Our guests for today the host of the Investor Mind Mindset podcast and an active investor who curates commercial real estate investments for clients at VonFinch Capital. He has raised tens of millions of dollars, which has successfully cycled through multiple assets, beginning in a single-family. As an operator, Steven flipped over 200 houses in under three years prior to expanding into commercial to focus on building a business around working with his ideal client, successful high-income earners like himself who are investing to create flexibility and independence.
Our guest is dedicated to understanding how we can think better, how we can do better, and how we can be better, better people, better business people, better operators.
Let’s dive right in and learn from Steven Pesavento about making breakthroughs in our life.
[00:01 – 8:18] Opening Segment
- We introduce our guest, Steven Pesavento
- Steven talks about his background
- Steven give a short story of what not to do
[8:19 – 18:42] Valuing Freedom Of Time Over Cars, Houses And Money
- Steven talks about getting clarity
- Money is still a top priority
- Vision for success
[18:43 – 37:30] Getting Clear On That Impact Or The Intention
- Car analogy
- Looking for your ideal client
- Borrowing beliefs from the experts
[37:31 – 43:15] Closing Segment
- Final thoughts
- Steven’s book recommendations:
Tweetable Quotes:
“I have learned is that mindset is not the answer to everything. Mindset is one component out of many, but it happens to be one that a lot of people end up screwing up” – Steven Pesavento
“getting surrounded by other people who are passionate about their work” – Steven Pesavento
“money was at the core of everything. And I kept thinking, well, if I just have more of that, everything’s going to be better. But it wasn’t it didn’t solve all the problems” – Steven Pesavento
“mindset is nothing more than the thoughts and beliefs that lead directly to the actions that you take and therefore the experiences or outcomes that you experience in your life. – Steven Pesavento
Connect with Steven Pesavento! See the links below:
Go to his LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, pages to connect with Steven Pesavento. Visit his Website, Podcast, and YouTube.
Mastering the Investor Mindset with Steven Pesavento
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:14] Hello and welcome to Multifamily Investing Made Simple, the podcast, it’s all about taking the complexity out of real estate investing so that you yes, you, dear listener, can take action. Today, I am your host, Anthony Masino of Invictus Capital, joined, as always by Dan. I have absolutely no interesting middle name for you today, Krueger. I’m sorry, Dan. I really dropped the ball on that one. A lot of material. I came unprepared. The people were expecting gold and I gave them fool’s gold.
Dan Kreuger: [00:00:42] When you don’t have any ideas, you can just default to George.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:45] That’s actually that. Is that actually your middle name? Oh, my goodness. I wish you hadn’t told me that so that I could.
Dan Kreuger: [00:00:51] One of these days you would have gone.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:52] I would have gotten there.
Dan Kreuger: [00:00:53] That was in your toolbox if you need it.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:55] So I my very first question for our guest today, who is a fantastic guest, I’m really excited to have him on because he is the host of a podcast that I listen to very frequently. I think my very first question for him is going to be what is his middle name? But before we get to that, let’s introduce Mr. Steven Pessah. Vento, who is the host of the Investor Mind Mindset podcast and an active investor who curates commercial real estate investments for clients at Vonne Finch Capital. He has raised tens of millions of dollars, which has successfully cycled through multiple assets, beginning in a single family. As an operator, Stephen flipped over 200 houses in under three years prior to expanding into commercial to focus on building a business around working with his ideal client, successful high-income earners like himself who are investing to create flexibility and independence. And we talked about it right before we went live. Listeners, this guy is super cool. He’s been living that flexible lifestyle for almost a year now, sold his house back in July and he’s just been living on the road. It’s amazing. So without further ado, Mr. Steven Pessah. Vento, how are you doing today, man?
Steven Pesavento: [00:02:00] Oh, super good to be here with you guys and with all the listeners excited to dive into some great topics. Are you guys ready?
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:07] Let’s do it. First one up. I said I was going to ask. So what’s your middle name?
Steven Pesavento: [00:02:12] Yeah, my middle name is Steven Scott Sevenzo, ASSP, baby,
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:17] Nice, nice ring to Steven. So let’s just give our listeners the 30-second elevator pitch of who you are, what you do, what you’re about.
Steven Pesavento: [00:02:27] Yeah. Yeah. So Steven Pessah, Vento, founder of Venture Capital and host of the Investor Mindset podcast. You know, what I really do is I help investors make breakthroughs to create life as they’ve always dreamed of life on their terms. And I’m living it myself. I’m constantly looking to continue to grow because since I was a little kid, I can remember back, always looking to try to understand how we can think better, how we can do better, and how we can be better, better people, better business people, better operators. And it really a lot of it comes down to mindset, which I know we’re going to talk about today, and we get into some of that in the Investor Mindset podcast as well. But, you know, it’s been a wild ride. I flipped over two hundred houses. I’ve raised tens of millions of dollars. But if I actually thinking back to when I was a kid, I wanted to be one of two things. I wanted to be a chef like Emeril Lagasse or I wanted to renovate property like Bob Vila. And so I’ll tell you, like all of that, HDTV paid off. Finally, as I broke out of the management consulting game and out of the corporate world and started down that real estate path, flipping houses.
