We have Joe DeSanto with me here today. And if you wanna follow along and Joe has a great blog with a lot of content. play louder.com for those information for that training material. But, Joe, I really appreciate your time. We're going to go down the rabbit hole of business and fractional CFO today, which that's what Joe specializes in. But I really appreciate your time here today. Thanks, Jack. Thanks for
having me on. I appreciate it. So I'm always curious, fractional CFOs run into I even have a couple fellas locally that do this type of work. It's always interesting to find out how you accidentally fell into this. Yeah. Fractional CFO, really, I guess, another way to say part time CFO. And I came to an I guess you could say organically, really, I used to own larger businesses in Los Angeles in the production and post production
space. We basically on the commercial side, we make commercials largely for, like, large multinational ad agencies. And then on the production side, we also produce some of our own content And we in my bio, my mentioned, I want a cup we want a couple me's at one point for a show we did for HBO. Very proud of that. But it was a -- larger business. We had about 30 or so employees, and it was very time consuming. And then long story short, we had a kid, my wife and I, and
then we actually went to spend some time with it. But we came up with cock made me idea to, like, reinvent our whole life. We I my partners cashed me out of the business, and then my wife and I it will, I call retreated to cheaper ground. We moved to Florida. And at that point, my real estate investing had definitely pumped
up our savings quite a bit. We had some cash flow from that. We had some cash flow from other just market investments, and we figured I could probably work part time and supplement our passive income with part time work, and we could make it all work and then inevitably have more time for the family. So that's what we endeavor to do. And in with that whole idea, I guess I consider myself a little bit of the fire ill the
financial independence retire early. I don't know if you're familiar with that term or those folks, because I consider myself semi retired, and then I don't work full time. And also part of what I put in that classification is that I'm not completely concerned with saving more. mean, your full time work,
obviously, saving for retirement's a thing. I think with what we have, if that just continues to grow through its through the investments, then I'm comfortable with that, so that's what I mean by semi retired or whoever wants to know. But what ended up happening was is for my businesses, I was the CEO and the CFO. I did all the I did all the finances all the time from the very beginning. And my partners, when I left, they were supportive, but they Hard to lose me. I
like to think. I did a lot of I did a lot of stuff, but they asked me if I wanted to maybe just stay on, like, doing the finances they would just pay me, like, a retainer or something. And I was like, yeah. That's great. And once I put the word out to friends, it just casually that I was doing that. I happen to have a lot of friends and own businesses, they were like, oh, wow. Are you doing that? Would you do that for
us? Because we really need that. And it turns out that for businesses of a certain size and, like, clients range anywhere from on a a couple to, like, 30 employees being my company. They don't know if there isn't a business person that one of the partners of the company and that is, like, tasked with managing the business of the business. It's hard to have a full time really qualified person in that role. because it's expensive.
So there's, like, a niche there turns out to do this part time CFOing, essentially, My clients get access to all my knowledge and everything. They don't have to pay me a full time salary. And, of course, I can do it for multiple clients I like and do it as a consultant to remain in control of my time and all that sort
of stuff. And so I started saying, yeah, I'll do more of it because I did need to fill in that part time income that I that I had mentioned earlier, and it just became the natural progression of what was the next the next step for me. So I really love finance. I love doing the numbers. And I also like always I always had an interest in doing it for myself too. I genuinely
considered my personal life. I ran it like a business because I was running my business, and I that you do what you need to do for that. And, of course, I would just apply those same principles to my own income and Benson P and L and balance sheet and all that goals and so on. And I really started to as I started the blog and tried to communicate my knowledge people, whoever is interested in it, that's become sort of one of my fundamental concepts is that people really need to
