party and Kiyosaki was there, so I got to bend his ear. Because he was kind of like the grand mentor for all of us. What is your reason as far as real estate? A lot of people say, well, time freedom, all these different things. You probably had a good salary with the oil rigs and things like that. Now you're doing real estate. What's the why? Tell us a little bit about what was going on inside your head? Casey: Yeah, it's a combination of things and I'll try to keep it concise for you. It started out working in the field, being away from my family. And if you guys, if anybody watching this has seen the new series Landman, incredible depiction of what it was like working. I was in West Texas working out there away from my family in a dangerous sort of setting. It wasn't that dangerous working for Shell, a big company, it was much more safe, but it was being away, right? And I was asking myself this question, right? It was like. But what if I didn't have to choose work over family? What if I could make this living? Not have to be away from my family for two weeks. So I was able to manage that for quite a few years, while my kids were young. But what really hit me, and it's a longer story, so I'll give you the cliff notes, but I came back to Houston and was working a day job. So I gotta see my kids every night. And at this point I had. I had three of 'em and I'll never forget it actually. Not many people know this, but when COVID hit a couple months after that is when oil went negative. It was a crazy time in the markets. But here's where it really clicks, right? My new job is to go out to the Gulf of Mexico on a platform, right? And I had to leave for like indefinitely. I actually had to go sit in a hotel room for a week and sit there in quarantine before I could even get on the helicopter to fly out to the platform, right? So I'm going there for a week, waiting three to four weeks on a platform before I see my kids again and my wife, right? He was seven years old at the time. He was my oldest. And I'll never forget it. I'm driving out to the hotel in Houma, Louisiana, so if anybody's ever been out there, they know where I'm talking. And my wife calls and I'm about halfway through the drive and she's like, "Casey, just checking in. But I dunno if you saw this, but when you left your son, he chased after you. I had to chase him like two blocks down the street and try to tell him like, Hey, dad's gotta go. He's leaving." I'll never forget that moment. It was like one of the hardest moments, like having to hear that and then having three or four more weeks of work just about to start, like I was just going. So that was one of the pivotal moments of "Alright, I was already hustling and going hard in real estate," but I'm like, "I'm going to supercharge this because again, I don't want to have to make that decision anymore." Mike: Yeah. It's definitely family. It's definitely security. A little bit before we get started getting into the details of Wyoming and what you do. How did an engineer's mind help you in looking at real estate and with math and engineering and the ability to look at an asset and say, "You know what? This works mathematically, or this doesn't." Casey: Absolutely. I didn't realize at the time how much synergy, but as I've gotten older and done this for more and more years, I realized, "Oh, wow, there's these little skills that I picked up." Whether it was being an engineer and just being, always being math minded, right? And just doing underwriting. Not many people realize it's a skill I take for granted, but just being able to pull, open a spreadsheet and underwrite a deal quickly and be like, "Hey, can I analyze this? This makes sense." That's probably the biggest asset but other ones that I learned was, even though we were working for Shell in a big company, like we were very process oriented, right? And everything had an SOP, we were drilling wells in West Texas or the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. And it was all about repeating it and starting to streamline it. So learning those processes and then. What I did is I simply like the first thing I automated was property management, right? I was doing property management from Houston and I was doing it on properties up in Wyoming and a little bit in Dallas-Fort Worth. Like I wasn't touching any of my properties and I was doing it all. So one of the first things I did, and this was another thing I did during COVID, when everybody was locked down, I'm like, "Alright, here's an opportunity to develop this system." Basically, I wrote out all my SOPs in Microsoft Word. I recorded myself doing it, and I built a system where virtual assistants could do everything that I was doing and be able to manage property from afar. I had that experience of building out SOPs and standardizing, and then every time you do it, you go back and do an after action review and you go have this feedback loop, or you go implement what you learned and do it again. Mike: Absolutely. So let's get into what you're doing. You're out in Wyoming for the rest of the United States, it's like, "Okay, is there a capital of Wyoming? What's in Wyoming? Do people live in Wyoming?" You know, that's just one of those forgotten states, and that's probably good for real estate and picking up multifamily and single family houses. So tell us a little bit about why Wyoming and not Houston. Casey: Yeah, you hit it on the head, Mike, you, that's literally my exact story and why it works so well. Let's get started in Wyoming. Because one of the first things was like wholesalers, right? Not many people maybe know this in the real estate industry, but you can relate this to any industry, like a really easy way to get started in real estate is just to find deals, right? Just do marketing, find the deals, and then go find the end buyer. I was doing that in Dallas-Fort Worth. And I had owned a couple properties in Wyoming. This was like 2017, right? And I'm like, "Man, I wish I had a wholesaler in Wyoming I could buy deals from, rather than having to try to buy off the MLS." But I saw it as an opportunity. I'm like, " Why don't I just go do that myself? Because there's no competition. Why don't I go do it?" So we started doing marketing postcards, direct