Steven Pesavento: [00:03:36] But, you know, I started out probably in the same place a lot of listeners started out at some point in the past. Right. It’s like you get hooked on this idea that real estate can create the freedom and flexibility that you want, but maybe you don’t believe you can do it or you don’t have any good examples or you don’t have the money or maybe your family doesn’t have the money. Well, all those things were true for me. And finally, one day I just decided I decided I was at a point of true clarity. And at that moment I made the decision, I’m going all in. I’m going to find a way, I’m going to find a path, and I’m going to get into this real estate game. And fast forward, I flipped over seventy-five houses, our businesses in that first year and then over two hundred or in two and a half years. And our business today is focused specifically on going out and buying, finding, and then funding large multifamily properties. And it’s been a great journey. I’m excited to dive into some of the details.
Anthony Vicino: [00:04:33] Samaan, like when you decided to go when you finally decided to pull that ripcord and go all in, you, like really went all in. Was there a bottom-of-the-barrel moment rock bottom situation, or was it just you were tired of living inside the comfort zone, which is anything but comfortable. It’s just, you know, it’s really just a zone of complacency and familiarity.
Steven Pesavento: [00:04:55] Yeah, well, I can remember back I was working as a managing consultant. I was making more money than my parents had ever made and I had really reached it. I had reached all levels of success that I could have dreamed of coming out of university. I went the traditional path, but I always knew entrepreneurship was in that back pocket was something that I wanted to do. But I really didn’t believe I didn’t I wasn’t sure. And I really wanted to follow that certainty and security path of going to university and graduating and going that route. I was a managing consultant. I mean, when you’re in the business world, it’s that title that means so much. But I looked around and I recognized that a lot of the people that I’m surrounded with are not living a life that’s in alignment with who they are, what they want to do. They’re just waiting for five o’clock on Friday to finally spend some time with their family. And I got that lesson pretty early on, a couple of years into the business. And I made a hard decision. I made a decision to go to one of my mentors, somebody I respected dearly, and to let her know, hey, I’m going to be leaving in the next six months. I’m going to be finding a new position. I I’m committed to getting into something close to entrepreneurship.
Steven Pesavento: [00:06:05] And so that first step for me was actually moving into the tech space and getting surrounded by other people who are passionate about their work. But it’s been a constant iterative process of moving from position to position or opportunity, an opportunity to try and get that flavor and see, hey, what do I like about this and what do I not so that I could really understand early on in my career what was a fit. And when I finally got to that place, you know, a number of years back where I had this massive amount of clarity, I had kind of hit threshold. I had gone down the path. I had, you know, had experience starting companies and failing. Right. Spending a year on a startup and on-demand storage company that had an Amazon-like interface. We’d go and pick up your items from your house and put them in storage. And that idea, Quick Box was the name of it at the time. Phenomenal idea. There are multiple companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We could have raised money. We were very close to that point. But I realized just then the same way I had as a management consultant, that I was going about this for the wrong reasons. I was just going after it purely for. And all that really started way back when I was a kid, I mean, a lot of people probably grew up the way I did and, you know, pretty rough, rough upbringing to loving amazing parents that didn’t love each other, no divorce and all the things that go along with that.
Steven Pesavento: [00:07:25] But money was at the core of everything. And I kept thinking, well, if I just have more of that, everything’s going to be better. But it wasn’t it didn’t solve all the problems. And that’s what really set me down, this personal growth mindset, discovery into who I was. And, you know, how do you become a great person, a great business person? And that’s what’s really been amazing about real estate, is it’s full of people who believe that there is another way that it’s possible to live a life that’s full of freedom and flexibility. And when I finally got to that point, I made that decision because I hit this point of just really understanding who I was and where I was at. And I was ready to move forward and thank God I did. And I’m a person who is a burn the boats. I fired all my clients. I transitioned them within that day to somebody else and set out to go find a community, find a mentor or find somebody who I could learn from. And and I guess the rest is history.
Dan Kreuger: [00:08:19] That’s super interesting. I think you hit on a lot of stuff that probably could resonate with a lot of people. That’s really you know, you talked a lot about finding out what your personal values are, what’s really going to make you happy because I think a lot of people are stuck chasing what they think they want to be based on what society shows them, which is usually money, cars, houses, that kind of wealth. But it sounds like you, after a few iterations in various industries, figured out that it wasn’t necessarily the big-ass bank account that you were after. It was more so. My guess is time freedom from the sounds that we just chatted about before we hopped on the air here that you’ve been spending the past year traveling. And it’s I’m guessing you probably value that more than a ginormous bank account. Is that accurate?
