Both Annie and Julie are real estate investing experts, each with over a decade of real estate investing experience. Annie is the COO and Julie is the CEO Goodegg Investments, a company that helps people invest passively in real estate syndications. Together they have helped hundreds of investors around the country to invest passively in commercial real estate assets, worth $800M+, in strong, growing markets.
Here’s some of the topics we covered:
- Working With A Partner
- Your Partner’s Strengths & Weaknesses
- Proper Due Diligence
- First Deals Gone Wrong
- The Importance of Giving Back
- Working With Experienced Operators on a Deal
- How To Handle Tough Conversations
To find out more about partnering or investing in a multifamily deal: Text Partner to 72345 or email Partner@RodKhleif.com
Full Transcript Below
Intro
Hi. My name is Rod Khleif and I’m the host of “The Lifetime Cash Flow Through Real Estate Investing” podcast. And every week I interview Multifamily Rock Stars and we talk about how they built incredible wealth for themselves and their families through multifamily properties. So hit the “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons to get notified every Monday when a new episode comes out. Let’s get to it.
Rod
Welcome to another edition of “how to Build Lifetime Cash Flow Through Real Estate Investing”. I’m Rod Khleif and I am thrilled that you’re here. And I’m also super thrilled to interview the two wonderful ladies that I’m interviewing today. Their names are Annie Dickerson and Julie Lam. And they operate Goodegg Investments, which we are going to dig into because there’s a reason they use that name. And it’s very impressive. And they’ve got over 800 million in assets under management. They’ve written a book called “Investing for Good: The Surprising Strategy for Building Wealth” while also making an impact. And they also co-host a podcast that I was on that you need to check out called the “Life and Money Show”. So very excited to have them on the show. Welcome, ladies.
Annie
Thank you, Rod.
Julie
Thanks for having us.
Rod
Absolutely. So, you know, maybe you could kind of give us a little background on how, you know, did you start out in real estate? Did you start out in, you know, some sort of a tech job? Because I know you guys are in California or some other W2 role and migrated to real estate. Just give us a little background, if you would.
Annie
Well, this is Annie. I can start. And Julie, you can stack on top. I never intended to get into real estate. Julie will tell you she grew up wanting to be an entrepreneur and having her own business. I was the complete opposite. I never wanted to have my own business. It was never my intention. I started out as an elementary school teacher, and then I got into game design because I wanted to create educational games. And then I got into adult learning and development, creating trainings, gamified trainings for companies. So I was having a blast, climbing the corporate ladder. I wanted nothing to do with real estate, but my husband and I sort of fell into house hacking. We had this great realtor back when we lived in Washington, DC, who thankfully in our 20s, talked us out of buying a condo or a loft in a trendy neighborhood in DC. And he said, why don’t you get something more practical? These row homes in DC, a lot of them have not one, but two units, and you could live in one unit and rent out the other. And he said, if you play your cards right, after a certain amount of time, you could get that to be cash-flow positive. And here I am, a teacher, no background in real estate. I had never heard those words together before. I heard those words cash-flow positive. I was like, I don’t know what that means, but I want that. Give me some of that. So tell me where to sign. I will sign up for that. And so we fell into that first house hack, and then it worked so well. We got another duplex and another and another. And it was always something we were doing in the background. But once we moved to the Bay area, my husband, all of a sudden he was in tech, but he decided he wanted to be in real estate all of a sudden. So he got into real estate. And of course, then I was like, I’m definitely not getting into real estate. We can’t be one of those couples that were both in real estate. So he gets into real estate and I’m climbing the corporate ladder. I’m watching his business grow exponentially year after year. I’m like, what is going on? And one year he says, well, why don’t you help me with my business? I said, I don’t have a lot of time, but you know what? I’ll read a book. I’ll read a book and maybe something will come out of that. And along the way, I stumbled across his website and realized, oh, Rod, it was bad. It was this dark purple page, a single page with text on one side and his photo on the other side. That was the whole website. And I said I could do better than this. So I took it upon myself that summer to redo his website. And that’s when I fell in love with real estate, not residential real estate that he was doing, but really figuring out how to invest in real estate. And it was all I could talk about. Any time we got together with friends and family and so started gaining this natural network of people who wanted to invest with me. That’s when I discovered the world of syndication, which is what we focus on now. And that’s how I met Julie. But Julie, actually, she has a very sort of parallel track, even though we didn’t meet until just a few years ago.
