Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Every single deal that I get, I have to try to make the most out of that property and not just throw it into the wholesale machine. And.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Today we are focused on Gonzalo Corso. Gonzalo is the founder and managing member of Cash Geeks. Based in Jacksonville. They're a real estate investment firm specializing in wholesaling, wholetailing and flipping.
Gonzalo began his real estate career in 2015 and launched Cash Geeks in 2017.
Since then, he's closed over a thousand wholesale deals and now runs a lean, high performing team.
He's known for his strong disposition strategies and high margin focus. He successfully transitioned the company from hunting deals for hedge funds to working with local investors. Today he concentrates on flipping wholetailing, not hoteling, wholetailing strategic joint ventures and maximizing deal profitability from his network of realtors and wholesalers. Gonzalo, welcome to Trust this today. I want to thank you for coming on and we look forward to hearing from you. How you doing today?
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you, Joe, for having me on. Excited to do this.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Good, good, good.
Before we get anywhere, I mean, we use the, that hold telling word in there a couple of times and I just want you to explain for the audience exactly what whole telling is because I've used that a lot on the show.
Never really, we never really got an explanation for it.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. So I guess is what you can consider retailing. Right. So retailing is taking the properties to the retail marketplace and then there's wholesaling where you find properties and you sell them to investors. That's the wholesale side. So the whole tail is where you, you don't fully renovate a property, you make it livable enough or do some minor work to it and sell it in that condition. So you're not fully renovating a property, you're making it either just financeable. Right.
So that you can sell it cheaper to the end retail buyer or even some investors will buy them after you've done some work to it. So that's what I've, I've noticed that the retail market right now is it's harder to sell properties right now on the retail market, let's just put it that way. Right. And so what I've noticed is at the end of the day, you always think you're gonna, your projections show higher profit margins than you have actually then you've actually gained. Because right now we're doing a lot of contingencies to the buyers or they're just not selling as high as we thought they would. And so What I've kind of noticed is instead of me buying a house for 100 grand, doing another $80,000 renovation, let me do a lot less renovation, let somebody else do the heavier lifting. And you don't make as much at the end of the day, but you're in and out of deals a lot quicker, and you're not investing.
You're out a lot less capital because you're able to borrow the money for the purchases.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Okay, good to know. Good to know. Yeah, because like I said, we talk about wholesaling, wholetailing, flipping, fixing all these other things.
And I think we all take it for granted that we all know what we're talking about. But some of our audience may be new and to the real estate investing sphere, and I, we need to make sure that we, we educate them on that. You started out, it looks like you started out in 2017. I know you started out working for hedge funds. Explain exactly what you were doing in the beginning when you first got into this.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah, so I first got in, I started catching in 2017, in about 2019. So we were mainly wholesaling, Right. Wholesaling to mom and pop investors.
And then 2019 to 2020, certain hedge funds started buying in Jacksonville, Florida. I mean, they were always buying. But I guess this is what changed the game for a bunch of people is hedge funds started buying from wholesalers.
Hedge funds were always buying, but they were buying on the mls and as a wholesaler are not a licensed individual. You don't own the property. So these hedge funds didn't typically work for wholesalers, agents. So we just rather some wholesalers, some hedge funds started buying wholesalers. And that is what floodgates to us.
One hedge fund doesn't just buy in one market.
They buy in multiple, usually all over the country. Right. And so if you find one hedge fund that is open to buying from a wholesaler, then our intention when we went super deep with hedge funds is let's just find inventory for these big companies.
And one hedge fund started buying from wholesalers, then another one started buying from wholesalers. And then it kind of got crazy during the COVID years because everybody was competitive, everybody was buying a house. And so the hedge funds had to not rely. You know, we were in a super low inventory.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Market.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: And so the hedge funds couldn't just rely on the market. They had to find other ways of buying houses because they were getting all this free money because interest rates are super low. So they needed to put the money to work. So I feel like they opened up Their, you know, rules a little bit, and let's start buying houses from these wholesalers.