Steven Pesavento: [00:09:02] Yeah. I mean, from the beginning, I remember I have gifted the book when I entered college my freshman year, the four-hour workweek from Tim Ferriss. And it’s a book not about working for hours. It’s a book about working more effectively. So you could if you wanted to, or you could work 40, 50 hours a week, the most effective as you possibly could. And I’ve lived my life by some of those strategies and some of that vision. And I’ve made decisions that go along that path. You know, I read Rich Dad, Poor at seventeen, but it took me ten years before I could take action on that vision. But that that idea, that belief, those thoughts, they had been imprinted in me after reading that I could get rid of it and it kept building and growing. And the thing is, mindset is nothing more than the thoughts and beliefs that lead directly to the actions that you take and therefore the experiences or outcomes that you experience in your life. And for me, it was realizing that, oh, I can have an impact on those thoughts and beliefs, that if I go and study some of the most successful people, which we do on the investor mindset podcasts, and I’ve really dedicated my life to understanding how to be successful, how to think like a champion. And if you apply those same strategies the way those people think, and then you actually learn the tactics that they’re executing because you have that right foundation, you’ll start experiencing the same kind of outcomes. And so for me, time freedom has been a huge piece of it for sure.
Steven Pesavento: [00:10:27] But let me be clear, money is still a top priority. I’ve just realized that before money, my driver was out of fear. My driver was out and not wanting to deal with that same experience that I did as a little boy. A lot of people will be driven back to that feeling. And even today, even now, after learning all these things and talking about and teaching and helping other people realize some of these same things, I still deal with this stuff just even moments ago. I have to redirect my mind and bring myself back and being conscious enough about some of those subconscious thoughts to recognize and push myself in a direction that’s helpful. Because the truth is, money is a tool. It’s a tool just like anything else. It’s an exchange of value. If I’ve got a great set of services where I can make some kind of huge impact in the world, that impact is going to most likely result in money and that money. I can then turn right back around and make an even bigger impact. And so some people end up getting caught up in this trap and it’s a terrible one, that money is bad or money is evil or rich people are bad or rich people are evil. No, they’re just people and they are just things. There’s doesn’t need to be any judgment on who they are, what that does. It’s really all about how you use it. And with a lot of money, you can make a heck of a lot more impact.
Dan Kreuger: [00:11:44] Yeah, that’s huge. I’m curious whether to say something there because I was going to
Anthony Vicino: [00:11:50] I am curious because this is your podcast is ostensibly about talking with high achievers, people who have achieved success in life and trying to break down, understand what are the common threads, what are the through-lines here for you now? What is the measure of success that you judge your life by now? Like what are you shooting for in money can be part of that? Like what’s your vision for success and what’s that mean to you?
Steven Pesavento: [00:12:15] Yeah, absolutely. Well, to me, success comes down to impact. How many people can you make an impact on? How many people can I inspire every day with the work that I do? How can I live my life in a way that not only inspires other people but continues to inspire me? Right. Because what I have learned is that mindset is not the answer to everything. Mindset is one component out of many, but it happens to be one that a lot of people end up screwing up, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. It’s a common misconception and it’s a common misconception that I believe mindset is the one stop shop for fixing all of your problems. It’s just one part of it. But when you get your psychology in the right place, you can start to show up more effectively to actually do the things that you know you need to do. And I work with a lot of high achievers, a lot of people through a program called the Multifamily MBA, where we help up and coming, emerging operators really be able to scale in this business and create the right kind of partnerships with experienced experts to be able to do the business that we all know, like and have grown to build our life around. But one of the biggest things that those people end up dealing with as they come in and we’ve got the strategies and we’ve got the tactics. And one of my great partners read Goossens is a phenomenal multifamily operator. You guys know him over three hundred million dollars of assets under management, I think probably closer to four at this point.
Steven Pesavento: [00:13:37] He knows exactly what to do. Step by step. We can show people exactly what to do. But one of the big things people end up getting in their way is it it’s worth believing they can and continuously. And so, I mean, every single day myself internally, I’ve got to listen to something that’s going to put me in the right state. I’ve got to go out and do some of those habits, those activities that make my body ready to tackle the day. And so success to me comes back to that. It comes back to be able to show up as the person that I know, that I’m capable of doing my best every day and hoping to be able to make an impact through the work, you know, and that work comes through, you know, through the investments that we do, through our passive investors who are making that kind of freedom and flexibility that they’re really after, but also for those clients that are entrepreneurs who want to go and create a better life. And it’s kind of like once you get this set of this clarity and it’s almost like it was like granted to me from the universe, from somewhere higher maybe I just found it within myself. But it’s once I got clear on that, everything became easier. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy. That doesn’t mean that it’s not still difficult at times, but it’s much simpler.