Annie
Yeah. So it’s funny. My story is kind of very similar to Annie’s, my mom, actually. It’s so funny where it actually started my kind of real estate journey was my mom offered me the opportunity or actually, this is where it didn’t start and should have started 20 years ago. She offered me the opportunity to buy a house from her for basically what was left on the loan in an area here in the Bay area in San Francisco Bay area, that’s like one of the nicest neighborhoods. It’s actually the house that I grew up in. And I was like, what do I want with this old junkie house with root problems and roof issues and all these things? No, thank you. I’m going to go off and do law school, and I’ve got better things to do than deal with old properties. Right. And that’s where it should have started, but where it actually started was in 2009 with my husband. And it was a great time to buy. And we were just buying our primary home, and we were looking at, you know, building wealth, and that’s what most people do is buying real estate to build wealth. So got in in 2009, bought a bunch of properties since then, and realized that I wanted to scale and go bigger, faster. And that’s how I got into commercial real estate and started a capital raising company about eight months before I met Annie. And then met Annie. And it was kind of love at first sight, I guess you could say. She had all of the things that I lacked, and she felt the same vice versa, and our strengths kind of offset our weaknesses. So, yeah, that’s kind of quick over.
Rod
I’m so glad you went there because I was going to go there and you beat me to it because you know, we all know anyone listens to me has heard of ad nauseam, that this business is a team sport because you guys are such a dynamic team. I wanted to go there to find out you know, how that– sounds like you start talking about you know, how you met or that you met, but really want to talk about how you, you know, aligned and kind of fell into the different roles that I assume you play now. Maybe I’m sure there’s some overlap, but can you speak to, you know, Annie you want to start speaking to the team dynamic of the two of you.
Annie
So a few months into, you know, knowing each other, Julie and I got together, and, you know, we were contemplating the partnership, but we didn’t want to rush into things yet. We were talking to our coaches and advisors and friends and family and trying to figure out, is this a good idea? How should we go about this? And one day we came together to have a brainstorming session, which was really pivotal in putting this partnership together. And this is an amazing activity. We used to do this all the time when I was in the world of creative design. It’s part of the design thinking process. So what we did was we came together, we had a stack of post-it notes and some sharpies, and we said, okay, what’s your vision for the future of this company that we’re building together?
Rod
You asked each other this? Yes, you asked each other this. Got it. Okay. Love it.
Annie
Exactly. It’s like when you get married, right? You say, how many kids do you want to have? Where do you want to live? What kind of house do you want to buy? Right. But rather than just talking about it, we did this exercise which really shortcut the process. And what we did was we just set a timer for about ten minutes, and we each had a stack of post-its, and we just wrote anything that came to mind, anything that we wanted for the future of this business we were building. And at the end of the ten minutes, we came together and we had this stack of post-it notes, and we started putting them up on the wall, all these colorful post-it notes. And we started seeing basically into each other’s brains, and we started to see, oh, my gosh, we align on so many of these aspects. And not only that, as we were sorting the post-its, we got a glimpse into what it would be like to work together, because we would start saying where this one goes, oh, I think this one goes together with this one. Let’s pair this one together. Or what were you thinking? Was this one like, you know, right away, or do you want to do these years down the road? And it helped us to really foster a conversation and see how that collaboration and that negotiation would work.
Rod
That is freaking brilliant. I know that came from you, Annie because you’re the creative in this bunch, right? I’m certain that that process came from you. I want to add something here because I talk about partnership all the time. In fact, I’m going to offer a free resource that I created that I just used for my new partnership as well. But the thing that– I love the fact that you saw that you were aligned on your goals because so many people don’t do that piece. Now, me included. Okay, that was really insightful. I’ve got a resource called the “Questions to Ask When Forming a Partnership”. And if you guys want it, just text the word “PARTNERSHIP” to “72345”. It’s got a whole list of questions because what will happen is, you know, people will get excited about each other and they’ll do what you did, but then they don’t ask the hard questions. Like, what happens if somebody dies? Who’s going to do what? Who gets a salary? How are we going to structure this? You know, how are we going to take title to assets? In what fashion? Has anybody had legal issues in the past? You know, do you have any upcoming major monetary needs? I’m just looking at some of these questions. So these are the hard questions that most people avoid. And, you know, I host the largest Multifamily Mastermind, I think, in the world now. We’ve got somewhere well in excess of 14 billion in assets in there, maybe more than that, even. And there are two people in that Mastermind, a male and a female that owns, you know, four, five, 6000 units each. And they just went through massive breakups because they didn’t ask these hard questions. And so, you know, I want to let Julie have a chance to talk. But if you guys want this resource, just text “PARTNERSHIP” to “72345”. I just want to add one other thing, because you guys instantly had rapport because, you know, you’re both Asian, you’re both women, you’re both attractive, and you obviously connected at that level immediately. But the other thing that’s so critical when you’re aligning with people is to trust your gut. And women have incredible intuition. It’s not a sexist thing. It’s just reality guys. Sorry to say that. They’re better at this than we are. And, you know, your brain is so powerful that it can see these micro nuances subconsciously that you don’t see consciously. And if something doesn’t feel right when you meet someone, trust it. Every time I’ve ignored it, I regretted it. So anyway, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to steal your thunder, but I wanted to add to that because this was a great teaching opportunity. So, Julie, please give us your version of that.
