My name is Mitch Siemens and I was born in North Bay Ontario! I know! Not a great way to start a biography but give this one a chance! At 15 years old my father moved my sister and I out to Lethbridge AB so he could work the diamond mines up north. I was 16 years old when I got my first taste of money. I was hired on as a summer student for Frito-Lay and worked as a labourer on a production line. I saw the value this was having in my life and decided I would convince my boss to give me full-time employment. Being so young, I had to ALSO commit to finishing my grade 12 so that the HR department would agree to bring me on. I'm sure you can probably guess how well a 16-year-old, unsupervised teenager, did at completing his schooling ... you nailed it! I most definitely did not see the value in completing my education. I stayed there for a couple of years and then eventually, as I'm sure most of you would guess, things fell apart. After some poor choices and a loss of a job, I was left with no education and nowhere to go. Obviously, I needed to figure something out! It wasn't long after this that I started my career with Precision Drilling. This was amazing! There was so much to learn and so much room for advancement. I was honestly in heaven. This was exactly what my "inner energetic child" was looking for. This job was extremely tough but it taught me a lot of amazing things. Commitment and persistence being a couple of them. With that being said, after my first year of "rigging", I went back and challenged my GED. Things were starting to change. I remember sitting in one of the rig shacks and hearing one of my coworkers talking about rental properties. Although I was intrigued, I did not think that that was something I would ever be able to do. Come on, I had barely even achieved a high school equivalency. How could I possibly be able to take care of a rental unit? I did however see the value in owning a house so I did just that. I bought my first house at 21 and resided in it for what I thought would be forever. In 2014, the oilfield crashed. And at that time, so did my life. Or at least it felt like it did. I was 23 years old with a truck payment, a house payment, and all the other financial responsibilities to accompany those things with absolutely no income to provide for them. This was about to be the biggest change for me, and I had absolutely no idea. I went back home to Lethbridge and searched for work. I had no income so I decided, "I might as well try to rent my house out if I'm going to lose it". It wasn't long after that I started my employment with Teck Coal. This was a job that had a 4 day on, 4 day off schedule. I started to read. I picked up my first book titled The Cash Quadrant, by Robert Kiyosaki. This changed the game for me. I sold my truck, reduced my living costs and paid off all my debt. By the following year, I bought my second rental property. Learning had become my new passion and investing seemed to be the product of it. Everything in my life started to become routine. Gym, food, work, reading and finances. It didn't seem to matter how busy I got, I would still pick something else up. This is when I started my real estate license. Its funny. I remember my father telling me when I was a teenager,  "If someone, says something to you once, you may want to ignore it. But if you keep hearing the same thing, over and over again, maybe you should do something about it." It seemed like everywhere I went people were telling me I needed to be selling homes and eventually enough was enough. I pulled the pin. I crushed the schooling and then immediately dove into the business. Looking back, it's kind of ironic how it all played out. I listened to a man talking about rental properties and thought, "I could never do that!". Fast forward and I surrounded my whole life around it. Who would've thought?