And that is what changed, you know, wholesaling for a lot of people.
It changed the business for cash games. Once we found out that we could quickly expand.
When you're, when you're wholesaling, it's hard to go into other markets because you're so reliant on your buyers.
But if we now have 10 of the biggest buyers and they're buying the same product, whether it's here in the rest of the state of Florida or, you know, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, whatever, wherever you can find a product, it's the same client. So now we don't have to worry about selling the house, building a new buyers list, building a mom and pop buyers list in that market, we can just sell to the same people we're selling to in Jacksonville. That's where I'm based out of. And so I think that, you know, looking back, we put our eggs, all of our eggs in one basket. And that was the hedge funds. And that's what kind of made my, my business pivot.
But that is what we were essentially doing for hedge funds, to answer your question, as we were looking for off market inventory that fit their specific buy box and we would go and put the properties under contract and essentially just wholesale, the hedge fund.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Now the hedge funds probably pulled out. So how did you pivot?
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Yes, so at that point this was like mid-22, 2022, the interest rates were coming up and the hedge funds have started falling off one by one, right? Hey, we're, we're done buying for, for this, for this quarter. We're done buying for the rest of the year. We're done buying in X markets. We're only going to be focusing on these markets. So we try to keep pivoting as their buy boxes pivoted, but it was happening too quick and then ended up, most of them just turned off, right? They're like, hey, we're just going to stop buying for now.
And so number one, it's, we had to reduce our, our company, right? We had a lot of staff, a lot of team that was built up and that was a challenging time, but something you have to do when the market pivots, right? And so we made those hard cuts. And then the way that we transitioned is I noticed that everybody was having these issues, right? I thought it was just wholesalers to hedge funds. People and hedge funds were reacting to the interest rates, but really it was the whole market, the whole Market was reacting to interest rates. Buyers stopped buying or not buying, but overpaying, you know, offering highest events, waving inspections and all that kind of affected flippers as well. And when flippers aren't buying, wholesalers can't get rid of inventory.
So now this domino effect of motivated wholesalers became a thing. Right. Wholesalers were locking up properties and nobody wants to buy them. And I have historically always worked with my network.
I have, you know, I teach classes here for the local ria. I was vice president for a couple years, been on the board. And so I have a good network of individuals that were also. They're all struggling to sell properties.
And I have an old database, right. Because for a couple of years we were just selling to hedge funds.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: And we're in the beginning of our.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Career selling to mom and pop investors.
Then we transitioned to selling to hedge funds. But the mom and pop investors from 2016 to 2020, they have all been kind of waiting for this because they were, they just kept getting beat out by hedge funds. And so we still had a lot of pent up demand from our buyers list because they want to buy the wholesalers, they don't have access to an old buyers list.
And so the, the new buyers from like 2021-22, those buyers kind of disappeared as well because they were used to that.
So we're used to a slower market, a, a, you know, potentially even more of a buyer's market from the season of 2014-2019. Right. And so it was just tap, tapping my network of wholesalers with my buyers list.
So at that, at that point it became all about disposing the house. How do we sell the property before. You don't worry about selling it, you worried about just getting the deal. And getting a good deal still is important today.
But now you have to worry just as much sometimes, if not more. How do I sell this property? And so all of our metrics in the business went from being acquisitions to now it's disposition. How many buyers are we talking to on a daily basis? How many buyers are we bringing into the office to figure out their buy box, who's still hunting for properties, who's not.
