Is Fix and Flip a Bad Idea?

[00:00:00] Just Say No to Fix and Flip. That's what my guest talks about here today. When I speak with Jerome Maldonado, who's got 30 plus years of real estate investment experience who has done Fix and Flip, he says there's a much, much better approach than Fix and

[00:00:14] Flip. So if you're looking to build wealth in real estate and you're looking to grow your portfolio, you need to listen to this episode today. Welcome to the Brick and Mortar Money Show. The podcast dedicated to helping business owners and professionals achieve wealth, autonomy, and control through commercial

[00:00:34] property ownership. Join us as we unlock the power of real estate to transform your business and investment strategies. Whether you're seeking to expand, invest, or gain more freedom in your entrepreneurial journey, this is your destination for insightful stories, expert advice, and actionable strategies. Welcome.

[00:00:59] Hey, welcome listeners. Today I have the distinct honor and privilege of having Jerome Maldonado today on the show. And Jerome has got just a pretty interesting and amazing track record in real estate. He's not only a real estate investor and developer but an author and a business

[00:01:16] investor. But he's been in the game since the 1990s, started in single families, moved through land and commercial and done all kinds of different investment projects and has some larger projects going on now, which I want to get into. But he also has a very interesting

[00:01:32] perspective on Fix and Flip, which I want to get into today. But before we do that, Hey Paul, thanks for having me, bro. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's always fun to talk to somebody who's been

[00:01:44] in and around the game for a while and particularly since the 90s. So, you know, I got in real estate finance in the late 90s and we've obviously had some tumultuous, some good times, bad times and crazy times. And so I know you've seen it too,

[00:01:57] right over that period of time. We've had some interesting times even when I got started in business, I was told that was crazy because even in the late 90s, we were going through a market

[00:02:07] correction and they told me that I was nuts. Let's just get a job. That was my old manager to grocery store. And then the 2008 recession almost killed us, but we got through it and we

[00:02:17] got through it. We walked through it and actually landed up being a blessing in disguise in so many different ways. And here we sit today, went through the pandemic and the turnaround of interest

[00:02:29] rates and financing. And since you're in the finance world, you know what that looks like on the commercial market sector. And I think most people they hear about it, but they just don't really understand the magnitude of what's really going on behind

[00:02:41] the scenes and underwriting, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. No doubt. It's been crazy times. The last 24 months have definitely been very interesting. But to your point is if you're a long-term player and you get in with the decision that you're going to play the game

[00:02:56] and you do it as intelligently as possible and try not to overextend yourself and try to I'm guessing you surround yourself with some other people. And so you're not making all the decisions. You're getting input and wisdom from other people that have been in through and

[00:03:11] around before. So because cycles repeat, right? I mean, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah. I mean being around the right people is everything. As we scaled, we've partnered with

[00:03:22] some of the best asset managers and some of the best people in the industry. And so yeah, we have a really extensive and incredible team for sure. It's not just me. I'm the face

[00:03:33] of it. I take a lot of the credit for it, but it's a lot of intelligent people behind the scenes working together. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. I tell people all the time, I'm the face for radio

[00:03:43] of our team. But anyway, so tell us real quickly, just bring us some speed, kind of, you know, quick overview 30,000 feet. How did you... So you worked at a grocery store and your manager said, you know, this is the life for you. You're going to run the produce

[00:03:59] section or whatever. This is your dream. You're like, nah, you went from that to, you know, real estate, you know, super successful real estate investor and developer. Give us the kind of the

[00:04:09] history real quick. Yeah. Well, I've only had one really long-term job my whole entire life. And that was with Smith's grocery store, which is Kroger's. And we... And I was a manager at a

[00:04:20] young age. I lied about my age because they changed the law when I was 15, that you had to be 16. And I was already working. So I lied about my age and I started at 15 years old,

[00:04:29] working there at 17. I was a manager. I left because I went on this crazy, rambunctious, multi-level marketing craze for almost five years. And I struggled for a good amount of time, finally figured out the business, made some money and then got shut down by

