Joe DeSanto is a fractional CFO who specializes in providing part-time CFO services to businesses. He has a background in owning larger businesses in the production and post-production space in Los Angeles. Joe and his wife decided to make a change in their lives after having a child, and they moved to Florida. With their savings from real estate investing and other market investments, Joe was able to work part-time and supplement their passive income. His financial independence and early retirement mindset led him to consider himself semi-retired. However, his expertise in finance and managing businesses led to his former partners asking him to continue handling their finances as a consultant. This led to other business owners reaching out to Joe, realizing the need for a part-time CFO who could provide the same level of expertise at a more affordable cost. Joe enjoys working with his clients and helping them understand the importance of running their personal finances like a business. He started a blog to communicate his knowledge to individuals who may not be able to afford a CFO but still want guidance in managing their finances. Through his blog, Joe offers free information and courses, as well as one-on-one coaching sessions. His goal is to help individuals gain good planning skills for their own future at a reasonable cost. Overall, Joe's focus is on helping businesses and individuals achieve financial success and improve their overall financial well-being.

Connect with Joe DiSanto: https://www.playlouder.com/

Key Topics & Bullets:

Primary Topic 1: Real Estate Investment and Risk

• Almost making a real estate investment in Nashville for short-term rentals
• Property was subject to a lawsuit due to owner renting without a license
• Canceling the contract and getting money back
• Lesson learned: Avoid risky or uncertain ventures
• Importance of compound annual growth in real estate investments

Primary Topic 2: Taking Control of Financial Planning

• Taking control instead of relying solely on the financial industry
• Personal investment strategy: diversifying portfolio between real estate, syndications, cryptocurrency, and stock market
• Adjusting asset allocation based on market conditions and personal circumstances
• Exploring other investment products like life insurance
• Creating a new asset allocation plan
• Importance of educating clients about different investment options and savings

Primary Topic 3: Financial Support and Advising

• The speaker's role as a financial therapist
• Assisting with money management and avoiding mistakes
• Helping businesses with employee management
• Assisting clients with organization and identifying areas of improvement
• Advising clients to raise their prices, resulting in positive outcomes
• Acting as a fractional CFO

Primary Topic 4: Financial Services for Businesses

• Speaker's background in owning businesses in production and post-production space
• Transition to offering financial services as a consultant and part-time CFO
• Passion for finance and running personal finances like a business
• Offering coaching and courses on financial planning
• Mission to help individuals manage their personal finances like a business and achieve financial independence

Primary Topic 5: Analyzing Real Estate Investments

• Importance of analyzing the financials of real estate investments
• Factors to consider: cash flow, appreciation, CapEx, and tax implications
• The current market is not favorable
• The significance of time and tax efficiency in real estate holdings
• Depreciation's impact on other income, requiring careful analysis

Primary Topic 6: Getting Help with Personal and Business Financial Goals

• Neglecting planning in personal and business finances due to time constraints
• Seeking help for both personal and business financial goals
• Determining long-term goals, such as retirement destinations and desired lifestyles
• Real estate as an investment option compared to the stock market

Primary Topic 7: CFO Perspectives and Experience

• Traditional CFOs and their background in accounting and certification
• Importance of a CFO candidate with business ownership experience
• Speaker's experience as a business owner and guidance on broader business owner tasks
• Importance of bookkeeping, emergency planning, and managing credit and financing

Primary Topic 8: Personal Finance Fees and Tracking Income/Expenses

• Treating personal finances like a business
• Tracking income and expenses like a business
• Importance of profit and loss statements (P&L)
• Understanding the impact of compound annual growth rate on financial goals
• Importance of investing and not solely relying on financial advisors or index funds

Primary Topic 9: Real Estate Investment Analysis

• Speaker's course with three pillars, including real estate analysis
• Detailed sheet for real estate analysis with various metrics
• Mapping out returns on an annual basis for 30 years
• Visualizing property performance over time.

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"You can invest 10,000 hours and become an expert or learn from those who have already made that investment." - Jack

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