And so it was kind of like re interviewing our buyers list and getting and we had a whiteboard in the office of the hundred hottest buyers that we have right now. This. And this was like now 2023. Right. So in 2023 we were trying to figure out who are the buyers that are actually buying and how do we look for inventory for them. So that's how my new business model right now it's just leveraging. Other wholesalers, they'll bring me the deals because I've been wholesaling for so long here in Jacksonville, I can pair them up with a, with an investor now with, with the volume that we were used to versus the volume now I, what I noticed was being in a less volume driven business, right, we were doing four to five hundred deals a year, right. So that creates a lot of noise. And that also doesn't allow you to get creative per deal. When you're running a machine, the machine needs to, needs to run the way you've built it. And so when a deal would come in, I couldn't look at it as a buy and hold or a fix and flip because the business needed this deal to run through the wholesale department and you know, go from beginning to end. So now that I'm, that I don't have this massive machine that needs to be fed all day, I can now analyze deals as like, what's best for the deal and how am I going to make the most money out of this deal?
Because in this market, deals are hard to come by. So every single deal that I get, I have to try to make the new most out of that property and not just throw it into the wholesale machine. And whatever we make wholesaling it is whatever we'll get because we can just mark the next deal.
So that's what pivoting looked like for me. And that kind of forced me to start taking down some assets, taking down some properties, and now analyzing them as, hey, I could wholesale it to this or I could flip it and make, you know, slower money. That was, that was the challenge for me as a wholesaler. I was used to, hey, let's get this property under contract, throw it out to our buyers list, and in less than 30 days we're paid. Now the fix and flip arena, it's not like that, right? You take a property down and that's just costing you money until the bill close again. Sometimes, especially in a slower market, that can be, you know, six months out. And so I had to get used to that. But a low volume team allows you to, allowed me to, to be okay with that. And so now I look at wheels as what's the best use for this property? Can I keep it?
[00:14:41] Speaker C: Can I flip it?
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Can I wholetail it? And I started wholesaling because I did a ton of fix and flips in 20, 24.
We did about 30 of them and not all properties were number one, not all properties were profitable. But number two, not all deals were as fast as you wanted them to be or sold for as much as you wanted them to be. But because I have my wholesale background, I could, I realized, like, hey, I only made, you know, let's say 18 grand on this flip. Took me six months to make 18 grand.
When I close on that property, I could have just trashed it out, cut the grass, maybe painted it and immediately resold it and maybe made 15 grand, right? And so if I can do that in one month, two months, it's better for me to do that than to make a slow 18 grand in six months. And so that transitioned me now to, hey, if I have this property, should I do a full flip or should I just get it finance ready and sell to a conventional buyer?
And maybe you don't make as much, but you make it a lot quicker. And after my fix and flips, you know, and any, any fix and flip investor hearing this, you know, you always, you never make as much as you think you're going to make, right? And so what I realized is, hey, the quick 15 to 20 is way better for me than a potential 30 to 40.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Yeah. I always tell, when I teach investors any kind of class about contracts or whatever, always talk about how fix and flip on tv, they make it look glamorous and they, you know, it's in 30 minutes, they flip, taken a zombie house, they fixed it up and they flipped it and they've made all this money. But number one, those shows were shot probably year three, four, five years ago, number one. So it was a different market. It was a seller's market, not a buyer's market. Like it, like it is now. But I also tell everybody that's one of the highest risk, risk activities you can do in real estate investing because you don't know how long it's really going to take you to get that, that flip done. And then how and what interest rates are going to do between the time that you bought the house and the time that you go to sell the house, where they're going to be, where unemployment levels are, where the job market is, you know, all kinds of things, all kinds of other factors you have no control over. And I always used to joke I was going to have a T shirt made that said you never know what you bought until you open the wall. Because so many of these fix and flippers I've represented over the years are like, oh, I got this house. It's going to need some paint and maybe a New floor and then they open the wall and the only thing holding house together is the termites holding hands. You know, that's it. So, so it's, it's really risky to do that. And if you're not experienced with it, you can lose a lot of money really fast.
So we heard how you scaled up. I mean you built this huge team whenever the hedge funds were buying and, and your whole focus was, okay, we got to get deals, we got to get the deals because we're just going to turn right around, we're going to wholesale the, the contracts off to these hedge funds. We've got our buyers already and we know what they're looking for.