run their personal lives, like business as well. And for my clients who are business owners, I stated them, hey. I'm working on your business with you, but, ultimately, You're in business to make money. I know you're also realizing your dreams and all that sort of stuff, but at the end of the day, you are headed somewhere called entirement. And if you are not taking that seriously as well and making sure that your business is gonna pay off for you in that sense, you're making
a mistake. So I indoctrinate them into this idea that that you really do have to take your personal finances as seriously and realize that it is one big system. The money comes into your life at the at your business, but it really is not all that meaningful until it's after tax and in your savings account. And that's when you know, like, financially, speaking what the net result
really is. And there's also tax concerns and tax efficiency in that system that you need to be concerned with and not just be concerned with, but you want to be concerned with because it can obviously help your net result as well. So I come at it from that perspective. It's more like I do for people what I did for myself as a business owner and entrepreneur as opposed to just, like, being, like, their bookkeepers. know what I mean? Yeah. So that's what
my business is about. And I started the blog to basically be able to communicate this to individuals more on a coaching basis, but obviously, that can't afford to pay someone to be a a CFO on retainer. So I offer lots of pretty much all my information for free in one way or another through my blog post, but I also offer some courses where I distill the information down to the most pertinent that individuals can buy and get access to, like, good planning skills for their own future
very reasonable cause, at least in my opinion. And they can also book time with me just like an hour at a time to have some coaching or accountability or whatever. So That's a little bit of what I do as well, but, like, I do that more as a side thing. This is quite interesting based on the other investors that I'm aware of. It's rare to find somebody to plan out their financial future for their business in the real estate world, let alone their personal
life. Has that been typically the biggest hurdle when you're talking to real estate investors? Yeah. Not just real estate investors, but all investors and also really business owners because obviously having your own business is an investment in and of itself. But, yeah, you'd be surprised how little planning people do both in their personal life and
even in their own business. And it's not always because people are you're responsible, but, like, particularly owning a business, even a real estate centric business as well, it's very time consuming. And you only get so much time of the day, and it's like everybody always has the intention of getting down to doing some good planning and figure out where they're headed and now they're gonna get there and making adjustments based on good data and all that sort of
stuff. But again, depending on your size, if you don't have a staff or someone that's partner that really takes that on. Like, it's just one of those things that oddly falls by the wayside. So being able to do it in this part time capacity people. It makes it much more accessible for them. And as I said, like, they usually are thinking, oh, I need help with my business, and I am educating to them to the fact that you also need help
with your personal life. And how much are you saving? Is it gonna get you where you want to go? How much return do you need on the savings in order to get you where do you wanna go? Actually, where do you even wanna go? You know what I mean? What is your retirement destination? Actually, one of my courses is called the Financial Independence roadmap. And first step is figuring out, like, where do I wanna be in 20 or 30 years? Like, literally physically, what state would I
wanna I wanna live in where I live now? Do I wanna be in the Caribbean? How much is that gonna cost? And how much money do I need to sock away in order for the passive income on that to cover that in what I'm envisioning in my head, And then, okay. Now I have a, like, a financial goal of savings. How do I get to that? Like, how much do I need to save every year? How much return do I need to get on those savings in order to get there in 20 or 30 years.