Anthony Vicino: [00:14:43] It reminds me a lot when you’re talking about the tactics and strategies that can get you like with the multifamily MBA course that you guys are putting on. And it’s absolutely the case that you could think of the strategy and the tactics like a car and the road map, the car, if you get into it, you drive it and you have the road map, you can get to your destination. But if you can’t even bring yourself to get into the car because you don’t believe that you can drive the car, then you’re never going to get to that destination. And that might seem really silly. Like, why would you be afraid of getting into a car? But let’s turn that on its head and say, OK, the vehicle is actually a horse den. Are you do you believe that you can get on that horse and ride that horse through the mountains to the destination? Stephen has the road map. He has the vehicle. Do you believe you could do it? And that’s, I think, what a lot of people in entrepreneurship feel like, is that they’re looking at a horse and they’re like, I can’t ride a horse.
Steven Pesavento: [00:15:35] Yeah, it’s such a huge thing to underline there, because it’s like if you’re looking at a car, you’ve never been in one before, but maybe you’ve heard about them, you’ve seen them drive around, but you’ve never been inside one and you don’t really know that many people who’ve done it very well. Maybe yet another example is like a spaceship. People are talking about flying to space and having that first experience. Well, it’s scary to me to think about doing that. I don’t know that many people have done it successfully. And I know there’s a lot of risks involved. But if you can actually go in, you start learning about it, you start understanding how it works. You start seeing some other people who’ve done it successfully. And all of a sudden you can do what I always call borrowing someone’s belief. You’re going to go and meet a mentor, a coach, someone who is just an incredible person doing what you want to do in life. You can borrow their belief, right? They believe it’s possible and you can borrow their beliefs so that you can start to believe it’s possible as well. And through that process, it becomes your belief. Once you actually do it, once you get in there and you start seeing that experience turn into your reality and you do it over and over.
Steven Pesavento: [00:16:38] And that’s a big, big reason why I’ve been such a huge proponent of the idea of partnering with experts. I’ve been doing it since I first got started in real estate and well before. But it’s such a core component of our business today. Know when I started flipping houses, for example, I you know, I, I had never flipped a house in my life and I had no idea how to do it. But I went and found a mentor and that mentor ended up teaching me a bunch of set of skills. And the first mentor, I traded time for that experience. And then once I had more money or I was willing to believe that it was possible to invest in mentorship and see a result from that, I realized that I had totally screwed it up and I should have definitely made that investment earlier on because my business scaled from zero to seventy-five once I made that first investment and mentorship. But once you do that, then everything becomes simpler because you’re able to go in, essentially borrow that person’s belief and really model their business, your business off of what’s worked for them.
Dan Kreuger: [00:17:38] And I think that’s a huge way to get ahead in this business, if you’re unsure about doing something for the first time, finding a good partner to fill the gaps in your experiences is huge. I think you’re kind of talking about a concept that’s really interesting. I can’t remember where I read about this example might have been in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. But there’s this example I’ve heard used when people are talking about minds and things like that, where it’s about the the the the the the quickest mile time for a long time, I think it was either a four-minute mile or five-minute mile was perceived to be a Tocumwal.
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:14] Yeah. You’re talking about the four-minute. Four-minute mile.
Dan Kreuger: [00:18:17] Yeah. Yeah. And people thought that once you get going that fast, once you started an approach that you just die and that as soon as someone actually broke that record, all of a sudden like four or five other people just did it really quickly, as soon as they realized that it wasn’t impossible that they were going to die. It also became doable. And I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about there, Stephen. Like, once you realize something is in fact possible, it becomes much more doable than if you were sitting there thinking that they can’t do that.
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:43] It’s really interesting. It’s really fascinating, too, because with that example, Roger Bannister, he’s the guy that broke the four-minute barrier when he first did it, he crosses the line. The first thing that he says is in French. He says now the floodgates are open. Mm-hmm. And it’s incredible when you surround yourself with mentors or people who are doing the thing that you aspire to do and you see that example modeled for you and to Stephen’s point of like borrowing somebody else’s belief in yourself, that can be incredibly powerful. So, Stephen, I’m curious, what would you say is the number one or one of the big things that are holding entrepreneurs back from making that jump, not just from like from square one, like working at two, but maybe they’re in the entrepreneurial land right now. They’re doing it. They’re not they’re not quite where they want to be. They want to make that next jump. They can see it, but they’re not there. That’s what’s holding them back from that?
Steven Pesavento: [00:19:35] Yeah, it’s so simple, but it’s so hard to do on your own. And it’s getting leverage getting somebody from the outside who you can really get leverage on the problem, on the situation that you’re dealing with, a coach or mentor, somebody who can come into your world and really be able to point out exactly what’s working or what’s not working for you. That might be a business partner. Maybe you’re deciding to give up 50 percent of whatever you guys do together. And it’s not really giving up. It’s it’s making that investment in yourself to have that true alignment. But it might be a friend. It might be a spouse. It might be some other person that you met within the community. But at the end of the day, when you actually pay for it, when you have aligned incentives, paying or partnering with somebody ends up leading to the best way to be able to overcome most of the obstacles that you’re going to deal with. That doesn’t mean that as soon as you do that, that there’s not going to be another obstacle around the way you might end up spending 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, one hundred grand on mentorship, on training, on coaching in order to get to that next level. And you might end up then realizing when you get to that next plateau, oh, my gosh, I didn’t know that I needed this or I didn’t know that I needed this skill or I have to hire this consultant or I have to hire this person now to learn this strategy.