So then you scaled back down.
How do you prioritize the people, what positions you need? How do you know what people you're going to need depending on what you're doing at the time?
[00:18:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So scaling down is, is hard.
It was very, very tough.
Making the picks not based on metrics of performance, right? That's easy, right? If someone's not performing, they're not cutting it, right? So letting go of people because of lack of business or the market, it, it changes the way that you, that you look at them, their metrics, right?
When, when we were, when we had to let go and make, and make cuts of scaling down, the way that we decided that is number one, who's essential for the business.
When, when you're looking at a scaling down market and it's happening very, very fast, you, you almost, you do care about performance, but you care more about are they going to be able to help me rebuild this, right? And so you look for, not only are they really good performers, but there were some people that maybe they were really good at that position that they had.
But if I had to pick, right, if I can only pick X amount of people that I have to keep, then I might care a little bit less about, hey, this person gets 15 contracts a week, right? Let's keep that person versus hey, this individual. If I get in a car accident at 2am and I can't reach these other people that I'm calling this individual, right? Those are the people that we, that we tried to keep the most, right? And so now it's who's going to help me rebuild this, who's going to stay? Because when you're making those cuts, the morale is, is horrible, right?
[00:20:04] Speaker A: The morale sucks.
[00:20:06] Speaker C: And they're also thinking like, are they next?
And they're also thinking, can I still trust G, right? Like G was telling me we're gonna go here and now. We're going here and now, right? And so like, these are all certain, end of, these are all traits that you can't just tell this from. Like, did you hit your KPIs, did you make your calls? Did you? Right? And so that's how we made the decisions of scaling down and then right now figuring out who to keep or what positions to build. The one thing that I did different or not did, but I cared a lot less about being extremely profitable and, and only, and only making decisions based on the bottom line.
I. You know, when you're young and you're scaling a business, you are, you convince yourself that I'll make, I'll make money next year, I'll make money the year after. You know what I mean? I'll, I'll, I'll eat last.
And so you start to do things that don't really move the needle in the bottom line, but they may be, they increase volume of deal flow or whatever. And so right now what I'm doing, and this is what I would advise anybody who's, you know, making any decisions, any weird wonky market, is to stay profit driven, stay super focused, analyzing the, the P and L, and only make decisions based on the P and L. And so right now what I'm doing is I'm looking at my P and LS and deciding, do I need somebody else in this, in this department.
I look at what is going to make the difference for the business in a year from now, two years from now, three years from now.
Because in the beginning I was also very quick to hire. Right? Let's, let's get some people in.
And especially being in a high sales environment, your, you kind of get used to being a, A unfortunately, right? The sales side was always a revolving door, right? You'd get four sales guys come in.
Two make it for two months, one makes it, you know, longer. And so right now that I don't have a crazy sales floor, I'm being very, very selective with the positions that I need and the individuals that I bring on.
Um, I will say one key hire that I, that I have now that I wish I had before is an executive assistant.
I've, you know, I've gone to so many trainings and seminars and events and everybody always talks about hiring a, you know, a really good executive assistant that's going to change your life. And I just never had one. Right? I just, obviously I had different positions in the business, operations managers, things like that, but I never really had one person that Solely worked directly under me.
And that has been game changer.
And that is kind of like what I prioritize right now. Like, that's been. My most recent hire was an executive assistant.
And that makes me way more productive that I.