And therein lies, for me, like the real estate piece, it's like, Real estate to me is just like any other investment. I shouldn't say exactly that. But, ultimately, as I jokingly say, unless you're gonna go sit outside your rental properties and just look them all day. The purpose of that is to generate a good quality return for you
on your on your investable cash, right, your savings. with the purpose of getting you to some destination in the future, whether that be building up enough passive income from your real estate or building through appreciation or value add or whatever, but ultimate real estate is an investment for that purpose. And I do think real estate ultimately provides a better return for less risk in general than the markets, and it has for me. And so I educate people as to real estate is a potential
option for your saved money. Is it right for you or not? We can talk about that, but if it's gonna produce more return, if you're gonna get 25% compound annual growth at a real estate versus maybe the hopeful average of 10% of the market. You're gonna grow your savings three times as fast, but, actually, so that's something you seriously wanna look at. You can't just leave it up to the financial industry to get you your 7 your 7% compound annual growth and throw you in some stocks and bonds
and then call you once a year. That's the rest fee for failure. The investment component, you know, of that planning is very vast, obviously. Real estate is a potential piece of that Yeah. Or it could all but it could also be markets. It could be a combination of that too. I've actually more recently I was mostly I was, like, probably 75, 80% real estate in my overall portfolio. Obviously, real estate, as
Marcus, head up into last year, was in a pretty serious bull market. So I thought I probably should maybe reevaluate given my own personal new circumstance. and I adjusted my asset allocation to be a little less real estate
heavy. I sold some of my single family rentals that appreciated, and so on, I ended up actually buying some syndications though instead that I thought might be better on the cash flow front because I was trying to produce a little bit more spendable cash as opposed to being in the investments on in the long term and on the appreciation front. I did a lot of research over the last
couple of years about different things. And it ended up there's only so many categories, but there there are private real estate investments, LS indications. Obviously, Crip cook cryptocurrency is a thing. I don't have a lot of percentage in that, but I have some money in that. I mostly divested a real estate puts some more money in the market because I thought the market was gonna be coming down off the end of 2022 sorry, end of 2021, which obviously did So I started buying into
the market. I wish I started buying into the market today, but, sadly, I started buying into the market about 4 or 5 months ago, but I think in the long run, that's gonna prove to be a good a good situation. So I and then I also even investigated some other products like life insurance, and I put together a plan that involves some you know, Bristol index life. And I I spread things out and made like a
new asset allocation. That's right for me at my jumb shirt, but I try to educate my clients in these options and, like, what the whole asset location is about and, like, What exactly? It's in a way they don't even know, like, what the goal of the savings is. So they just know I'm supposed to save. I hope I'm saving. I don't know, like, a busy a year goes by at a flash once you have kids. So I try to bring them that perspective of a CFO. Obviously,
that's a very c customer in a business setting. You would review your numbers on a regular basis. You would try to establish how your business is doing, which of your products sell the best, which ones cost the least, all these types of things, and make informed decisions about how you're gonna make adjustments for your business next year or what you're gonna spend more or less time on, all
that can apply to the personal life as well. Of course, I try to do that I was glad that you just brought that up because I was gonna ask you if we could define what a CFO actually does because I think a lot of people classify essentially that it's doing some accounting or something like that. But and misses the concept that this is taking those numbers and planning making strategic decisions and planning for your business. And then you've mentioned a few times your
personal life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is, like, I was not didn't go to school for accounting. I I really was just, like, an entrepreneur, and I did the finances for my business 1 out of necessity because I couldn't pay someone to do them at the beginning. And, 2, because I was concerned that I needed to, like, know if we were doing well. Like, it was it just seemed like it's extremely important to know if we were, like, making a profit. Like, how much could I
pay myself? How would I know that if I don't know if the ins and outs of the finance And it's just something I like too, so that made it a lot easier to do. But that is my experience of what a CFS does. It's just me doing it for myself. So in some ways, I could answer the question and probably someone who went to a school for accounting or whatever, it said I'm missing some thing. But at the end of the day, for me, yeah, it's basically, you do bookkeeping
because you need data. Right? And while the bookkeeping gives you data, to ultimately make good decisions on. But it's not just, like, everything's going great. Hey. What can we do to improve next year? What should we focus some, but you also have to have an emergency planner or emergency exit plan. One of the things I would always do is I hope for the best plan for the worst. So as a business with many employees that you have a monthly goal that you know you need to hit. Right?
Well, if you don't hit that for a couple months in a row, you know you're gonna have a cash flow crunch likely in 2 months is if have terms and you're like, what if I don't hit my goal for 6 months? I don't know. What if something crazy happens? Likely, you're gonna have to start lightening your load.
So I would have plan of who would I let go if I had to do that, not that I want to, but, like, I have to be prepared for all those scenarios, or where can I access funds from if I wanna bridge the gap and take on that responsibility and not let anyone go? because often letting people go, it's not an ideal situation because you put so much time into training people and getting them on board and getting them there. It's not like you you think about it in a flipping
way. And that's another thing CFOs do is they constantly keep, like, your financing and your credit accessible, increase your credit as needs to be, like, in my case, I also said because I own the business and it said to my partners, hey. We're spending so much money in rent you know, just like the idea of buying your house, hey. I'm spending so much money in rent. Why don't I just buy a house? We were spending so much money in rent on our business location.
when we were growing and we needed a new space, I was like, why don't we buy a building? Might as well, why would we setting a spent sign up for a 5 year lease for the 5 or 10 year extension, do a whole bunch of tenant improvements on our dime just to build out somebody else is building. And we're in post production. So, like, our office was very nice. Like, it's you're entertaining clients there all the time.