[00:04:45] the FTC in 97. And then we... I went back and one night just to say hi on the store that I worked in forever and the manager that was actually my senior, I told him what I was doing

[00:04:56] in construction. And he told me I was crazy. He goes, did you ever open up the phone book? He said, there's so many contractors in there. You're going to go out of business. Just come back

[00:05:03] and work over here. And the reason I left that store was because I saw people graduating from college staying stuck there. And I said, I'm not... I'm never going to stay stuck here because I saw at a young age that these folks that were... At that time,

[00:05:15] I thought they were old, right? Like they were probably in their 30s. And, you know, they were 10 years my senior or greater. And I felt like this is not where I want to be.

[00:05:24] And I knew at that point in time, I never wanted to work for anybody. And so when I left a multi-level market, it was the best decision I ever made in spite of the struggles that I went through.

[00:05:33] And so that day after he told me that, I said, okay, this is no longer a place I come to embrace relationships. Once there's negativity in it, I just X myself out of

[00:05:45] that environment forever. So that was the last day that I showed up to that grocery store to ever say hi to anybody, surround myself with anybody. And that just gave me fuel because

[00:05:53] anytime somebody told me that because of all of the different pushback that I got from loved ones, friends, colleagues, all these people, I just would just put up barriers and walls to never talk to them until I hit a level of success that it didn't matter anymore.

[00:06:05] Right? Because this road that we've climbed has been an extensive one and it continues, right? It doesn't just end. It's a continuous one. So that's kind of the nuts and bolts how I got started into the construction. But we really just started out one by one, you know?

[00:06:20] I was bold. I was very ambitious and I did take some risks in the early years that could have probably severed my financial career. We got really close several times, but in those times, we pushed through and persevered mostly through persistence and

[00:06:37] continuous work of pushing through. I can see how some people going through what we had to go through certain aspects of time could have just folded and said, we're out of here. Like this,

[00:06:49] this is just way too much for us. In fact, my dad asked me at one point in time, he said, don't you just want to get a job? And that was around the 2008 recession. I said,

[00:06:57] Dad, I can't afford to get a job. I'll really go broke. And so you just keep pushing through. And little by little piece by piece, you create wealth. And I think a lot of people

[00:07:09] look at it once you're there and they think it happened overnight. And man, there's the lainty story that we can't cover. And I still tell my wife stories after 20, 20, so much 26 years of us being together. She was, I've never heard that story before.

[00:07:22] So there's a lot of them. Yeah, yeah. No doubt. I remember in 2000, it was sometime in 2007 where I had a real estate finance company and we had multiple locations. But our primary location was in this class A office space and we had the entire second

[00:07:44] floor of this tower building, right? I don't even, it's like 15,000 feet or something. And so I had positioned my office when things were going well, I was right in the center of activity. But as the world started to crash, I moved my office down to the far corner

[00:08:00] as far away from people as I could get so I could shut the door and just cry. Yeah. You're like, how am I going to pay this overhead? All these employees, you know, it's like when liquidity went to zero overnight and there was no money,

[00:08:15] it's like, wow, it's like, fortunately we had some cash reserves and we did okay on the other side of it. But it was like one of those things that you're hard to prepare for.

[00:08:28] But you do make it through if you persist and if you have something pulling you right, because it sounds like you had something pulling somewhere to me is like, I didn't want to work

[00:08:36] for somebody from day one. I wanted to fly my own life and it sounds like that was kind of your drive too. You're like, I'm not going to be stuck in this place where these people are going

[00:08:46] nowhere and here we are. Yeah, 131 years later, here I sit. So it's been a good, it's been a good, it really has. We've been blessed. We've been very fortunate.

