Kevin Siskar 12/20/16 Kevin Siskar 12/20/16

Joe Fairless' Journey From Madison Avenue To An $85 Million Real Estate Portfolio

Ambition Today Kevin Siskar Joe Fairless

In keeping with last weeks' real estate theme, Episode 25 of Ambition Today finds us across the table from Joe Fairless, Real Estate Investor and Host of the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. Joe set his roots in advertising after a bit of soul-searching during his undergrad years at Texas Tech. Fighting complacency, he left Madison Ave. for the allure of real estate investing and entrepreneurship, and was met with incredible success, with due credit to his persistence and work ethic.

Owing his early sense of drive to his start in landscaping, Joe Fairless has always had an entrepreneurial mindset. After leaving his teenage lawn-mowing business, J&J Landscaping, Joe tried to cling to his high school football career by attending a junior college near his home town of Dallas. After transferring, he went on to graduate with a degree in advertising and quickly rose through the ranks of executive marketing, while investing in real estate as a side project and finding passion in that venture. Joe applied his trademark tenacity to his newfound love of investing and now controls approximately $85 million worth of rental property. Kevin digs into the factors behind Joe's success, and much more:

The seemingly hidden on-ramp of landscaping as a teenage job to eventually invest in real estate.
Exploring passions during college to find what interests you.
Applying lessons from the corporate world to an entrepreneurial startup.
Leaving a comfortable job to pursue your real dreams.
How to break into the shark-infested waters of commercial real estate.
The 75/25 rule of listening/asking when approaching mentors.
Acknowledging your strengths.
Acknowledging your weaknesses and surrounding yourself with people who help make up for them.
The grit of making your ambition come to life.

Ambition Today Question of the Day™:
"As a thought leader, how does ambition play a role in your life?"

Quote Of The Episode:
"Don't get caught up trying to be everywhere at once, find the platform that makes sense for your skill sets and what you enjoy doing. Then own it." - Joe Fairless

“Be different before being incrementally better.” - Joe Fairless

Links from this episode:

Thank you so much for listening and applying these useful tips and strategies to your life! If you have a chance, please drop by and leave a review for the show on iTunes by clicking here. Also, who should I interview next? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments. Do you enjoy this podcast? If so, please leave a short review in the comments below. It keeps me going…

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Founder Institute New York

Kevin Siskar 12/9/16 Kevin Siskar 12/9/16

How Matt Rodak Plans To Fund Every House Flip In America with Fund That Flip

Any amount of research into the seemingly eternal-growing market of real estate investment will almost surely make one familiar with Matt Rodak, Founder and CEO of Fund That Flip.

Any amount of research into the seemingly eternal-growing market of real estate investment will almost surely make one familiar with Matt Rodak. The 2007 John Carroll grad is the founder and CEO of Fund That Flip, a company which allows anyone to apply for fast and affordable funding in the rehabilitative real estate investment business. The New York based startup had already raised $2 million by April 2016, shortly after graduating from Manhattan's Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator in the summer of 2015 and Founder Institute New York prior to that. Fund That Flip finds its niche by bridging the gap between accredited investors and vetted real estate rehab projects in the U.S.

On this episode of Ambition Today, Matt Rodak discusses his seemingly inevitable entrepreneurial roots (despite his "best efforts") as the son of a business owner. He explains how his relationship with his father, and him owning his own company before and during college, led to Matt's on-again, off-again kinship with business ownership. Today, Matt capitalizes on the experiences of his youth by taking action to solve the problems he notices in his industry, such as streamlining the loan application process for prospective "flippers". We hear about his journey to where he is, his advice on how to get there, and much more:

Maturing in an entrepreneurial-spirited family.
Paying for college by advancing a teenage lawn-mowing gig to a profitable business that he was able to sell during his sophomore year at JCU.
Being introduced to the real estate market through his early exposure to landscaping.
What to study in college vs. what to leave to education via real-world experience.
Bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to a non-entrepreneurial position at a large business.
Using lessons from upper management to implement starting a business.
Creating a business to streamline and eliminate the fallacies of market norms.
Employing the JOBS Act to capitalize on a brand-new industry.
Ownership vs. Accountability in life.

Ambition Today Question of the Day™:
"How do you align the ambitions of your team with the ambitions of the company?"