Like, the quality of your design in your office is a reflection of the quality of your work, basically, in a creative field. So we actually decked at our place pretty well. And I'm like, we're gonna we're gonna spend, like, half a 1,000,000 or $1,000,000 or whatever doing that for someone We bought a building. And then I managed I got all the financing together for that as being the CFO. And that worked out
really well. I in my real estate endeavors, which ultimately was side thing for me and part of my investing, I think we owned, about 16 properties over the last, I don't know, 15 years, including our homes, which I do consider investments personally. And when there's so 3 of them were our homes, but 2 of
them were buildings for our business. So in 2008, we we bought a building, renovated it, had it for about 8 years, decided to sell it and trade up to a slightly bigger building and a better make a better one and one that had parking. That was probably the biggest driver of us switching gears. So we did well on that building. It'd be pocketed half the profits, but the other half into the new building did
the build out again. Now in those cases, those two buildings probably are the, like, single largest driver of profits for me in real estate, but I manage the build out. I manage the construction. I was basically at the beck and call those projects, and I could be because I was a a partner in the business that it was for So I spent a lot of time making sure those privates were successful, and they were not small. Like, the first one was about a $4,000,000
project, and the second was 10,000,000. And there are a lot of things that could have gone wrong, did go wrong, needed to get fixed. It there's a time component to real estate, I guess, is my point that you do have to factor in to your returns, I think. But luckily, so far, for me, it's all been worth it. Sure. Part of what I do calculate into the kind of compound annual growth is how much time do I have to put into this project and relative to some other less time consuming option
where I could put my money. And hence, lately, I wanted to spend less time on real estate. And as I was saying earlier, I kind of our portfolio divested some of the single family rentals, but I like real estate. So I decided to take some of that equity and put it into syndications where I'm not doing anything, and I'm just collecting cash flow. Now granted you're handing your money over to someone else, and they have to do a good job. So it's it's never riskless, obviously, to do that. I'm
giving that a try as well. Sure. Just to remind everybody, it's play louder.com to learn more about what Joe does and how he can maybe help. So, Joe, you've been working with quite a few real estate investors at this point. Have you found some consistent or pitfalls, if you will, some of your real estate investors? What are some of the stories you've been seeing? that are is a consistent problem with with us. The funny thing is it's it's the same
problem I mentioned earlier. Some people are very diligent about it as a business, and they can answer any question you fire off at them about the financials of their endeavor. And other ones are just buying real estate, and I'm like, so have you done an analysis on whether or not these properties actually have made you any money when you consider cash flow appreciation, like, Cap CapEx, tax implication, whatever. And they were like, no. I probably should do more of that.
Luckily, when in a long running bull market of real estate, it usually is worked out pretty okay, but we're not in that anymore. You know what I mean? So it's really this p again, but again, having the time or making the time to do that very valuable work. And then also making sure that you're getting, like, the most tax benefit and tax
efficiency out of your real estate holdings. So I'm understanding how depreciation real estate may or may not affect your other income, especially if it's a side thing and what steps you wanna or can take to make sure you're getting the most value out of the the potential tax benefit and so on. Same issue. People having and or taking the time to really do the analysis and make sure, you know, what they're doing is worth it.