It has in a. In a good way. It has prevented me from making other hires that I probably didn't need.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: Having an executive assistant, when they wear multiple hats, they're able to put out a lot more fires that I'm used to putting out and doing things that I'm used to doing, like, you know, just going to the bank and dropping something off at the bank. Go to this title company, pick this up, or make it like things that don't have a specific role an executive assistant can take on. And that's been game changer. So I highly, highly recommend everybody. And I heard that for 10 years and never did it. And now that's like, doesn't matter what advice you ask me right now. It's like, get an executive assistant. You need to get an executive assistant.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that's always a lot of folks that go, well, I need a CEO. It's like, well, no, you probably just need an assistant first. And I hear that a lot. It's sort of like rocket fuel for the visionary who's wearing multiple hats. All of a sudden you can, you can get a lot more done because you have this other person who's doing a lot of the stuff. It's. It goes back that book buy back your time, and it really. All that comes together. And yeah, a lot of people go, well, there's just no way I can afford it if that person is doing what they're supposed to do.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: You.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: You get, you should be doing a lot better that you can definitely afford them, plus a lot more. And I also sympathize you talking about, you know, you hate letting people go when they've done nothing wrong. It's just, you just have a lack of business. And I, I remember I had that in 2007, 2008, when the market crashed during the Great Recession.
And I had to. My, my business partner at the time, he said, if we don't lay off at least half the staff today, this week, we will be bankrupt in two months.
So we, we had to lay off, you know, 50% of the staff, and then two weeks later, we had to lay off the other. Another 50% of the 50% that were left. We were down to a quarter.
And you feel so horrible doing that, but it's, it's definitely a It's a blow to your ego, but in a way, it's a good thing. It keeps you humble because you, you know, at some point it could always happen again, you know, and, and so you, you're much more careful in your hiring before you hire someone else. You're a little more gun shy about, a lot more selective about it. It's, it's, it's horrible at the time, but it's, in the long run, I think it's good to go through that experience just to, just to keep you in your place a little bit. I agree.
[00:26:24] Speaker C: Grateful man. Because that, that's what it was for me, you know, Like, I, I got into the game in 2015, so I've only seen the upside since, you know, from the beginning. And so it was really good. And I'm, I'm grateful that it happened, right? I, I feel like I, I thought I was a business owner before, you know what I mean? And now I truly do feel like a business owner where you've, you know, you, you had to make the decisions of like, how am I going to make payroll? If I do decide to make payroll, how much of what's left in the bank account am I going to put towards payroll? You know, it's just like, like you said when your partner was like, hey, if we don't, like, make these cuts right now, I was in that same same boat, and it sucks. And, but you're playing with your own money, right? And you're like, hey, if this is all the money I have left, how am I going to make it past the 070809?
You can't just keep everyone, right? I got really good advice. That's when I started leaning into everybody that I have been getting advice from before. It's like, hey, what, you know, I know you went through this in the past. What would you do? And you know, that was the really good advice that I got was so it was two things. It was number one, which basically they were like, hey, if you're gonna make the cuts now or in two, three months from now, do it now while, while they can still find jobs.
And that kind of, you know, that, that was a little thing that I needed to hear, right? Because you care about these people. And you know, when you're letting go of these people, you're just like, hey, I'll write you a recommendation letter.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: What?
[00:28:08] Speaker C: I will help you find a position, whatever I got to do. And so, you know, it was that, right? Do it while they can still find jobs. And that Was. And that was valid at the time.
And then number two was if, if this is all you have left, you have to go home to your wife and kids and explain to them why, why you kept Susie and Sally at the office and why you can't eat.
So you have to go home and explain that to your wife.
So if you are going to keep Susie and Sally, they better be explaining to your wife why your kid can't do this or whatever. And so that, that made me really internalize, like, okay, if I am going to keep a group of people, I need to be able to explain to my wife why I'm keeping them. And it can't be because they get six contracts, you know what I mean? So that kind of goes back to the beginning when I was like, hey, now it's all about their integrity, their character.
Because those are easier people to justify, you know, to not only myself, but to my family if I had to. Right. Hey, we struggled because I needed to keep these key individuals. And now look at us. Right?
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. I like that.
What kind of struggles do you think beginners who are just getting into this, into real estate investing, what kind of struggles are they going to face?
And how did you handle yours early on when you first started thinking back to then?