[00:08:58] Yeah. Yeah. And so boys, so awesome. All right. So a little bit of a, you took some risk in the beginning and tumultuous. So we have a lot of guys, a lot of investors and business owners that

[00:09:10] listen that are looking to grow real estate. Some of them are working jobs and do it on the side. Some of them have businesses and they're looking to diversify cash flow and some of them are

[00:09:22] looking to go full-time. But we also have a lot that do the fix and flip because it's very popular, right? I guess maybe HGTV made it so popular. It was amazing. I used to see those shows. My wife

[00:09:33] and I would laugh and they'd come in and buy this house somewhere in San Diego and we live on the East Coast. So it's not nearly as crazy, but they buy this dilapidated shack for $800,000,

[00:09:45] you know, 1,000 square feet or something. And they'd say, oh honey, let's put a new mantle here. We'll spend a couple hundred dollars and it'll be worth a million too. We're like, oh, it's so easy to make wealth like that, right? So so many people I think have kind

[00:09:59] of been pulled into that and there is this sort of this image of how easy it is. It's get rich, quick kind of thing. And you and I both know that doesn't exist anywhere, in particularly in

[00:10:11] real estate. But you've been on, I've seen the financial side of many of these transactions, but you've been on the building, developing and all that. So and you came out something

[00:10:23] somewhere I saw which I was intrigued by and it said just say no to fix and flip is basically the dumbest thing you could do. And so I want to dig into that and uncover a little bit here,

[00:10:33] Jerome, if you can just talk about that. Yeah. You know, it comes from real life experience. I built my first house as an investment property to make money, you know, and as a business in 1999. And we when I found out that there was so much

[00:10:52] profit behind them, I started building multiples of them and create a business model out of it in a very short period of time. As an entrepreneur, when you find something that has upside,

[00:11:03] that has great upside to it, you move on it. And so I started moving into single family homes. Well, I created a vehicle and a beast of employees when I did that. And so that's one thing that most business owners, they aspire to do. And now in hindsight,

[00:11:21] I sit back and I scratch my head sometimes and I go, I will never do that ever again. Because you create this liability where we were having to pull a house out of the ground

[00:11:30] every single week, every single week, every single week. And it was stressful. There was a lot of stress because that was just to cover overhead. And we started building retail and we started buying distressed retail in 2000. At the same time, we were doing residential and then

[00:11:43] we started, we did our first ground up build of 12,000 square feet. No, it was 8,000 square feet on my first bill. My second one was 12,000 square feet, just small retail centers in 2002. And then when we were, when we would be in the interim of having these projects going because

[00:11:59] sometimes permitting and some of this stuff just wouldn't line up at the right time. We would just, we started buying little single family homes and we would flip them because they were just

[00:12:08] great tools to be able to just feed our guys into these and have work for them and just make a little profit. And when I say a little profit, it was because with our single family homes that we

[00:12:20] were building ground up, we were making at that time, we were making about $110,000 on average with every single family home that we would build the fix and flips we would average about

[00:12:30] $30,000 on every fix and flip that we would do. And we were doing like these little hundred and $135,000 houses, give or take. And we'd buy them for like a hundred grand, 110,000, 10, 20,000 into them selling for 150,000, 160,000, make about 30,000. Well, they were a lot of

[00:12:48] work. And what I found over the course of time is they took just as much time to do those as it did for me to do a single family home from the time that you purchased, you closed,

[00:12:57] you renovated, you listed and resold. It was almost the exact same amount of time for less than a third of the profit. Well, when the recession hit in 2008, we had these and we would just use them

[00:13:09] as tools. And so when the recession hit, we made no money on any of those and every single one of those seemed to be a pain in the ass. Every time I'd show up to a fix and flip, there was

[00:13:21] always more problems where my other builds were just streamlined. Like there was the variables were the same. There was always circumstances, right? But the circumstances were few and far from they were very manageable. But the fix and flips, it was always like just chaos.