Yeah. It just seems like maybe it's just a small businesses in general. We operate off of checkbook balance versus planning things out accordingly. Yeah. the funny thing about real estate is it's the one thing where there's a lot of hidden financial ins and outs with with just it's not super complicated, but it's just with the amortization of your loan with the depreciation and the tax effect that it has with the appreciation, like, There's a lot going on in the potential performance of
the real estate that you have to think about before you sell. Like, once you sell and you realize all those things. Well, you have your end result, but in the planning of the buying of a property and or the deciding to stay in it and or move the money into some other property, you have to read between the lines and figure out really what's happening. And that takes
a little bit of take some time. Actually, one of my courses, which is about by the way, like, my content, I should say, just put a big picture As I've created my blog and delivered my content, I realized that for me, there's, like, kind of 3 pillars to success in life, really. Not in financial life, which is, 1, being entrepreneurial. I really do think being entrepreneurial key to income generation and also time control, which both of which, you know, are obviously the important.
2, the personal finance fees, which is the treating your personal financial life like a business tracking your income and expenses like you would in your business, actually having a P and L, you look at maybe once a month or once every month and go, wow. I actually made more than I spent. Thank god. Or holy moly. I spent more than I've made. That's bad. I have to fix
that. And then the last piece is the investing, like, understanding, like, there's a significant difference between a 7% compound annual growth and 20%. Like, you will shave could you could shave 10 to 15 years off of your saving and amassing important in your life if you could get that return to be higher. So you need to educate yourself on how to do that. You just rely on your guy over at Fidelity through you and some index funds and let's go
be a home run. So one of my core I have a course, and she has 3 pillars, one of them is real estate. And bay and, basically, it's just doing real estate analysis, both the property you might buy or properties you have. And I've create I created this sheet for myself, which is not groundbreaking, but it's pretty detailed. I mean, what it does is it has all these metrics you can change like, obviously rent, interest rate in your loan,
inflation, blah blah blah. And then it maps out your returns but pre and post tax on an annual basis for 30 years. So you can actually see how the performance of the property would happen over time. And potentially if you wanted to get out in year 5 or year 10 or year 15, where you would be in a turn in compound annual growth based. Now any syndicator, whatever, a higher level investor's probably
gonna have something like this. but for the smaller in individual investor, I don't know that they go through the length to create something like that. So my courses, basically, you get my sheet, and then I have 7 or 8 videos where I explain to you exactly how all the real estate investment returns materialize and show you how tax affects you, show you how depreciation affects you, blah. I will show you what would happen if inflation was 7% instead of 2%
blah blah blah. So at what point does a small business decide to engage somebody like you to help them along. What at what point should what question should they be asking themselves? Yeah. Sometimes, sadly, people have engaged me more when they're concerned about their finances, which is, unfortunately, I can't go out and make money for people. I can help them probably figure out how to beat make more money more efficiently, though.
So sometimes that's been the case, but a lot of other times, it's really just been word-of-mouth, friends of friends, In some cases, I it's been like, oh, a friend of mine was like, I have these 2 friends. They started this business. It's going really well, but I know they need help. with their money and managing their money and making sure they don't screw it up, and they they have a couple employees now, blah blah blah blah. So I'll it's obviously better when people catch me on the
upswing. And I'm like, oh, we have something to work with here as opposed to, like, the downswing, but I do have help clients get reorganized, trim the fat, figure out where the weak spots are, that kind of stuff. Sometimes it's been simple as you know what? You're doing pretty good. You just don't charge enough. You need to go you need to go charge more. And they go charge more, and it works that great. But they just needed someone to be looking at things and tell them that and then
give them the conference to go do it. So in some ways, it's a little bit of a therapist too, financial therapist. which I also like. I like about in life. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. So, again, I just wanna remind everybody it is play louder.com for some more information and some of these lessons and downloads that Joe is talking about. It's very generous to to give out this information like you you do, Joe. We could just con continue. We could just keep going