Steven Pesavento: [00:20:49] But you would have never known that or would have taken you a lot longer to know it without actually having somebody there to be able to point in the right direction. And so it’s so key. No matter who you are or what level you’re working at, it all comes down to, you know, finding great experts and partnering with them in a partnership doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re giving up a portion of whatever money you make or doesn’t mean that they’re, you know, locked into working with your company forever. But what it does mean is that there’s an alignment of interests. Right? That mentor, that coach has to be aligned with you on interest, whether that’s an upfront payment, whether that is an investment in your company, where now they want you to succeed because guess what? They’re in it. Their money’s working with you. Maybe they’re a partner on the deal. You know, I mean, in the multifamily NBA, one of the core benefits of working with Reed and this program has been the fact that people get to join this deal team. Right. And they get to partner with somebody who’s got hundreds of millions of dollars of assets under management.
Steven Pesavento: [00:21:55] And that helps give them the confidence and the certainty that that deal is going to go well. But what it also does is it gives them the opportunity to have almost like training wheels on or bumpers when you’re bowling to know that you can go out and do the one thing that you’re really good at. Maybe that’s going out and finding a deal, or maybe it’s due diligence or maybe it’s underwriting. Maybe it’s some other piece of the process that ends up being really important. But when you can come together with a great team and you’ve got somebody who’s a leader, who’s being able to direct you in the right direction, you’ll be able to succeed much more quickly than if you’re doing it on your own. And the same example holds true for those who are looking to invest passively. This idea of partnering with experts is core to the whole syndication model. It’s the idea that you don’t have the time expert. Years or connections to be able to do this on your own, and even if you do, by leveraging somebody else, you can end up doing so much more and really scaling in such a more effective way. And that’s the reason why it’s great to go find a great operator to partner with and to start doing deals.
Dan Kreuger: [00:22:54] Have you read the book? Not how,
Steven Pesavento: [00:22:57] Stephen, that that is one of my favorite books. It’s something that has been a core philosophy of mind for a long time. But I think Dan Sullivan and is his phenomenal writer, I believe it’s Ben Hardy has done an incredible job of taking this concept, of realizing that all you need to know is what do you want and who can help get you there instead of getting stuck in the trap that ends up holding so many of us back.
Dan Kreuger: [00:23:23] For listeners who are really kind of getting excited here, everything that Stephen just said, if that if pulling on that string is attractive to you, that book who not Howse is excellent because it’s all about asking essentially, you know, instead of saying, like, how can I do this thing? It’s about asking yourself who can help me do this thing? And to your point, Steve, and finding a partner, whether it be a mentor or a coach, an employee, a consultant, somebody to do the things so you can do your thing that you really enjoy, that you’re really good at. So that’s huge. Anthony recommended that a couple of weeks ago. And it’s just been a game-changer just because where we’re at with our business and growing and everything you just said, it’s just so valuable.
Steven Pesavento: [00:24:02] So my recommendation is to listen to it once or read it once and then immediately start again. In my experience, it’s like these lessons that you need to be reminded of them. And if anything that we’ve talked about here today has been valuable to you, I highly encourage you to head over to the investor mindset, dotcom principles and download this resource we put together after interviewing hundreds of successful investors and entrepreneurs and thought leaders from Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference, to Mark Madsen, author of The Subtle Art to Joe Fairless, to tons of other great investors and entrepreneurs. We’ve taken all those lessons and put them together into these five principles of success. And we’ve talked about some of them today. You guys can grab a copy of that’s totally there’s no cost associated with it, but it just kind of summarizes a lot of these ideas that we’ve been talking about and gives them to you in a way that you can just implement them totally. No cost on your own.
Dan Kreuger: [00:24:57] And it’s huge. Use your point, Stephen, with who? Not how the resource you just mentioned that stuff is. It’s great to consume at once, but it’s even more powerful when you consume it on a regular basis or maybe quarterly, maybe once a year, most of that book or that resource and refresh it, because it’s great to put it in your brain, but it always ends up in the back somewhere and you start to forget it. And some of these core philosophies that have been so important to you and your successes are things that I think people just need to remind themselves of after they consume that content, read the book, read the resource, just busted out every quarter, and make sure that it’s still fresh and top of mind so that it’s still impacting how you behave.