Julie
Yeah. Well, it’s so funny that you say that, Rod, because intuition, it is such a female thing, right? Women are out there picking the berries. That’s what we’re supposed to do is we’re out there picking the berries. We can see everything. We know what’s going on as mothers, too. We know what’s happening behind us, and men sometimes are, you know, and again, not to be sexist or whatever. Men are so, keep the goal, go for it.
Rod
By the way, those of you listening, I’m holding my hands up the side of my face because men have tunnel vision. Okay.
Julie
Yeah. So that is certainly something that I think Annie and I realized early on. I think even through an app, I think that was when we first met the very first time. And it was just like this intuition of like, this is a woman I need to talk to and meet up with.
Rod
Wow.
Julie
And, you know I had explored various partnerships before I had met Annie. That didn’t go well and trusted my gut. Right. And it was like something happened. They didn’t show up for a meeting. They didn’t return a call. And I was like, yeah, how is this really going to pan out in the long term if it’s not working out now? And so definitely listen to my gut. But one of the biggest things you know, that story that Annie was telling, the spark started flying for me when I realized that she had the strength that offset my weaknesses.
Rod
Yes.
Julie
I always talk about any of your listeners like, if you’re looking to form a partnership, the way you form, like, a power team, like a super duo as you go out there and you find somebody whose strengths are your weaknesses because you can try to make your weaknesses as you perfect them all you want. But at the end of the day, it’s just not what you’re good at. Right. And I knew that early on. When I met Annie, and she was like, this is what I love to do, which is my weakness. I was like, oh, my gosh, we need to talk about a partnership. And I think I might have even been the one that pitched you and was like, what do you think? Do you want to partner? Because I kind of knew she was like the missing puzzle piece for me. So that was it for me.
Rod
Let me expand on something you just said because it’s so insightful. Guys, don’t try to build your weaknesses. Do what they did, because if you’re playing in your strengths, number one, you’re enjoying it. Okay. You’re going to have fun, and you’re going to be passionate about it. If you’re doing what you don’t love, there’s no passion. And if you don’t have passion, there’s no way you’re going to influence people to sell to you, to invest with you, to work with you. None of that. So, you know, when you meet somebody that complements you and is strong when you’re weak, success is freaking inevitable if you’re both working in what you love. Well, listen, I’m really glad we spent some time on this because I will say, I think it’s one of the biggest secrets to success in our business is those alignments. Like me, my last partner was a CPA. You could throw them in a– and this was analysis versus outgoing in our dynamic. Okay. And I’m the mouthpiece, obviously, you know, you could throw him in a room with a spreadsheet and throw raw meat in once in a while, and he’s happy as heck, you know. So that was our dynamic. Yours is creativity versus, you know, I’m guessing, Annie, you’d be the more analytical one. Yes? No? Maybe? Or are you both analytical?
Annie
I think Julie is more– these days, she more takes the– she’s the visionary, and she also takes the lead on the acquisition side of the business, looking at the deals and all that stuff.
Rod
So, she does the deal analysis then.
Annie
She leads the team–.
Rod
I would have picked it the other way. Wow. Okay. All right. Well. When you said you were in tech and gaming, and all that that’s a lot of code and you’re obviously both very analytical, then I would guess. Okay. Very interesting. Well, so let’s talk about the Goodegg. I mean, just the component of where that came from and how that shows up in your organization? What that looks like, where, you know, it’s not just about money, because that is super dear to my heart. You know, I got to be candid. Power moves to those who serve, and that is absolutely a huge secret to success. I see it with my students. I’m– extraordinary. I just got an email yesterday from one of my students that building a school in India, you know, and he’s super successful. So let’s talk about you guys. Talk about that, if you would.