[00:29:52] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of sales that goes into wholesaling or just real estate. And so when I say sales, I mean volume. If you're getting into sales, every sales is a contact sport. Right. And so you have to put in a lot of offers, you have to walk a lot of properties, you have to talk to a lot of people.
And so most people underestimate the amount of no's they're going to get. They, they underestimate the, the amount of properties they're going to have to analyze in order to get a successful transaction. And so I talked to a lot of investors, you know, just getting started, and they're like, hey, I pulled the list. I've called like 20 people.
None of them want to sell.
What am I doing wrong? And my immediate, you know, answer is, you've only talked to 20 people. Like, you need to talk to more people. And so when I first got started in 2015, I actually got a job working for a wholesale company.
It started off as like a mentor internship thing, and then it turned into a gig.
And so I was blessed enough to have experienced the industry before, before I started my own business.
And I just remember seeing like, because I used to go and inspect the properties for them, take the pictures before we would go under contract. And so I would see, hey, I went and walked, you know, 15 houses. But then we're only selling one or two of the 15 that I went to walk.
And so I noticed, right, like, not everything that we went to, we would get under contract.
And then out of the two that we were selling, one might actually close.
Right. And so I always, I, I point out these numbers to create some more expectations or some better expectations for people getting started. Because that's a lot of what they face is I, I keep getting no's. I keep getting no's, and they get, I, I wouldn't say, you know, discourage, I mean, yeah, they get discouraged and, and then they quit. Right. And so that is, and, and, and the game also becomes, how can I expedite the amount of no's? Quicker, right? So if, if you're saying I need to, I, I, and I, I point out these numbers because I want people to realize this isn't a time thing, this is a contact thing. If it takes you six months to contact 500 people or if it takes you one month to contact, right, it's the same amount of volume that you're hitting.
So make it about, how can I talk to more people in a shorter amount of time?
And, and especially in a changing market, right? If you got into the game maybe three years ago, you could talk to 25 people and, and get a successful deal done. And now in a, you know, in a buyer's market where we just came off of the best interest rates ever, people are going to be less likely to sell, especially at a discount.
And buyers are not going to be buying at prices that they used to buy at. They're going to want to buy less cheaper.
And so now it's, it becomes a, you know, it's an industry norm right now that your offers are increasing, your conversions are hurting right now, right? Your, your, your cost per deal is increasing and you're having to make more offers to get more deals through the finish line. And so just understanding that from the beginning, I think helps. A lot of people kind of compare apples to apples when they're questioning themselves like, what am I, what am I doing wrong? When I, you know, I've gone to look at three houses, no seller has taken my offer. What do I do? Like, you know, how am I gonna, how is this gonna happen?
[00:34:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I think that's a good point. And a lot of people, I've talked about this before, you know, leading indicators versus Lagging indicators. And a leading indicator in sales is always, well, how many calls did you make? How many houses did you go see? How many? Because we know the more that you go see, then on then our lagging indicator will be closings. How many closings did we have?
How many contracts did we have? You know, so, but we know to get. And in this market, yeah, the leading indicator may have been 10 walking 10 properties a week. Now we're at, you got to be walking 30 properties a week to, to get to the numbers just because it's gotten harder, but you can adjust those KPIs, and, you know, it's just another scorecard. And, and, and I found that most people in sales, they love scorecards. They love to be playing a game.
And so, yeah, it's like, okay, well, did you, did you do 30 this week? I know you used to do 10, now you gotta do 30. Can you, can you do that? And you're not going to win the game unless you're doing 30 a week.
And then you can show them that how it plays through the timeline of, of the deal, of the life of the deal makes it a little bit easier for everybody to see.
[00:35:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: What's a belief you've had to unlearn to unlock your next level in business?
Something that you knew this is the way it is. And, and you've had to go, yeah, that's not, that's not right.
[00:35:28] Speaker C: So I would say two things.
One is, and this is, this is kind of hard, but I would say I, I, I always knew that.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: You.