here. but I do have some rapid fire questions I'd like to wrap up with. But -- Lam army. But before we do, I do have one last question regarding this. If somebody was considering talking to a CFO or a fractional CFO in in order to get this type of help, Could you give us, like, top 3 questions they should be asking to make sure that they are getting the right partner? Yeah. Again, I guess it depends a little bit
on who you're going for the traditional sort of CFO person. The traditional CFO person, I think, would be probably someone who has a background in accounting might even be a CPA. Oftentimes, larger companies have license CPA's as their CFO, actually, my sister in law's like that. And they're not necessarily coming at it, like, with the business owner been in the hot seat as the business owner perspective. They, like, maybe just, like,
strict analysis. So I guess it's like one asking, how do they approach it? Have they ever owned a business before themselves? Maybe they have a accounting firm that they've owned. And so they understand that because there is the aspect of the finances of the business and trying to establish, like, what's working, what's not. But then there's also, like, the employees, the staffing to this, that sort of stuff. Can I also help people that I don't do HR
stuff, but I just have so much experience as a business center. Like, I can tell them what needs to happen for those types of things, but how to get payroll done? Like, what annual filings they need to do? All these kind of more broader business owner things. So I guess That's a really long way to say is, 1 establish, have they been just, an employee in their career, or have they ever owned a business? 2, I think because I think the personal finance thing is important. It's like,
what do they think about personal finance? What do they do for themselves? Do they understand, like, the how asset allocation works in per personal investing. And they have a good grasp on just investing in general. I really think that's important. And then 3, I do think that as a business owner, especially if you're one with a brick and mortar operation, just like I think buying your house is, like, a fundamental thing. I tell young people. I think that should be your
primary first investment. I do think If you're renting a space for your business, you should look at it the same way and consider buying a space for your business. And so with that in mind, do they have any experience in real estate and real estate finance and and making good -- sound real estate decisions, and could they help them in that capacity when the time comes fighting a good project and that sort of stuff? Here. Joe, if you're ready, we'll go through a
few of these rapid fire questions. Yeah. One last time, it is play louder.com for Joe's information. But first of all, what is one real estate investing myth you'd like to bust here today? Real estate investing myth. Oh, okay. A one that I think the buy and hold forever idea personally is, like, mathematically, oftentimes, that's not the smartest way to do real estate. 1, you don't wanna drain down your
leverage because leverage is where you pump your returns. And, 2, you know, people talk about, oh, I gotta I gotta do is buy a bunch of houses and then get them paid off, and then they're gonna be this endless stream of money for me. But, unfortunately, they don't say that, oh, yeah. After 20 years, like, your rental is practically destroyed, probably, and you need to replace every May system in there and
possibly even do, like, a whole home renovation. And you're gonna unwind like your 15 years of, like, positive cash flow. So I think people need to and if you actually mathematically, if you look at how returns materialize over 30 years, you do get peak returns in the 5 to 10 year window. So I think that individual investors shouldn't necessarily be thinking I'm gonna buy something whole to
get paid off, and then it's gonna produce the most cash for me. They might look at it as a 5 to 10 year timeline per property and try to get in on all new systems and get out before all major systems have to be replaced and so on. But if you do the math, you'll figure that out on your own. Sure. What book would you recommend, or what are you
reading right now? I'm gonna say rich no. I'm just kidding. I you mentioned the funny thing about rich ed up and people say that, but there is that's they have a series, the rich ed series, and they have other authors do books. And one that I that was really helpful for me was the loopholes of real estate by Garrett Sutton. It has a lot of good detail in there and about, like, tax benefits in real estate and that sort of stuff and
entities and various stuff that come up. So I would recommend that. I don't know if that's on your list of people say that a lot or not. In fact, Garrett has been on the show. So it's -- Oh, cool. -- been one of those. Yeah. That is a great book. That's a really good book. So Another one that I'll say that I read recently was the law science of compound interest, which, really, Frank, I'll be perfectly honest, is a brochure for the product that the author
sells, but I do think that's fine. Number 1, because we're also in something with our books. But, 2, There's just a lot of really good information and thoughts in there about the kind of fundamental problems with, like, modern retirement planning theory and, like, how, like, it's not very well supported by Matt based on the average income and average savings of Americans. Sure. So I would check that out. What is the biggest