Annie
Absolutely. We came together to serve. That was the entire reason we got together was because we saw a need with these other moms out there, busy moms who are, you know, they’re trying to take care of their families, do the carpool, do the laundry. They have all this stuff, and they were working their jobs, and they’re still not able to get ahead. And we wanted to give them offer them something that maybe they didn’t know about, that maybe previous to us, they didn’t feel like they had a place in real estate. They were too intimidated by it. Maybe the financial world they felt just wasn’t for them. We wanted to create a space for them, an experience for them where they felt like, hey, wait a second. I can do this. I can contribute in this way. I can be part of this. And not only that, I can teach my kids about this. And so we set out to really create that experience. And that culture has been pervasive, not only amongst our investors but amongst the team that we’re growing as well.
Rod
So you target women, then. Your demographic is– your large demographic is primarily women then is what I’m hearing. Yes?
Julie
Women and families. Yeah.
Rod
Women and families. I love it. I absolutely love it. They don’t just invest. And of course, I can tell, you know, good operators spend time teaching behind the scenes, what’s going on in a deal like we do webinars and email. We just send an email today, yesterday, you know, on a particular asset that we haven’t– so that’s a component of this. Well, let me ask you this, okay. You guys have a lot of stuff on assets under management. Let’s go the other direction for a minute. Everybody thinks that this is all roses and glory and success just fall in your lap. And there are never any setbacks. Talk about a failure. I call them seminars but talk about a seminar that happened, you know, a dramatic one. If you have one. And really the lesson that you got out of it, if there was one, there always is. So talk about one of those.
Julie
Oh, gosh, do you want to share the– which one do you want to do?
Annie
Oh, my. Where idea exactly.
Rod
You have to do the one she’s alluding to now. Okay. That’s not going to get by, and I’m going to know if it’s not the right one. Now that you said that. Come on now. Let’s hear it.
Julie
Yeah, go for it, Annie. You know which one.
Annie
Which one. Okay. All right. We’ve got a few zingers now.
Rod
No, give me the big one.
Annie
I think I know which one she’s talking about.
Rod
All right.
Annie
This is the first deal. Yeah, the first deal that we got into together, and, you know, we are fresh off of creating this partnership.
Rod
Wet behind the ears is the expression, right?
Annie
Right. We’re ready. We were hungry, Rod. We were like, let’s go. You know, you were able to raise this amount? I was able to raise the amount. Let’s go. Let’s see what we can do together. We had this opportunity come across our desk to partner in this deal, and this was somebody we knew sort of, but not–
Rod
Partner with someone else in the deal. Got it?
Annie
Yes. Partner with somebody else.
Julie
Several partners.
Annie
Several. That was the issue. So there were multiple partners in the deal. I think there was something like seven or eight different partners in the deal, lots of different personalities. And, you know, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we got into it. It was a good market, a good deal. We were looking at the numbers, and we believed in the deal. But we didn’t ask all those hard questions that are in that resource of yours. We didn’t ask all those questions. We just said, you know, we’re ready for a deal. Our investors are ready. Let’s get into this. And so we did.
Julie
I just want to cut in right here. These were people who were experienced operators. So that’s the thing to keep in mind, right? Because I think when we were very new, we thought, these are experienced operators. They must know what they’re doing. And it’s not that they didn’t know what they were doing in a lot of ways, but it was the partnership. There were lots of things. But I think we just went on their experience, and we trusted that.
Rod
I want to add something to this. Listen, you know, I got in a deal, and I’m actually flying out there tonight because it’s finally under contract to sell. Thank you to Lord. But this was a deal that I got pushed, I mustn’t say pushed. I mean, I agreed to do it and, you know, bought for 16 and a half, sold for 28 something. We did okay. But, what a nightmare. And the partner in this deal had a management company and obviously knew how to manage A and B assets, crashed, and burned on a C asset. So again, had 4000 doors when we met. So I assumed like you guys did. And so anyway, please continue. But, guys, this is very common. So just because somebody has the experience, dig in, okay? Because their experience may not relate, like, in your case, the experience, they probably didn’t have experience having multiple personalities in a deal, maybe. I don’t know. I’m conjecturing. Please continue.