Anthony Vicino: [00:25:34] Yeah. And make sure that you’re actually taking meaningful action towards implementing the lessons that you’re learning. It’s not enough just to consume and educate yourself and gather more and more knowledge. If you never implement it, then it’s all it’s it’s a false sense of forwarding progress. You’re not actually moving anywhere until you start applying it. And one of the things I’m guilty of this, I read a lot of books. I get done with them like, yep, we’re going to implement all that. And then I move on to the next book. I’m like, this is great. And then I completely forgot about the previous book that I was reading. And so it’s better to go deep with books than it is to go wide. And a lot of cases, especially when you’re trying to find practical things to apply to your life in your business, find some concepts, let them change your life, and really go deep and implement them. And to Dan’s point, then keep cycling back to that every year, every quarter, however long it takes to keep it top of mind. Because we all know your ability to go far in business and life is how effectively you can work with and through other people. That’s it’s a really obvious message. But what are you doing to actually live that out on a day-to-day basis in a book like who? Not how or like what. Stephen’s talking about having a coach or a mentor, an accountability group that is actually pushing you towards that goal is invaluable. And so I think that’s a really powerful answer to leverage. I wouldn’t have expected that.
Dan Kreuger: [00:26:52] So, Stephen, I have a question, you mentioned the storage on-demand business that you were in, and that was I think that was the last venture before the whole real estate thing started. I’m curious how you transitioned from that into real estate flipping single-family homes and how you transition from that into what you’re doing now. What does that what does that journey kind of look like for you?
Steven Pesavento: [00:27:15] Yeah. Yeah, well, it’s an interesting path and it’s a good reminder. And I think it like really starts early on in life is how do you deal with change and changes happening all the time, whether you want it to or not. You can’t change the fact that change is happening. Right. You can either fight it or you can accept it. And when you accept that change is happening, that gives you the opportunity to flow through it instead of fight it. And so for me, what ended up happening was, you know, I transitioned out of every time I took a new position, I doubled my salary. And so but I knew that entrepreneurship was at the core of what I really wanted to be. So I was looking for opportunities because I knew that that’s what I was looking for. I started to see opportunities around me and I had this great opportunity with a phenomenal set of founders, a couple of guys who just graduated from Stanford. They’re well-connected. Opportunity to get funding was not a question for us and really join that team to be able to help bring some of the same strategies that I bring to all of the real estate deals, you know, the ability to speak well, the ability to pull people together, ability to market and to really be able to simplify a set of ideas and be able to put that out in the marketplace. And so we went through this process of building a company from scratch.
Steven Pesavento: [00:28:34] And it’s a startup like a true startup when people say I got a startup. Most startups don’t fall under the traditional tech definition, which is a company that’s designed to scale as quickly as physically possible in order to get to a point of some kind of exit or monetization. And so in the startup world, it’s not about making money upfront. It’s about proving that you have good proof of concept and be able to go and find customers and prove that that’s possible. And then you get funded by VCs or angels or people of the like, and then you end up putting in 50 hundred million dollars and you try to scale up to take market share as quickly as possible. And so we were in that early stage development phase. We are bootstrapping it because we believed in the idea so much and we wanted to be able to retain as much equity and go to investors from a position of strength and to be able to show, hey, this is exactly what we’ve been able to do. So we worked hard, diligently every single day, all day, all night type of thing. And after months of doing this, I went through a process, a process I encourage a lot of people to do. And it’s made a huge impact on my life. But I was introduced to Tony Robbins. I was introduced to a program called Personal Power Two.
Steven Pesavento: [00:29:47] And it’s a program that came out back in the 80s or early 90s. Old old school tapes is what they referred to, what talking about them. But in this process, I got clear and that clarity ended up making it almost had no choice but to part ways with the company that we’re building now. We had some challenges, some things that were going on, someone of our founders had gone kind of a wall, actually, to fly out to San Francisco to go track them down because he wasn’t responding. And our whole system was built on code he had written and another partner had some challenges going on. But at the core, I knew, like, we have a great idea and it can go really far. But I had to ask myself, is this the business that I want to be building? And I’ve had the same experience. It’s funny you think you’ve learned the lesson, but sometimes it takes a time or two to do it. But what ended up happening was I recognized that this was not in alignment with my values. It was not in alignment with the business that I want to be building or why I was building a business in the first place. And I looked around and I happened to be renting property on Airbnb. I had three projects going. I never had owned a single property up until I started flipping houses and but I was renting.
Steven Pesavento: [00:30:58] And I don’t talk a lot about the Airbnb story, but I was making more money than I had ever made before. And remember, I doubled my salary every time I took a new position. So I was making a lot of money. And the crazy thing was that business, the Airbnb business, was funding this startup. And so I looked around and I thought to myself, well, it’s time to make a shift. It’s time to make a shift out of this. I’m going to had I actually went to Columbia for a few months to go learn Spanish and to take advantage of the exchange rates and leave my place, which in the summertime in Boulder would rent for very, very high numbers. And I thought to myself, this is a time to get clear, to understand what’s next. And that’s really what led to know getting me out of that first business. And there’s a lot of lessons that were learned in there. But one of the biggest ones is, you know, if you start with the right intention in mind and you build a business around that, you’re going to be in a much better place than if you go chasing the money or chasing some. Else, unless that something else is truly what it is that you want, that’s below the surface, and so there’s a lot of things that happen in between. But eventually, eventually I went into flipping full time and I haven’t looked back.