[00:13:35] The heating and cooling system is completely shot. It's not going to work. Well, we can't pull a bathtub out. We're gonna have to cut the wall open from the outside rip out of old

[00:13:42] bathtub from the 1950s. It was just all these different variables. The electrical is no good. The inspector is not going to pass. We got to rewire the whole damn house, right? And it was just all these little unforeseen variables that just added and added and made our profit

[00:13:56] margin was already smaller, even smaller. And so when we got to the 2008 recession, every single fix and flip house that we had, we made no money on it. And there was some that we

[00:14:07] actually took a little bit of a licking on just to get out from under them. But our residential single family ones, the most vulnerable property that we fire sold, we made $48,000 on. And

[00:14:20] that was we did that to two properties. One of them a 52,000, one of them a 48,000. And then when I did that, I sat back and scratched my hands that this is what we need to be doing. Now,

[00:14:30] I can, I can figure this out because they're still profit here. So even when we fire sold, we made money. That was when I decided no more fix and flips that's off our business completely. And we started just adjusting and fixing stuff. And so I do tell people,

[00:14:43] I say the fix and flip games, it's crazy. I would never do it. I don't encourage it. It's a lot of stress for people that think that building ground up is an undertaking.

[00:14:52] It is so much easier than doing fix and flips. Well, yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit. I'm just sitting here thinking about your, as you're listening to your story and

[00:15:01] reminds me of that old movie. I think it was Tom Hanks was in the money pit. Oh yeah. You know, and I'm like, that's what I always think about. And it might be because

[00:15:10] my dad, when I was growing up, he bought this old four unit apartment building in downtown was a place called downtown Portsmouth, near where we used to live. And it was already in bad shape.

[00:15:22] And it's like, and it wasn't a fix and flip. He bought it for a long term rental. And this was his first foray into real estate investing, right? And had no experience. And the experience

[00:15:30] he had was not good because of all the surprises and all of the, you know, all of the, like you said, the issues hidden behind the walls or whatever. And I always laugh,

[00:15:40] my wife and I laugh because, you know, when you see people or you talk to people and they want to buy, they want to buy an old home and they want to restore it. I'm like, man, okay,

[00:15:50] you know, we'll see how this goes for you because it just does seem to me, it's if you have a, if you have a clean slate, a piece of, a piece of dirt or maybe you have to raise an old house,

[00:15:59] but a piece of dirt and you've got plans. And I mean, you know, everything is new, right? Coming up. And so, you know, you've got some tolerance issues, maybe some subcontractor issues to deal with, but you're not finding surprises behind walls. I mean, everything is

[00:16:15] from a pricing standpoint, you know what it's going to cost, you know how long it's going to take to do, there's no, there's no like ghost around the corner, right? It seems to me, I mean,

[00:16:26] is that pretty much what you're saying? And so based on that, you can, you can make more solid projections and it's more consistent. Yeah, because even you can even control costs better. You know, when you construction,

[00:16:36] if you don't want the cost, because we'll have this issue happen regularly where we'll have the same contractors for years, then all of a sudden, like our cabinets, for sake of example, we were paying like $16,000 for a full house. And then they went up to $19,000

[00:16:48] and we were like, damn that $4,000 jump is huge. But we bit into it because of the state of the market, right? We've been using these guys forever. But then that same cabinet company

[00:16:56] went up to $26,000 on the same exact house. I'm like, holy shit, like this is crazy guys. That was just like six months ago, there's no way cost have inflated that much.

[00:17:05] And so we're with a new house. It's easy. We just start getting, we just go in and we just start getting cabinet companies to come out and we land up getting the cabinets for $17,000 and they're nicer than the ones we were using before. And they're doing pre-manufactured. So

[00:17:21] we can control costs. The problem with renovations is when you go in and you have like an electrical contractor or plumbing contractor, if you don't like the prices, you can shop it really quick. And any contractor that services residential, they're going to want your project,

[00:17:34] right? Like they want that project. Fix and flips, you go in and it's so much stress that you almost have to nurse your contractors because it's not just stressful for you, it's stressful for them.