Annie
Yes. What we discovered along the way was there was a lack of alignment between their vision and our vision for the deal. It was a C-class asset or actually two assets. And what had happened was there were a couple of lead sponsors on the deal, and they sort of viewed us as almost like customers, and they weren’t sharing and being totally transparent with us. They wanted to figure out the answer and then present that to us along the way. They weren’t including us in the problem solving, what was going on behind the scenes. So we were kind of left in the dark. We thought things were going along just fine. We didn’t hear about anything. And then several months into the project, we hear that there’s no money left in the deal. There are no reserves. We’d let it dry. And not only that, we owed a bunch of money on all these bills. And we’re like, what happened? We thought, you know, we had underwritten all these cash reserves. What happened? And that’s when they went back and they said, oh, we probably should have told you this earlier, but the appraisal, this is before we even close on the deal.
Rod
The loan proceeds weren’t enough. Got it. Yeah.
Annie
The appraisal came in $200,000 under. But here’s the kicker. Rather than tell us at that point so that we could all pitch in and maybe continue raising after closed, they said, okay, well, we’ll go with that and we’ll just move forward like the goal, right. We see the goal. We’re just going to go and we’re just going to continue with the business plan as is. And that’s exactly what they did. They didn’t adjust anything. They didn’t think about, okay, well, given that let’s go this different course, they just kept going. And then after a certain amount of time, there was nothing left. And so then we had to come together. And you can imagine with multiple partners in the mix, everybody had a different idea at that point. And so as a lot of these tough conversations, trying to figure out how to do best by our investors, how to get the deal on solid footing, it was a lot of tough conversations.
Rod
Do you have to put money in?
Annie
That’s another thing. We wanted to put our own money in to continue paying out distributions to our investors. But because there were all these partners in the deal, everybody had to be on the same page. Otherwise, it would dilute the shares of everybody else. And so we weren’t able to even though we wanted to. But at the end of the day, what happened was all the partners did agree to put our money in to make the deal whole. So we did do that as a team.
Rod
Got it. Yeah. No, that’s what happened on this deal as well. We’ve got 3 million from the GP in the deal to make it survive because it was just a train wreck. When we finally got the management away from this guy, it was at about 90 to 100 grand a month in revenue. I got it up to 280. And thank God you know, it’s under contract now, but, okay, so the lesson is what? What was the lesson that you got from that experience?
Annie
Well, we got a lot of lessons from that. One is always to ask the hard questions, take your time, don’t jump into a deal. Nowadays, we vet partners very carefully. We take time. We invest our personal money with those partners if we can before we bring any of those deals to our investors.
Rod
I see.
Annie
So there’s a lot of– little things have changed.
Rod
Sorry to interrupt. You guys will align with operators and bring equity and then obviously do more than bring equity because you can’t just bring equity. Sounds to me like you will maybe a little hands-off on that first deal. And you should a little more than you should have been because, you know, otherwise you would have, you know, been in tune with it. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s a valuable one. Thank you for sharing that.
Julie
Rod, can I just inject something here? The other thing that I would say that I’ve learned, and this is something for your listeners to keep in mind if you’re looking to get active into these deals is to consider how many partners there are. GP partners. When you’ve got a deal with like 20 different, ten different GP partners, you have to understand the potential of the disaster that could happen. When you have so many different people that are trying to run the deal and everyone has to have a say in the asset management. Right. Legally, that’s part of it. They can’t just raise capital. They’ve got to have a say. So it’s something to think about. And as we’ve moved forward over the years, we’ve realized that we’d like to stay in deals where there’s just a handful of us so that we can keep the conversations short and to the point in a line. So just another thing to say.
Rod
No, that’s very, very good. So Besides that moment, are there any other, aha moments for you too that you can recall in this journey of yours where you’re like, okay, now I get it with this particular situation. Anything come to mind when I ask that question?
Julie
Communication. I always go back to communication. It has been paramount in not only Annie and my relationship over the years, but also in the partners that we have worked with. Going back to the trust your gut, right. If you don’t have good communication early on, trust me, it’s not going to get any better. We just went through something at the end of last year that, you know, really showed us that if we didn’t have the communication with our partners, like excellent communication, where they call us, we call them, we’re aligned every step of the way that it could have potentially been a really, really big disaster. And so communication is huge. I think you know, going back to the trusting your gut thing, I think is really big too. And, you know, really, I would say the only other thing that I’ve really learned over the years is mindset. Mindset is like, I feel like it’s like 85, 90% of what we do. Believe in yourself first. If you don’t believe, you’re never going to take the actions you need to succeed. If you don’t take the action you’re never going to see the success. And it’s just like this cycle that you fall into. I’m taking that from Tony Robbins. Right. So believing in yourself when you first get into this, that you can do it. Had you told me four or five years ago that I would be sitting here talking to you, Rod? I knew you, I’ve known you for a long time ago.