[00:35:43] Speaker C: Had to, like, I would say, I want to call it delayed gratification. Right.
That's something that I, I learned early on.
And I think that as a young individual, I got into the game when I was 19, and so I, I gave myself too much delayed gratification.
And I feel like that is something that we can get carried away with and not, I guess, you know, reap the benefits right now. Right. And so that's one of the things that I had to not. You can't 100 reinvest everything that you have.
Right.
You can't live in a, so live off of a sofa in the, in your living room for your whole life. Right. Like, sometimes you got to take some money out, put it into other things. And so that was one of the things for me that I, I feel like I didn't learn it. Right.
You know what I mean? I don't know that I would have to unlearn it, but that was kind of one of Those things where, like, I just remember selling myself, like, hey, I'll reap the benefits later, reap the benefits later. And then the market turned, and then I never got to reap any of the amount of the benefits, you know. And so that's, that's one of, one of the things. And then the other thing is.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: You.
[00:37:16] Speaker C: Know, every, like the term being a jack of all trades, right? Jack of all trades is, you know, something that's looked at as something positive and, and being knowledgeable in a bunch of things is. Is positive. But I would say that's one of the things that, as I am maturing in business is understanding what are my strengths and just leaning into those strengths instead of becoming an expert at marketing and content creation and selling the properties and the renovation side and, you know, trying to learn all that. Like, what I've learned is it's better to just be a master of your own craft and to let other experts handle, right, the. The things that they can handle. And so, like, for example, on, on the retail side, like, I don't list my flips, right? I just give them to the best realtors, let them do it. Some flippers want to get licensed and do it yourself, and that's okay, right? But then you have to, you know, be the expert at selling a property, especially right now in today's market. And so, like, I rather just, you hire the expert, let them do their thing. Instead of me trying to become, you know, the jack of all trades, let me just focus at what I'm good at, and the rest will. Will fall into place.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: So you got a lot of balls up in the air. How do you, how do you prevent burning out?
[00:38:50] Speaker C: It's a good question.
Number one is you kind of have to change your perspective of burning out, right?
Like, burning out for me is.
It changes in your career. So. So you might get burnt out of a certain thing.
For example, like cold calling. I would say that I'm burnt out from cold calling, right? Like, I've sat on a dialer with a headset for way too long now, right? That I just, I. I'm burnt out. I don't want to do more cold calling, you know, But I wouldn't say I'm burnt out of the industry, right? And so the beautiful thing about this game, and that's why I feel like I've been pivoting, is the pivoting has also become fun, like when you're, when you're just running this big machine.
It's funny, I felt more burnt out at the peak of when we were doing all these deals than I, than I do now from all this pivoting and you know, going to war every day. Right. And so I think what's cool about real estate and what's cool about being in a, in a.
I would say real estate is a very multi faceted industry.
So you can be a realtor, you can be a mortgage lender, you can be a hard money lender, you can be a wholesaler, flipper, and you know, it just keeps going on and on.
And so you can always add on things which I think is fun. Right. Like for me, right now I am buying properties from wholesalers and closing on them on one deal.
I, when I trash it out, I cut the grass. There was a bunch of, there was an extra lot. I separated the lot and now I'm selling the house. But now I'm actually also doing the hard, doing a hard money loan on the property.
So couple, me and a couple buddies put some money together and now we're doing some hard money loans.
So I get to offer that now on deals.
And you know, that's something that keeps you kind of engaged and becomes a new challenge.
And now you no longer feel burnout. I'm, I'm the type of individual where I feel burnout if I'm doing the same thing over and over and over again.
And so real estate allows me to not feel as burnt out because there's always something new to do, something different, a new person, a new deal structure.
Yeah. But I also just had, I just started a family not too long ago. So I have three little kids and yeah, we pumped them out very quickly.
So I have three under three.
And that forced me to not only care about business and success and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. The whole world of capitalism.