[00:17:43] They don't know what they're bidding. A lot of times they even take a licking on some of those projects. And so it's not as easy as even finding like if a contractor backs out on you on one

[00:17:53] of those renovation projects, it is so much more complicated to be able to find another electrical contractor or plumber or somebody to go in and service that project halfway through it if they leave on you. So when it comes down to even just vetting and having stable help,

[00:18:10] the ground up game gives you so much more options for price versatility and the ability to negotiate and keep your cost controlled where with Fix and Flips, you're almost like begging. You almost feel like you're begging sometimes to get these guys in there and you're plea

[00:18:26] bargaining with them because you have to. Like it just has to get done and you're almost vulnerable to the prices that they give you. There's just so many different reasons.

[00:18:35] And so and I hate being in that position first and foremost, I hate being bent over a rail where I feel like I'm pressed to do something that I know better than in putting people in that

[00:18:47] position as well. So nonetheless, those are just small examples of why the ground up game to me just makes way more sense than the Fix and Flip game. Yeah, I can see the tail

[00:18:58] wagging the dog there. In fact, again, a memory comes to mind. I had a client not long ago. It's about six months ago that was similar deal. It was an old one of these old houses they wanted to renovate,

[00:19:09] flip it and they were sort of new to the game. So they found a contractor. Well, after negotiating with a contractor, I don't know a couple of weeks, the contractor just said, nah, I don't

[00:19:19] want to do it. It's too difficult. Anyway, went to two or three contractors. It was like six weeks before they finally found a contractor that could do it. And you know, there was so much, there's so many issues back and forth and expectations and conversations from one to

[00:19:33] the next to the other. It's like, okay. So in this idea also that I can see a funny story. This is probably 2000 2001. I was in Denver. I was out there on business and I was staying

[00:19:50] for about a week and I had a friend out there and who had it took like a year off or two years off his job to, to this full-time job to build a house. But he wasn't the GC. He hired a GC or he

[00:20:04] was the GC, but he hired these subs. And so he got things going and things are going well for him and he decided, okay, I'm going to go back to work and just kind of because I'm going to

[00:20:15] manage them from afar. And long story short, he would go back week after week after week and it seemed like they were getting, they weren't getting hardly anything done. And so finally one of his

[00:20:25] new neighbors walked up and said, you know what's happening to you? He said, no, he said, well, when you meet them here in the morning and have the plan, everyone's good. But as soon as you

[00:20:33] leave, they get in their vans and they drive off. And the reason was because they had other contractors that had consistent business where they were building one a month or two a month

[00:20:46] or some frequency. So these subs, they knew they had consistent work. It was predictable. It was kind of boilerplate versus this one-off opportunity with this guy that they were going to string

[00:20:59] them along and eventually maybe they were going to get it done, but it was very low on the priority stack. And I can see that with what you're running into if you're consistently building versus doing flips where every deal could be surprised behind the walls. And I really

[00:21:15] want to deal with that today as the plumber kind of thing. Well, how does someone graduate into ground up construction? Right? Because doesn't it take a different level of licensing and education and experience? I mean, how did you get into that, Jerome?

[00:21:34] Yeah, it does. And I kind of slowly was resuméing myself into a lot of this stuff at the exact same time I was doing residential. And you know, I didn't even know the benefits to what I was doing at

[00:21:45] the time. I was just an ambitious entrepreneur. I was young and hungry. And I didn't realize what I was really doing for myself at the time. I kind of backed into this. I wouldn't call it on

[00:21:55] accident because I was very methodical in what I was doing. But I didn't realize the benefits and attributes it was going to have for me here as I sit pushing into 50 years old. And as we,

[00:22:06] when we got started, I would have never guessed that I was going to back into what I'm doing right now. And I went in very ambitious and got my general contractor's license for most

[00:22:15] residential and commercial right out of the bat. So when I went in, I didn't even qualify for a residential license in all honesty. My ex-boss that I was sending some drywall for,

[00:22:25] I was literally a laborer when I was in college doing it on the side and top of working at the grocery store just because I was doing piecework. And I would just go in, they paid me a flat fee

[00:22:34] to clean these houses, scrape drywall, sand them, I'd go to school with white dust in my hair. And that's all I did. That was the extent of my construction experience, literally.