Links from this episode:

Be sure to listen and subscribe to Ambition Today in the iTunes Store for iOS, on Google Play Music or Stitcher for Android.

Listen to this episode now:

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Kevin Siskar 1/28/16 Kevin Siskar 1/28/16

Startup Of The Week: Fund That Flip

I am starting a new blog segment called the "Startup Of The Week" or S.O.T.W.™ for short where I plan to highlight a great startup each week. There are several startups working to make the world a better place and I want to tell you a little bit more about them. The Startup Of The Week for the week of January 25th is Fund That Flip.

I am starting a new blog segment called the "Startup Of The Week", or S.O.T.W.™ for short, where I plan to highlight a great startup each week. There are several startups working to make the world a better place and I want to tell you a little bit more about some of them. The Startup Of The Week I have selected for the week of January 25th is Fund That Flip.

Fund That Flip

Founder: Matt Rodak, CEO

Headquarters: New York, New York Operating: United States

One sentence pitch: The easiest way to fund your real estate investments.

In my words: Fund That Flip connects real estate investors, starting at only a $5,000 minimum, who are looking to invest money with house flippers that are looking to borrow money for an upcoming renovation.

In their words: "We are technology, real estate and financial service professionals on a mission to create new opportunities for Investors to take advantage of the positive returns real estate can provide. At the same time, we are helping re-developers access a new source of capital so they can focus on what they do best – finding and rehabilitating homes so they are again livable. Leveraging our team’s diverse expertise and new legislation passed as part of the JOBS Act, we are building the preferred real estate investment marketplace for investors and re-developers."

Accomplishments:

How it Works:

If you want to learn more or let me know your thought on this week's Startup Of The Week you can contact me here.

Kevin Siskar 1/15/16 Kevin Siskar 1/15/16

Build Online Websites Like Offline Real Estate

Normal real estate is a much older industry then the current technology industry most of us interact with everyday. Tonight I heard an interesting perspective on how to think about digital real estate within the technology industry from David Karp, the Founder of Tumblr.

The real estate industry is a much older industry then the current technology industry most of us interact with everyday via our phones and computers. Tonight I heard an interesting perspective from David Karp, the Founder of Tumblr, connecting the two industries in regards to how we should think when building digital real estate (online platforms & communities) within the technology industry.

Tumblr as you know was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 Billion and the community at that time was reported around 300 million monthly unique visitors. That is a pretty big chunk of virtual land. The analogy David made was comparing the similar way an online community of people hang out on their favorite website to the way an offline community of people hang out at their favorite bar.

Let's play this analogy out and throw in a main character here. We can call the main character in this analogy Ted. Now say Ted goes to MacLaren's Pub every week to meet up with his friends. For the sake of adding a bit more realism to this story, let's give Ted's friends names too. We can call them Marshall, Robin, Barney, and Lily. I just came up with those on the fly, pretty good right? Now, each time this group of friends comes to MacLaren's Pub they sit in their favorite booth. They get drinks, order food, and good times are had whenever visiting MacLaren's Pub. This is their bar. This is their community.

Then one day the owner of the bar decides it's time to move some furniture around. He bought some fancy new tables and chairs which will increase the revenue per square foot of the pub. In comes the new tables and chairs and out goes the booth. It gets thrown out.

The next day Ted, Robin, Marshall, Lilly, and Barney all come back to visit their favorite booth at MacLaren's Pub to find that it is now gone! The food is as good as it was before, the drinks are the same temperature, the walls are the same color, but now their favorite booth is gone. And the first thought that crosses the mind of Ted, Robin, Marshall, Lilly, and Barney is the thought: "They can't do this to us, this is our bar! This is our community!"

Now re-read the above HIMYM metaphor and replace MacLaren's Pub with a website and the friends with that website's users. I really like this analogy. It makes you always remember that there are humans making up the loyal online community of most websites. It can be easy to forget this at times when just viewing click maps, analyzing Google Analytics, checking cost per user acquisition models, and judging conversion data. Just like re-arranging the furniture in your house, you need to always be thinking about how that change will affect the people who spend the most time in that space. So next time you are thinking about pushing a big release to your website or product that could alter the way your community uses it, make sure you think carefully about how you do so or your visitors might just go to another bar.