And so now with the kids, you kind of get brought down to earth a little bit and your priorities change a little bit. And so I've put a lot less or, yeah, a lot less like pressure on myself and stress on myself to reach a certain business, you know, goals level.
And that kind of helps with burnout because before you're just only focused on one specific business goal. Where now I kind of look at business as just an area of my life.
And I got, you know, I got three little kids, got to keep the wifey happy because she's handling the kids. And so that helps with burnout is just spending time with them, going on, you know, family trips, putting the kids to sleep. It becomes a drag, but it helps, you know, get your mind off of work and when you're, you know, putting your kids to bed or getting them ready for school, like, you stop to take your, you know, I, you stop taking yourself too serious and you start to, I guess, prioritize.
I wouldn't say prioritize less business, but. But yeah, I'm prioritizing business. Less is, is actually what helps with burnout for me as well.
It just has just kind of become more of a, of a lifestyle driven business.
And by turning it into that, it's actually starting to grow and forcing me to make bigger decisions. Like right now, when you're buying houses, you now have to raise a lot of money.
And so once you start putting out that you're buying houses, you start to get more coming in, more deal flow coming in. And now you need more money.
And so the, the new challenge arises. Now you don't care about this or not not care, but because you have a new challenge now, you don't really feel burnt out putting out a new fire. At least for me, my personality. Let me give me a new challenge.
I'll show up to work every single day. No burnout.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Well, and I think you call it lifestyle. That's the thing I think a lot of people forget. It's the reason we, we become entrepreneurs, the reason we start our own businesses is to be able to, you know, choose the lifestyle you want. You know, you build it in a way that maybe you want to work from anywhere at any time, so you build a business to do that, or maybe you want a place where it's more stable and you can stay with your family in one spot all the time. So you build businesses the way that fits your life, not.
Not a life that fits your business, which is usually what you have when you're working for someone else, you know, So I think that's good. That's. That's really good to hear. For, For Aspire Legal Services, for, for my land trustee. Our mission is to help people aspire to a better life. Reason we have the name Aspire Legal Solutions.
One of the things that we always end every podcast with is we ask our guests who is someone who has helped you aspire to a better life? So who would that be for you?
[00:45:40] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: Okay.
So right now, man, I'm in a. I'm in a. I'm in a. In a spot where, like, my wife has become my best friend and she is the one who, I guess, challenges me every day to be happy, you know, and that's always her thing is like, I, I Don't care if you do this with the business or if you buy X amount of properties or whatever. What I care about is are you happy? And so aspiring a better life right now to me has become more about happiness and peace and I guess full clarity on what you're doing. Right. And my, my wife is the one who recently has challenged me to, to live a, a better life beforehand. I could name all these, you know, gurus online and people who've wrote these books and, and blah, blah, blah, and that's awesome. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer of all that stuff.
But I would say right now my, my wife is the one who's pushing me to, to live a, a better life, become a better man than I, than I was, you know, yesterday.
And so, yeah, I gotta give shout out to my wife.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: We hear that a lot from a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners. They talk about it, their spouse, if, if it's not that, if that person's not also aligned with what you're trying to do, it, they can either be an anchor or they can be a sale for you.
And we hear that all the time out of people. And yeah, same thing. They've got their gurus, they got their mentors, they got people who helped them get into the business or whatever, but without that person day in, day out by your side, it's not, it's not going to be the same out there. But, well, with that, Gonzalo, I really want to thank you for coming in today to, to share your knowledge, your expertise, your, your experience with our listeners, with our audience. It's been great. We're going to put all your social media contacts for Gonzalo down in the show notes. I, you know, encourage everybody to visit Gonzalo's pages, learn about him, follow him and, and, and buy from him and sell to him. He's, he's out there, he's looking.
But until then, again, Gonzalo, thank you for coming in. Until then, this is Joe Siegel, your real estate asset protection attorney in Florida. And we're signing off today for Trust this.
Thanks for listening to this edition of Trust this. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep aspiring to a better.