[00:22:44] And when I went in, they said you need to have worked for somebody that has the license that you're going after, right? So I went in and I went ambitious and I just went for the top of the

[00:22:53] top of the line license in the 1990s. And I had my boss, he signed on it. I took the course and I studied and studied and studied and I went and passed the exam. And I landed up with my

[00:23:04] commercial and residential contractors license as a general contractor. And I still hold the same licenses today, in fact they're right behind me here. And so I would slowly do a little bit of commercial, a little bit of residential. I continued through the residential game because

[00:23:18] it was a good cash producer and it gave me good cash flow. And the commercial was always big revenue, but it came in in smaller quantities. And so it came in in larger quantities, but it

[00:23:33] came in in more less frequent amount of times, right? So what I loved about commercial was the fact that I could go in and I could do a project. A year, two years later, I can exit

[00:23:44] a million, half a million dollars through two million dollars out of it. And it felt like you had this money and savings account, right? And you just you come in and boom all at one time.

[00:23:53] And that's what always gave us like the big push because the residential always gave us the cash flow. But then I would do these commercial projects and then I get like a big hit and I'd

[00:24:01] be like cool. And then I'd be able to use that to scale. And so as life changed, as market circumstances changed, I also had to adapt, acclimate and change too. So once people say,

[00:24:12] I do retail and only retail, I say, okay, well, I'll never just do that because like even now, like with multifamily, we're doing multifamily is a big push. But I also know that

[00:24:24] there multifamily at some point in time will slow down where it's not as lucrative as it is today. And so we're already looking at that stuff, you know, we're looking, we're doing warehouse on the side. And, you know, we're looking at data centers and we're trying to understand

[00:24:39] and better educate ourselves on what really makes money and what's the differences between data centers that get failed least and stabilize the ones that don't. And we're looking at that type of stuff even right now, because it's intriguing, right? And I want to make sure that we have

[00:24:52] the ability to pivot when that time comes. Do I know that data centers are going to be 100% like what we're in that we're going to the direction we're going to go? Not not 100%, but they do show promise, right into the future. So we're learning about that stuff.

[00:25:07] So really this game to scale is about education. When we decided to go ground up on these big multifamily deals, I told my wife, I said, okay, I said, look, I'm going to do this.

[00:25:19] I got a lot of learning to do. And you would think that because of all the experience, you'd have all the learning you needed. It's an entirely different game. So I literally would spend Saturdays and Sundays like when they were asleep in the

[00:25:31] mornings, and I would just be listening to stuff and I'd be underwriting stuff. And then I'd have little biblical moments where I'd have, you know, or I'd have an epiphany, but oh, I got it. I understand. Okay. I understand that you went, you're a finance guy,

[00:25:44] so you understood all that stuff. Well, I didn't come from that world. I was always working against the banks and I realized that I need to work with the banks. And so when I really learned and took the time to study commercial lending, and I really understood,

[00:26:00] I realized, I said, I got arms length to negotiate with these guys. I really understand this stuff. Now we work in a partnership with the lenders, not against each other, where I was always trying to hide stuff from them and manipulate things to get loans. And

[00:26:15] I think a lot of lenders do that. I mean, a lot of borrowers do that to lenders. Now we work in alignment with these guys because truly we're going in as partners on these deals.