mail, radio ads, Facebook ads, you name it. And what I found was my cost per lead was so much cheaper in Wyoming versus Texas. And as I started to become part of other masterminds and see what other people that were doing this on a high level across the country, when I compared my cost per lead compared to what they were paying, it was considerably less. And even when I was negotiating, right? When I'm having the conversation with a seller that wants to sell their house off market, like all my buddies here in Houston, they're looking at it. They're bidding against 5 to 10, maybe 20 other people that do the exact same thing as them. Versus in Wyoming, I'm the only one having the conversation. And the other kind of superpower or niche I like about it is that I grew up there, right? I know how it ticks. It's kind of funny, but it makes sense. Like Wyoming's like 20 years behind the rest of the country, right? Literally. And just the way they operate and their technology and if you've been up there, you know what I'm talking about. And if anybody listened to this, they have, and that, but that's why they love it, right? That's why people wanna live there. But I like it, it's my little unfair advantage because I get it. I can speak to that, I can cater to that, but at the same time, I can come in and apply technology and marketing and different innovative things that I'm learning here in Houston and across the country and apply to Wyoming. Mike: Discuss with our listeners a little bit about what it is you're doing, if it's multifamily, what are the types of things that you're doing inside of Wyoming? Casey: You bet. Initially like a lot of people started doing single family, small multifamily. We've really found a big opportunity in the multifamily space in Wyoming. So we're still doing like my marketing, we still do a ton of the single family and small multifamily stuff and we will fix them up and flip them. Because one big thing I haven't mentioned yet is the contractors, right? I think one of the biggest drivers, other than just simple supply and demand, there's not enough houses, which again is related to contractors. There's not enough supply of housing in Wyoming, and that's what's really continued to have the market be very stable. For example, you could say Las Vegas, Boise, California. Like prices, some of those have had a big swing when interest rates went up. So prices drop, we just stabilized, right? It stayed flat because, granted, it wasn't appreciating at 10 to 20% a year. But we were still getting appreciation. And it was stable, right? Because again, of that constant need for housing. I think one of the biggest things is that it's just stable, right? And that's allowed us to do single and multifamily and then the last piece is the multifamily space, right? Again, like Wyoming being 20 years behind the country, I can't tell you how many big multifamily assets we bought where they're still paying cash. All the leases are paper leases, right? There's no technology being applied. I mean, I love doing value add in general, and I know I'm going, like you could see we do a lot of different things, but I'm just finding an opportunity to wear. If we just go in and operate it like more professionally and implement, even, not even talking ai, but just start to put in processes and systems. It's helping us bring value to the multifamily assets. And as we all know, when it comes to buying a multifamily, it's all about value add. And we're able to do that with forced appreciation and improvements, but we can also do it by just improving operations. Mike: Now are you seeing that there's in Wyoming it might be some of our assets that we have in the Midwest. The difference is Arizona, Houston. You get a lot of appreciation because there's a lot of growth and maybe a little less cash flow. But I noticed that like our Midwest and mountain type state assets. There's a lot of cash flow, but the appreciation is very small. Things don't increase as quickly as the hot states or the hot cities. Is that what you're seeing in Wyoming? Casey: Yeah. Wyoming historically has been like that, right? Yeah. And if you, again, go back and we talk about this all the time. If you go back and look at the year over year home values in 2008, 2009. It was everywhere else in the country. It was rough, right? It was a flat line in Wyoming, it was just steady. Call it a blip. But ever since then, it's been slow and steady. And historically Wyoming's always been, it's not like Utah surrounding it. It's not like that. Denver, I mean, at least not yet to where it didn't see these crazy appreciations. It's been three to 5% year over year. I mean, during the COVID years and interest rates dropping, you saw like the five, 10% jumps. But yeah, it's typically been a slow and steady one. And I think what you're heading at, Mike is the cash flow, right? Because prices haven't surged. It's been a good cash flow market. And again, the reason I love it is Wyoming's, so you've got Colorado, that's blown up. You got Utah, Salt Lake City, that's blown up now. Montana's even seeing a big surge. Oh yeah. It's got all the same geography, right? All the same demand, just less people. From a cash flow perspective, you can still buy multifamily, even small, single family assets. And they could still cash flow kinda like in the Midwest, but I just think there's a lot of upside just based on what's happening around it. Mike: Yeah. Very cool. So let's get into your company, what you're doing, what you're offering. You've now gotten to the point where in order to grow, let's get some investors. Are you doing syndications? Are you doing funds? And what does that entail? Casey: You bet. So back to the sort of supply and demand and what we're seeing in Wyoming, again, it can be a blessing and a curse, but actually I think it's a double blessing. So the blessing again, is low competition. We're able to find a lot of deals and we get it at a lower cost. But typically you would say the curse would be, all right, well now it's harder to go flip and sell this to another cash buyer. Like it is definitely difficult for Wyoming to be a wholesaler because there's not as many cash buyers and investors. But the way we've actually created an