Rod
That’s sweet. Thank you.
Julie
And, you know, you having us here with all that we’ve done, I wouldn’t have believed it, but, you know, we worked with coaches. You’re a coach. You know how that works. And I know you probably talk about mindset a lot.
Rod
My listeners have heard what you just said, literally ad nauseam. I show love that you said it. You know, I didn’t coach you to say it. And so here you just heard it. 800 million under management guys. Hello. That’s a clue what you just heard. Literally, I do an episode every week called “Own Your Power”. And that’s in the intro that 80% to 90% of your success in anything is mindset. So you just, you know, repeat what I say, literally, daily. So I love that you said that. I want to actually hammer something home that you said about communication. I have had partnerships that have failed, and it has always been around communication every single time. In fact, this one with this gentleman I was just talking about on this asset that I’m flying out to tonight. He’s very unresponsive and never answers emails and so on and so forth. And that was absolutely a component of this debacle that we finally cleaned up. Thank God. Anything to add Annie? Any aha, like, wow. You know, like, maybe a specific moment in time, whatever. I don’t want to steal it, but whatever comes to mind with that question.
Annie
Yeah, the mindset thing is huge. I’ll add on top of that, there was this one moment that I think changed the trajectory of our business. It was the moment we sat down to decide who we were trying to serve. Prior to that, when we started the business, like a lot of people do, we said, okay, we’ll take anybody.
Rod
All thanks to all people, right? All thanks to all people.
Annie
Anybody who has money, come on up. We’ll take you. We can help you right over here. Here’s who to make the check out to, right? And we can’t be everything to everybody. And there was a moment we sat down, we were at a cafe. This cafe had this big whiteboard wall, and we started just brainstorming. Okay, if we could choose the ideal person to serve, who would that be? How old would this person be? Does this person have kids? Where does this person live? What kind of job do they have? What kind of magazines do they read? What kind of Facebook groups are they part of? And we created this fictional person, our investor avatar.
Rod
An avatar. It’s called an avatar, guys. That’s what they call that. Yeah. We do the same thing for my coaching clients. My coaching clients are typically 30 to 50 years old. Anyway, I’m not– keep talking. I’m sorry I interrupted you.
Annie
Yeah, no worries. We created Jen.
Rod
Jen. Oh, you name them too. That’s right. You got to name them guys. Good. Love it.
Annie
That’s right. Oh, yeah. We knew everything about Jen. And from that moment, then we started to look at every part of our business from the lens of Jen. We said, does this resonate with Jen? Would she want this? Does she want a podcast? Does she like videos better? What kinds of blogs does she read? What kind of terminology is she familiar with that we can put in our blog post or our newsletters. And everything, it created this brand cohesion. And all of a sudden, we weren’t attracting just the Jen’s of the world. We were attracting all kinds of people because our brand had this strong personality. And when you can communicate that personality, that passion, you can attract all sorts of different people.
Julie
Yeah, I’ll steal something from Tony, too. Tony Robbins. We went to Business Mastery once, and he had talked about falling in love with your customer, falling in love with your client or your customer. And that’s exactly what we did was we were like, who is this person? Who is she, really? What does she like to do? What does she like to drink? I mean, I could even envision in my mind what kind of a gift I would send Jen because I know her that intimately. And when we make decisions, like big decisions within our company, we always ask, is this something that Jen needs at this point in time? And that’s what guides our decisions. And so our business is built around serving her. At the end of the day.
Rod
How long ago did you do Business Mastery?
Julie
A year and a half.
Annie
Yeah.
Rod
Okay, so I wasn’t at that one. I’ve been to five of them. You know, I followed Tony for 20 years and actually was on his team for eight years.
Julie
Nice.
Rod
I was just curious if it was older than that because I actually was at one where Tony Shay, unfortunately, is no longer with us. Built Zappos around the customer experience. There’s a reason Jeff Bezos is the richest guy in the world because of his dogged focus on the customer experience. I mean, we can go and buy something. I could buy anything on my desk in 30 seconds on Amazon because of that focus. So that’s awesome insights, guys. Awesome insights. So let me ask you this. What do you think is the best advice you’ve ever gotten? And I know I didn’t prepare you for any of these, so forgive me, but what’s the best advice you think you’ve ever gotten? It doesn’t have to be real estate. It can be life. Whatever. Answer it any way you like.