Anthony Vicino: [00:32:06] So I want to take this into where we are now. Is this idea you just mentioned of? Is this the business I want to be building? So what is the business that you’re building right now at Finch? Why is this the business that you want to be building? What’s that intention that you started from?
Steven Pesavento: [00:32:22] Yeah. So I can remember back a few years back, I was you know, we had flipped over two hundred houses. We were having a lot of success. We were, you know, from all accounts within our community, we were the top dogs. We were succeeding. We were making pretty good money. We had a high volume, low margin business. So it’s not like we were getting filthy rich, but we were running a great business and there were a lot of things that we liked about it, but a lot of things that I didn’t like. And one of them I remember I was sitting at this conference and I was getting really clear on this idea of what is the business that you want to build and run for the next 20 years. And I looked at my business, I thought, well, there’s a few things that aren’t in alignment here. And one of them was that I was spending so much money acquiring a customer and it was a one-time sale because, you know, in the house flipping game and the single-family game, somebody only sells their house for 70 cents on the dollar once. That’s usually not a two time sale. So I’m not getting to build a long term relationship and serve someone over the long term. But the biggest thing for me was the fact that they didn’t have my client’s current clients didn’t have the aligned values. They didn’t believe that they could create a better life. And if anything, they were in survival mode and no shame on them for that at all.
Steven Pesavento: [00:33:34] We were happy to serve them and we made their lives much better through the work we did. But they didn’t have that growth mindset and they weren’t set on how they could create more freedom and flexibility. And so when it really came down to and we went through many processes with that clarity and mind looking to change and adapt the current business. But at the end of the day, I realized I need to disassemble this successful business we built to really build the machine, to be able to serve people on a much higher level, to really be able to serve that ideal client. And when I talk about ideal clients, pretty simple. I’m looking for other people who are successful like me or determined to be successful and who want to create more freedom and flexibility, who have the idea in their mind that it’s possible to build the life that they dream of. And they’re looking to find another way to do that. Now, some of those people are going to go the entrepreneurship route. They’re going to end up creating that freedom and flexibility through their own effort. And other people are going to be in positions where they already are passionate about and they’re making great money and they want to start investing that money so they can start seeing the benefits of real estate without necessarily having to get dirty and get down in in on the projects to actually manage it themselves. And so what that’s done for me and my business is this allowed me to very narrowly focus on serving one set, one criterion of the ideal client.
Steven Pesavento: [00:34:53] And I get to serve them in both ways. And that means through every single time that I get to have interaction online over the phone, through a podcast, social media, all these different ways. I’m really looking to attract people who fit that, you know, that set of ideas and values. And what that does for us it allows us to really have that leverage that I was talking about. I learned this from a mentor, somebody that I invested a lot of money with. And as a result, I ended up receiving huge returns on that on that educational investment. But with that idea in mind now, every time we do something, we’re able to drive people back to one of the ways that we can help them. And it ends up being with those aligned interests that I was talking about from the very beginning. So it’s a much, much better business personally. And that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been incredibly hard going from the top down through the reg up to them to start something that next mountain. But when you’re looking from one side to the other and you realize I’ve got to the top of this mountain, but that’s actually where I want to be. It’s just another journey. And it all goes back to mindset to make sure that you can get in the right place to be able to go and do that.
Dan Kreuger: [00:36:00] Such a great story. It sounds like at the end of the day that the house flipping business just wasn’t really in alignment with that impact component that you needed to have in your business. You were doing a thing. It was a successful buy. You know, pretty much anyone’s standards are making money, but you weren’t having the impact on the people that you wanted to be having. That’s really what seems like gets you out of bed in the morning.
Steven Pesavento: [00:36:22] I wasn’t having that impact and I wasn’t surrounded by people who had the same ideals and values. I started changing my business just to give you some transparency or to change my business, to start serving buyers within our business. People that are going to end up being that first-time home buyer have that first experience. I started thinking, well, how can we serve them right there? The person I started thinking, hey, well, how could we wholesale some of our properties off and start serving those investors? And I realized some conflicts there. And then I started looking at, well, where does all the money and capital come from that we run our entire business and what are they really looking for? And a lot of them were looking for longer-term investments that have less variability. Right. And it started ended up dawning on me that I saw that multifamily and commercial real estate, in general, has the ability to scale in the way that I’m built for the type of scale that I think is important to be able to really fund the business, which means you’re not the only person in it. I going to have an impact on all the people I work with, all the partners, all those things. But it ends up really kind of building towards all of those things that I talked about earlier, which is one of the things that’s really important.