business mistake you've made and what did you learn from it? I should have that one, like, I should have a paragraph on that. It's like for people to be rent. I think about this one. I get this question, and it's I don't wanna say I've never made any mistakes because they have, but, like, I there's nothing that really stick out to me that, like, totally took me out because they are all kinda learning experiences. But one I almost made I'll tell you this. What I
almost made was a real estate investment. I was gonna try out the whole short term rental thing, the Airbnb thing. And I was looking at Nashville as a possible place to do it. Try to make long story short here. So I get into contract on this thing, and I find out the realtor was like, lately, they're getting a little more strict the Airbnb licenses and, like, you're really only supposed to be, like, renting out, like, a room if in your house, living there. He's, like,
plenty of people, though. They're putting it down as their address, whatever. And I don't like that, guys, sir, because I just don't like surprises, and it's, like, hassle and issues, but I was like, I was, like, really wanting to, like, try it. I found a property, and I was like, I'll just risk it. And it was, like, divine intervention for me, really. This keeps me up at night. Sometimes if I start thinking about how bad it would have been, So I'm like, in contract, go
all the way to the end of the contracts. Like, last day, closing, I literally sent all my I was buying an all cash with the plan of refiying out some money. and I send in all the money. And I'm like, thing. And I get a call from the realtor, and he's like, hey. Like, FYI, I just got this bomb dropped on me. This property is subject to a lawsuit. The owner is subject to a lawsuit because he's been renting it out without
an Airbnb without the license. and the city basically has tried to shut it down and now is suing him, basically, because he hasn't shut it down. And he's but don't worry, like, The lawsuit's not gonna transfer with the property. It's a problem of the owner. So it's not like it affects the property at all, but they felt like it needed to be disclosed. I'm like, you think they needed to disclose that the guys being sued for not having the proper license on an Airbnb when you know that I'm
buying this to be an Airbnb. And I was just like, I gotta I'm getting out. So I just got my lawyer on the phone. I was, like, undisclosed information, cancelled contract. They canceled it. They sent me my money back. And it literally, it was the last day. Like, I had I had a couple more pages to sign. And I'm like, never again, will I do anything that is potentially, like, not known to be successful. If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
It's philosophical questions at home. I would say don't be afraid to talk to people. Just go out and talk to as many people as you can. Don't sit in the corner. Don't be afraid of making cheesy, small talk. Just get out there. Make as many relationships you can. Take whatever licks you have to. People don't wanna talk to you think you're annoying and build your relationships because that's the key. You can't be a hermit if you wanna be successful.
Hey. Sure. Okay. I'm gonna time you on this one. You got 55 seconds. You gotta give somebody a single tip or trick that they can implement right now today that could have an impact on their business. Simple. 55 seconds. You gotta do the math. That's basically it. Like, you cannot go by your gut. You cannot go by your just your checkbook balance. If you don't have Genuine verified data in some sort of computer program like QuickBooks or Quicken or whatever.
you are setting yourself up for potential failure. Like, rush to go buy the software, get it going. And I know there's many business owners out there that don't do any bookkeeping, and they have employees. And you like, when I learned that, I'm just like, how is how do you sleep at night? But you are going to mess yourself up if you don't know what's going on in your business. It's funny to bring that up, do the math. We have this tool
that we've developed regarding. It it's just a way for us to quickly assess a property and what we would have to acquire it for in order to do wholesaling or flipping. And we call it the evil calculator because we don't we plug the numbers in, and that's the number we provided It's just completely well without emotion. This is what we have to get it for. Right. And a lot of times, in the last many years, that number is always, like, way lower. than people are
asking or that they want you to pay. Matt is Matt. That's why I like it. That's why. Is there a question or concept you wish we would have covered here today, Joe? I'm gonna say no. I felt pretty good about the interview. Thank you. Great. One last time, head over to play louder.com for more information. but I hope you're coming back again sometime, Joe. Yeah. Absolutely. Might just as the reason my website, by the way, is any Play Ladder. My slogan is work
smarter, plan, better, play louder. So, you know, if you work smarter and plan better, you'll get a lot more fun time in your later years. I should have asked you that. That's that is an interesting name. Yeah. There you go.