Julie
I would say for me, it’s be persistent. Be persistent and go after what you want. Never give up. And when you never give up, you’ll eventually one day get what you want. But you got to be persistent, especially in this business, because Annie and I have many odds stacked against us in theory, but we’ve learned to leverage those odds and actually make them benefits for us. But if you’re not persistent in this business, you’re not going to make it.
Rod
Do you really think you had odd stack against you because you guys are a force of nature?
Julie
Totally.
Rod
I’m sorry. I’m not buying it. I’m just not. Okay. I believe a lot of women might think that. But I got to tell you. I got to tell you, women are much more powerful than men. All you have to do is be vulnerable for a moment and men crash and burn. You guys have incredible power. Anyway, I’m sorry, I couldn’t let that go by. Annie, how about you?
Annie
You know, Rod, some of the best advice has been experiential, and it’s come through Julie, actually. I’ve learned a lot through this partnership. It hasn’t always been fun, I’ll tell you that. You know, the advice sometimes comes, it slaps you in the face, but over time, you realize, oh, my gosh, that’s so right. And so one of the earliest things that Julie taught me was–you know, one of our coaches said I had a case of the yeah, buts. Julie would come up with an idea and I’d say, yeah, but here are all the things why we can’t do it or here’s why we can’t do it right now. And Julie taught me if you just reframe it and you just say, well, how can we? How can we do this? It changes the conversation, changes your entire mindset, and it’s changed our business. Who not how. I think that’s another big one that Julie has imparted on me as it’s not that I have to do everything. Not that you have to know how to do everything. I used to– she’s great at coming up with ideas, and she’d come up with an idea. I’d be like, great. Let me research how to do that. Let me take a class. Let me figure it out. I’ll take all these notes, and then two months later, she’s like, where is it? I’m like, well, I’m still learning about it. And she’s like, well, we just need to find the right person who already knows about that, who could already do that. I’m like, oh, okay. So I have definitely learned a lot through this partnership.
Rod
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. And by the way, let me ask you this. Did you guys get married right away, or did you date first? Did you say, let’s do a deal?
Julie
No, we totally did not date, Rod.
Rod
You did. You just went all in. All in. But, you know, it’s obvious you did your homework on each other. You were very careful. But, you know, I advise people, you know, do a deal together, make sure you’re okay with each other’s work ethic. And so, one or even two deals together before you get married. But that’s why I asked. So I like to ask this question of people that are super successful like you guys are, and that is, you know if you could go back and tell your 18-year-old Annie and Julie something, knowing what you know now, what might you do differently? If anything, maybe nothing, but just curious what your answers might be.
Julie
You know, I think for me, it would have been to trust my gut and to trust my intuition a little bit more. Certainly did not start leaning into that until I became a mom, really. And it’s like a weird thing when you become a mom suddenly that you have to rely on that in so many instances. But when I was 18, I was just looking so much outside of me for the answers, And I needed to look inside of myself for the answers, and trust me.
Rod
That’s a great answer.
Julie
That’s what I want to go back and tell myself.
Rod
That’s a great one. Thank you. How about you, Annie?
Annie
When I was 18, I had followed all the rules, got straight A’s, Valedictorian, headed off to an Ivy League school. I had followed all the rules, and I thought I was set for life. And I thought, okay, after College, I’m going to climb the corporate ladder and I’m going to see this milestone and this milestone. That’s what I thought at 18. And I wish somebody had told me, it’s not about working for money. It’s about how can you make your money work for you. Find your passion and figure out how to design that life that you want rather than spending your whole life working for somebody else.
Rod
You work for someone else and you’re not the leader. The view never changes, right? And I love the fact you said design your life. I love that because, you know, that’s so freaking important. You know, on my boot camps, one of the first things we do is this massive goal-setting workshop on steroids. Because how do you do anything if you don’t know what it is that you want? I mean, with some detail and why you want it. Love it. So I want to ask a question. You know, I have a lot of listeners that you’ve inspired today, guys. I already know that. And I want you to speak to the person that male or female, that knows they want to do something. They’re in the rat race. They’ve got a W2. They know they want more. They feel like they’d like to be doing what you’re doing. What advice would you have for someone that hasn’t pulled the trigger on anything yet, but they know they want more out of life? Can you speak to that person?