Anthony Vicino: [00:37:31] That’s there’s just so much to unpack here. I feel like we’re getting to the top of the hour already like this conversation has flown by, I feel like we need to have you back already for part two of this episode, because I feel like we haven’t really started even getting into the really deep stuff. But what we have touched on so far is so incredibly powerful. And it’s the starting point for everything that follows is getting clear on that impact or the intention, what it is that you want to build and why do you want to build it like we always here start with why. But it is the starting point. And so I want to be respectful of your time. I don’t want to let this run too long. But I do want to ask you before we let you get out of here for some book recommendation because it sounds like I’m guessing you’re a pretty voracious reader or at least you’re consuming some things that Dan and I would at minimum find very, very interesting. So what’s something that you’re reading right now that’s really that’s really moved you?
Steven Pesavento: [00:38:22] Yeah. So I can’t I can’t recommend who not how enough. I’ve got a couple of books that are on my top recommendation list that is now one of them because it’s just got that concept that we talked about earlier that I know will make the biggest difference in people’s life. But another book that is at the top of my list, I read it a few times per year and I physically read it. And most books I listen to and I definitely listen to this book as well, but it’s called The Go-Giver. And it’s a book that’s really about this concept of giving without the expectation of receiving in return. Now it’s a little bit of a hack because it’s something that’s so different than what you might think. But what’s interesting about it is that when you give without expecting to receive in return, where you end up actually receiving back is so much more than you ever could imagine. But it has to come from that place of true, authentic giving. And then that’s when really great things start happening. And when one of the lessons and if anyone’s had one of those ten-minute or five-minute phone calls that I do because I, I like to make myself accessible, even though I’ve my time is not is very sparse, if you will.
Steven Pesavento: [00:39:28] I always jump on the phone and what people will notice is even if it’s just a five minute phone call, the intent is, hey, how can we be of value to one another? How can I support you? That’s a question I always ask. And I mean it truly because what ends up coming out of that is that you end up really understanding how you can make an impact in other people’s lives. And you don’t have to be a podcast host. You don’t have to have a media channel. You don’t have to be, you know, some top investor. You don’t have to do any of the stuff that I’ve been talking about here. But if you’re anybody, you can literally turn to people around you any day and say, hey, you know what’s really important to you? How can I help you with that? How can I make an impact there? And you could do with your spouse, your friends, like all day, any day. You have the opportunity to do that. When you start showing up as that person, it’s amazing how you’ll start to feel and really what will end up coming back as a result.
Dan Kreuger: [00:40:18] It’s huge. I think that I’m just going to reiterate what you just said. You don’t need to have this. You don’t need to read that kind of book from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a business owner. If you just create if you just go through life with the intention of trying to help other people around you, the rest is going to make yours is going to work itself out. We say it all the time when we’re talking about new people getting into this business, like how do you do it? Instead of going around trying to figure out how can I get something from these other people? If you go around just trying to help everybody around you, the rest is just going to work itself out. One hundred percent. So another good book, Rayco. I’m going to add that one back to my list because I have read it, but it’s been many years.
Anthony Vicino: [00:40:59] It’s a reread book. It’s one of those books that needs to be read. The message is so important just to keep getting back into the brain. But Steven Scott Specify, until I really appreciate having you taking the time to join us here today, where can people get a hold? We mentioned a couple of times Investor Mindset podcast. That’s a give and definitely go. Put that on the subscribe list right now. Stop what you’re doing. If you’re on the treadmill, just get off that and go find Stephen’s podcast. It’s fantastic. Where else can people find you?
Steven Pesavento: [00:41:26] Yeah, so you guys can find out more about everything that we do at investor mindset, dotcom. And that’s from you know, you can get that great free resource. The five principles of success. If you’re a passive investor and you’re looking to understand how do you do due diligence more effectively, how do you choose operators? And most importantly, how do you get super clear on what you’re investing for and why that’s important to you? You can grab a copy of of the passive investor playbook. It’s a fifty-two-page guide, but there’s a great summary at the beginning that’ll really set you up for success. You can grab a copy of that at investor mindset, dotcom passive and you can dive right into that to learn a lot of the lessons. And if you liked what we’ve talked about today, I encourage you to reach out. The best place to do is in the DMS on social media. You’ve got a favorite channel. I guarantee you I’m there. Shoot me a D.M. Let me know that you came from this podcast and either me personally or someone from my team will put you in touch and we’ll be able to serve you however we can and point you in the right direction. So super appreciate being here. It’s been. Great diving in with you guys, and of course, I look forward to seeing you over in the Investor Mindset podcast for the next episode.
Anthony Vicino: [00:42:37] Absolutely. So that’s going to do it for us guys and gals listening at home. We appreciate you as always. Be well and we’ll catch you next week.