[00:26:23] And so I'll tell you the fault. It's just, it's been a sequence of learning. And that's how we really scale from the small game. The people that just expect to be able to roll into it, it's not quite like that. Even like the data centers, like I mentioned,

[00:26:35] I don't know enough about them. You would think, well, it's easy. Just go build a data center. It's not like that. Like there's a business behind the business that you have to learn. You have to really understand it. And that's what really protects you is when you

[00:26:45] really understand where the numbers come from and how to manipulate those numbers. It's like algebra, right? You can go forward and backwards and still come back to the same answer. And that's how you check your work. Underwriting is the

[00:26:55] exact same thing. You go forward into it, backwards into it. You check your underwriting. And when you do that, you know that at least you're about 99% confident that when you roll into this deal, unless there's economic market circumstances that are outside

[00:27:08] of your control, you can control your variables. And that's how we really scale is through education and constant learning. Yeah. No, that's a good point. So many people think that they, you know, they go to school and when they finish school or whatever level

[00:27:23] they finish school, they're done learning. And I would say that actually that's when your learning starts, right? And cause you know, you only learn so much from a book. So not only are you educating yourself, but you've been out in the field working projects.

[00:27:39] You've been applying it. You've been, you've been synthesizing it. And then when you go to the book or you go to educational source, you're like, oh, I can see where I could have done that better if I'd have done it this way versus that way.

[00:27:51] And you're right. It's, it's, you know, working with lenders first of all today, you can't hide anything. I mean, everything is so widely available on the internet, right? And there's data sources. We all live in a glass house, whether we

[00:28:04] admit it or know it or like it. But the other thing is that most of us, you know, lenders and bars, we are working towards the same goal because you want a successful project that makes money because then you,

[00:28:18] then everybody wins. You have a profitable project, your tenants or your buyers, they're happy. And the lender wants you to have a profitable project because A, they want the return of the capital and then B, they like to make a little money on it,

[00:28:30] which is what the business they're in. So, so if you don't do well, the lender doesn't do well. It's just, it doesn't work out for anybody. And to the point, the other point about education and don't overdrive your headlights,

[00:28:44] you know, a lot of people have these dreams. I want to build like you and I were talking, you're working on like a 200 unit development, another 150 unit development. That's an, that's awesome that you're there and a lot of people want to ultimately be there,

[00:28:57] but it is a process. It's a journey, right? And you don't go from your first single family, whether it's a flip or a ground up or whatever to my next deal is a 200 unit development because it's just way outside of your competence level, right? So as a process,

[00:29:13] so long as you've been on the road, you look back 30 years, you're like, okay, well, I'm able to do all these things now. It's cause you've had, you've had success, failure, education, reeducation and, you know, and now you've got

[00:29:24] a track record to look back on and you know so much more what to do. And people are like, how did you become so successful? Well, it's, I skinned my knee, you know, 30 years ago.

[00:29:33] And then I went through 2008 and almost lost everything. And, you know, and I learned all this stuff. Yeah, 100%. And it's step by step, right? So you have to be bold. You have to

[00:29:43] be bold. It has to take conscious decisions that you, that you follow through on. I mean, I sat down in 2016 with him, with my, my father in law's house and we were, I was sitting down

[00:29:55] and, you know, he's an accountant and I was, I was sent back just learning this stuff, going, okay, we're going to figure this out or I'm going to figure this out. And now they look and even just last two nights ago, we sat at the kitchen table and,

[00:30:07] and they were proudly explaining a lot of the stuff that I had going on to another relative that didn't quite understand what we were doing. And they were kind of bragging about it a little bit in a fun way. And you know, it amazed me proud because,

[00:30:19] you know, to know that they're proud of what we've been able to do. And I think one thing that they've learned about is that most people will make a decision. And I'll tell you those decisions are never easy. And there's always opposition. Like there's,

[00:30:31] there's variables in there that at certain points in time, you sit back and scratch your head and go, wow, I never, I never knew I was bargaining for all of this at the time I got started.

[00:30:41] And in spite of that, you have to just continue moving forward, right? Like it's always going to be way more work than you ever expected, always 100% of the time. It's never as easy in a streamlined as you think it's going to be. It's always more work.