Julie
If you don’t get out there and make this move now and start to make the mistakes that you need to make to make the progress you need to start to change your life, you won’t be exactly where you are until the day you die. That’s the truth. And it’s through the mistakes. And I get this all the time from people is I’m afraid to make a mistake. I’m afraid to make a mistake, especially from the women. But if mistakes are only mistakes, if we don’t learn from them, right? And so you got to get out there and you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to try it. It’s like we did that first deal, and we made some mistakes, but we learned from it. And we dusted ourselves off and we got up and we did it again. And then we made more mistakes, and then we dusted ourselves off and we did it again. So the way that you get to where you want to be is by getting in there and getting your hands dirty and making those mistakes. Don’t be afraid. Get out there and make those mistakes because it’s from those mistakes where you’re going to find the progress.
Rod
We mistake our way to success. We fail our way to success. That’s the bottom line. I don’t know if you guys ever heard me say this. The two of you, my listeners have heard it, but I got blessed to meet Sara Blakely, the billionaire owner of Spanx, you know, started with five grand, just sold for a few billion, I think. And she told me that her dad, I met her at her mastermind, and she told me that her dad used to ask her and her brother weekly, what have you failed at this week or, you know, what mistakes have you made? Let me translate it that way. You know, isn’t that an awesome thing to ask your kids? Fear of failure. Annie, how about you?
Annie
The thing that comes to mind was the moment that I knew I had to quit my job. And actually, we talked about this. Rod, you were part of that process because I reached out to you way back when through Facebook. And I asked for your advice. And this is the moment that changed everything for me and for any listeners out there who are on the fence. Like, should I continue? Should I start this side gig? Should I quit my job? This is what did it for me. I heard on the podcast this brilliant exercise where you just sit down, you take a piece of paper, you divide it in half. On one side, you write down all of your fears about this decision that you’re trying to make, and on the other side, you write all of your opportunities. It sounds very simple, but it’s a powerful exercise because when you’re about to make a decision like this, you’ve got all kinds of fears going around in your head and you think those fears are bigger than the opportunities because that’s how our brains are wired to focus on the fear. But when you put it down on paper, here’s what happened to me. I sat down. I could have sworn I had all these fears and I shouldn’t do it. And I sat down, I started listing out all the fears. And then after, like four or five, six, that was it. I couldn’t think of anything else. I was like, okay, all right, let me move to the opportunity side. I started writing, and I couldn’t stop writing. I filled up that entire page. And after I was done, I looked at the paper and it was clear right there in black and white, look at this tiny list of fears and look at this huge list of opportunity. And it was at that moment I started bawling right there at my kitchen table because it’s not like the fear goes away. I was still so scared, but I knew what I had to do because it was right there on the paper.
Rod
Oh, that is brilliant. That’s a Ben Franklin closed basically. You know, the pros and the cons of the decision, but I’d never heard it described that way. I’m going to steal that one by the way. I love that. Fears and opportunities. That is brilliant because you’re right. You’re only going to have a handful of fears and, you know, there are only two big fears in life. Tony Robbins talks about this. The fear that we won’t be loved and the fear that we’re not enough and all the other little fears kind of translate into those awesome, awesome answers. Guys, what a treat this has been for me. I’m so grateful for you coming on and so freaking impressed with what you’re doing. So listen, very much enjoy seeing you again and you guys are changing the world and I’m blessed to know you. So thanks for coming on, guys.
Julie
Thanks for having us.
Annie
Right back at you, Rod. We’re blessed to be here.
Rod
Thank you. All right, guys. See you later. Thanks.
Outro
Rod, I know a lot of our listeners are wanting to take their multifamily investing business to the next level. Now I know you’ve been hard at work helping our warrior students do just that using our “ACT” methodology, which is Awareness, Close, and Transform. Can you explain to the listeners how they can get our help?
Rod
You bet. Guys, we’ve been going nonstop for three years building an amazing community of like-minded people, and our coaching students, which we call our Warriors, have had extraordinary results. They’ve purchased thousands and thousands of units and last year we did over 1000 units with our students. And we’re looking to grow this group and take it to the next level. We’re looking for people who want to follow a proven framework that’s really step by step and then leverage our systems and network to raise equity. To find and close deals and to build partnerships nationwide. Now, our warrior community is finding success in any market cycle. So if you’re interested in finding out more about how you can become more of our incredible network and take advantage of the incredible opportunities that are coming very soon, apply to work with us at “MentorWithRod.com” or text “CRUSH” to “72345” and we’ll set up a call so you’ll you can check us out and we can check you out. That’s “MentorWithRod.com” or text “CRUSH” to “72345”.