advantage to that is we've become our own buyer. And that's what I've done for years and years. But to really scale now, because now I've got a full marketing company, I've got four different construction crews that do our work and we manage all of our property management in-house. But to continue to feed all that. Like now it's all about raising capital for our fund. And to kind of go a little bit back to my story and I remember telling you guys about how I had to make the decision, do I choose business or family? I can't, I gotta go to the rig, I gotta make my salary. I gotta be away from my family. Well, again, I pushed right? And I didn't give up. That supercharged me to be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go hustle and I'm gonna figure this out." So I could eventually have that freedom and make that choice, right? And now, where this all kind of blends together is. I found that by building out these three companies, again, finding the deals, fixing it up and property management. I found that I love processes and I love building stuff, but really I love being able to help other people do the same thing because I know how that feels for me and I've just had so many conversations with others like passive investors, and maybe they don't have the time or the resources. It's mainly usually a time thing, right? They're still in their W-2 job and maybe whether they want to leave that W-2 or not, they have a time constraint and they also just don't understand all the ins and outs of real estate like I do. So what I found is my bigger passion, and it's actually a goal of mine I set a year ago, was to help a hundred families achieve their passive income goal. And to do that, they can invest in things like my fund, right? There's a lot of people that are just like, Hey, I want to, I wanna get in on a deal up in Wyoming. Maybe they just wanna come up and visit it in the summertime or winter, or they will like it because of the cash flow. But by helping these hundred people, naturally, they love partnering in our fund which is a great opportunity. But at the end of the day, like I've had really good mentors that have helped me and helped me to get to where I am. And I found that one of the biggest thing that helped propel me was surrounding myself with people who thought similarly. It's been really important to me to give back. So I'm really excited to help other people. I'll summarize it with this: I want other people to be able to make the same choice I made when it comes to family or business. And whichever one, just at least to be able to make the choice. Mike: And how is the fund set up? Accredited investors only? Casey: Yes. I have our accredited fund, which is Big Horn Capital Fund. We have limited partners. This is for accredited investors. So we have a couple different options and I'll just quickly highlight it. Yeah. I created this customizable fund to give people multiple options. But we also have equity ones and that's the one I'm actually working on right now. And we're raising for really, actually currently we're having an ongoing raise and that one's a more equity role where people can come in. It's a longer term one where we're gonna hold for five years. But they get the equity upside and the probably the biggest thing is because he talked to a lot of investors about the depreciation, right? Because we're buying and holding real estate, we get the depreciation and they get the upside. Again, I've just found investors are, it depends, right? Some people, they wanna be in and out and be flexible and have a fixed return. because that's the easiest to understand. But other investors are like, you know what? I don't want you to give me all my money back in six months on a flip, Casey. I want you to keep that money working and they want the depreciation. Mike: Absolutely. Casey, how can people find out more information about the fund? Casey: Yeah, absolutely. So you could go to bighorncapitalfund.com is one easy way, but also I just encourage people, I wanna help people out any way I can. Just go to my website or find me on YouTube, Instagram, whatever you guys use. It's just caseygregersen.com or Casey Gregersen on YouTube. As long as you guys spell my name, you'll find me Mike: And the ladies gentlemen, it's C-A-S-E-Y. Greg, G-R-E-G-E-R-S-E-N. Casey, thank you so much for coming on, The Richer Geek. Is there anything before we leave that perhaps I haven't asked you something that you'd like to inform our guests? Casey: One last thing Mike, I'd like to share is working with oil and gas professionals over the years, like I've just found that a lot of those guys, they didn't have the time, right? And they didn't have the experience to invest in real estate, and it's just been really fun to help those guys because it's the perfect combination for me and them, right? They don't have the time. But at the same time, for me to scale in Wyoming, as I mentioned, like it becomes a capital game now. 'because we can find the deal, we can fix it up and we can rent it out. I just love being able to partner with people to where I can grow, they can grow, and it's just a really cool relationship. So again, I just really encourage people if I give you my time, like I'm giving you my time 'cause I want to partner with you guys and I wanna make it a win-win. Mike: Absolutely. Casey, thank you so much for coming on The Richer Geek Podcast. Hope you have a wonderful night and good luck with the fund. Take care. Casey: Perfect. Thanks Mike.
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ABOUT CASEY GREGERSEN
Casey Gregersen is the Founder and CEO of Bighorn Capital Fund, a real estate investment firm in Laramie, Wyoming. He holds a Master’s degree in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Wyoming and spent over a decade at Shell Oil Company in technical, project management, and leadership roles. In 2016, he moved into entrepreneurship, managing seven successful Pure Barre franchises across Texas and California. Today, he uses his experience to help professionals—especially in oil and gas—reach financial freedom through strategic real estate investments. Casey’s Wyoming roots and strong work ethic continue to drive his mission of helping others build lasting wealth.