[00:30:52] Like you, when you think it's going to be a lot of work, just multiply that times 10. And then that's about how much work is really going to be. And when people back into that,

[00:31:00] they sit back, oh, wow, this is way more of an undertaking than I thought it was. That was me with this. And you know, but we get through it and my wife would even ask sometimes, she's like,

[00:31:08] holy cow, when are we going to see profits on this? I said, we're getting there, you know, we're getting there. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. And you got to be patient. And so now you're doing what you've always done to make cash flow. And now

[00:31:20] you're doing this next thing that you're doing to scale up. And you got to be bold, and you got to be patient, you got to be willing to put in the time and invest,

[00:31:29] invest the time, the money, the resources, everything in order to do it. And it's all in phase, right? You got to be a little bit bold to do it. If you're trying to stay comfortable

[00:31:39] doing it, it's just just just continue doing what you're doing. But if you if you dare to be a little bold, and you're willing to put in the work, the education and the time,

[00:31:48] you'll get there. You'll get there and you'll figure it out. There's a plenty of resources and plenty of good people out there, you'll get there. You just have to be willing to do what it takes.

[00:31:56] And that is what it really is. Yeah, bold. That's awesome. I think that's probably the walkaway word here from from this conversation today. Jerome, we're out of time man. What is there any way that you have any resources you can share? I know you do some coaching

[00:32:13] and things like that. Anything or websites or whatever you could point people to, if they want to learn more from you or other trusted sites that you have? Yeah, so in the my name is posted here in the in the notes of the podcast. And you guys,

[00:32:29] if you guys just Google my name, our website is JeromeAltonado.com. All of our social media platforms are at JeromeAltonado. And you guys follow the content. We give a lot of free content away. The content on YouTube is just absolutely priceless.

[00:32:45] I go through financial breakdowns and it's kind of my give back. It's the way I learned a lot of what I did by finding the right people to follow. And I'm the right person to

[00:32:54] follow because I've learned it so well. I can stand and sit with confidence telling you guys like we're living, breathing and eating every day what we're doing. And so to be able to find somebody that's doing that is absolutely priceless. So ladies and gentlemen, I tell you guys,

[00:33:11] if be cautious of how and who you learn from, make sure that they have the resume and the resources that they're teaching on. And they can go to our website and our YouTube channel and they

[00:33:23] can get a lot of free resources and help assistance. And yeah, we do do some live coaching and stuff. It really serves our brand well, Paul. And so thank you for that. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you putting all that out there because

[00:33:38] it's always, there are a lot of hucksters out there for sure, no matter where whatever space you're in. So to get from someone who's legitimately lived it and done it and to get teaching and particularly all kinds of free resources and more resources is super valuable.

[00:33:53] So I appreciate it Jerome. And man, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate your time this morning and love to hear about your journey and all the wisdom from it. Yeah, Paul, I thank you. It's always cool to share a little bit of you always wonder,

[00:34:05] okay, how am I going to tweak this where they hear a little something different from the life and journey? You always kind of put these little synapse together of like your life and it always seems to come out the exact same way and there's so much

[00:34:16] more behind it. So thank you for letting me explore into that a little bit today. You bet. You bet. All right, have an amazing day man. Thanks again. You as well. Thank you much. Hey gang, just winding down here today. Thanks for listening to the show.

[00:34:28] And as always, if you need capital to grow your business, you're looking to purchase commercial real estate or build a building or invest in commercial real estate, you're looking to acquire a business or a competitor or just need growth capital. We'd love to talk to you.

[00:34:45] We fund businesses all day long. Our mission is to help entrepreneurs win and to fund their businesses and fund their dreams so that they can make an impact in their community. Reach out to me today. Go to our website, click the button, schedule a 20 minute conversation,

[00:34:59] discovery call. We'll have a quick conversation, see if there's a need, see if there's a fit, and we can take it from there. The website is vpcvictorpaulcharly.capital. That's vpc.capital. All right, there's no dot com on that. It's vpc.capital. As always,

[00:35:20] keep crushing it and hope to see you soon around here. Take care.