The Power of an Abundant Mindset and Real Estate Syndications w/ Hollis

There are people out here from your same walk of life who are having a lot of success doing this. There's no reason you can't do it too. Understanding that and really getting that abundance mindset that hey, if I'm legitimately bringing value to a community of people, I'm gonna be all right. The person who's the most helpful will always have a job. So really anybody can invest into a syndication deal as long as you are able to form relationships with the operators.

The journey to wealth is a long walk and some may walk quicker than others, but what good is sprinting to the finish line if you pass out when you cross it? On Walk to Wealth, we enlighten and empower young adults to build wealthy, abundant lives. They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and your first step starts right now. This is Walk to Wealth with your host, John Mendez.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Walk to Wealth podcast. If you're tuning in on YouTube or any of the podcast directories, make sure to do us one tiny little favor. Make sure to give us a follow. We're bringing on fire guests all year. This year we haven't missed yet, and today we've got a very special guest. I've been able to meet this guy who's been investing in real estate quite a while ago and we were able to connect a couple of times and now I'm super excited to have him, I guess today. Last time he was a little under the weather, but now we got him back full health. But without further ado, let's get right into it. Hollis, tell us who you are and let us know what you do.

What is going on, john? Thanks for having me on man. I'm Hollis from Hollis Queens, founder and principal at 24 Capital Group. We're a real estate private equity firm. Basically, what that means is we help people to invest passively in real estate deals. Particularly, we like to work with real estate agents, brokers really any real estate professional because the tax benefits that these individuals have access to are incredible. Really, it's the cheat code to investing in real estate. If you're a real estate agent, a broker, and you're not also an investor, you're only playing half the game. So that's kind of what we do and what I like to do. We focus on purchasing mobile home parks short-term rentals. We actually did a deal last year. That fund acquired 81 short-term rentals in the span of 12 months and it was a really, really amazing opportunity to be a part of, and we're looking forward to cranking out some more of that this year.

Amazing, hollis. You got to tell us your backstory man. Take us back to when you were a kid man. Hollis from Hollis Queens. This is one of the more interesting stories I've heard. I done interviewed quite a ton of people, so take us back to your childhood. What was money like? What was your walk to wealth like in your early upbringing?

Well. So for me it's interesting my mom was the breadwinner. Both my parents worked with. My mom made much more money than my dad before the kids were born. Once my parents decided to start having kids, we lived in a bad neighborhood, so my mom decided to stop working and be a stay-at-home mom, take care of us, drop us off to school, make sure there was somebody home every evening when we came home from school. But that dramatically affected our family's financial trajectory as well. Right, that was a very legitimate sacrifice that they made, and I can't say how much I appreciate that sacrifice that they made. So for me growing up, money was tight Whatever you can imagine in your mind as a typical inner city, like food stamps. That's kind of where we were. So owning real estate was something I thought was impossible. I remember I must have been like seven or eight years old and my landlord he's collecting the rent every month, the penny cash back in the 90s. He's doing stuff in the hundreds into his wallet. He comes to our house His wallet's already packed with $100 bills and I remember thinking like, hey, mr Carter has to figure it out. I don't know how he did it, but I've got to go do what Mr Carter is doing, but I couldn't understand how he did that. To be honest with you, even as a black man, I couldn't understand how he owned so much property when property was so expensive, just to purchase it. This is, you know. Obviously, even way back then, 20 years ago, property was still very expensive in these areas, and so it took me a long time. That became like a limiting belief for me I can't afford real estate. Even after I left that neighborhood and started earning money, bought my own house to live in, in my mind it was still just like oh man, I can't afford to do that. And I had to just overcome that limiting belief, changing my environment, changing my circumstances a little bit, networking with people like yourselves and growing from there.

That's an amazing story, man, and I want to talk really touch a little bit more about when you got into real estate, because I know there was a certain time delay before you actually learning about a lot of this stuff and you actually getting into this stuff. So tell us about that times, man, of what was it like when you were trying to get into it? What was it like when you were getting that first property? What was your first taste of real estate?

Yes for sure. So this is probably four or five years ago. A buddy of mine, who I didn't even know, was also into real estate. Like I always looked at properties and tried to figure out how to buy one, but I never actually pulled a trigger or anything. But a buddy of mine. He calls me up and he says, hey, I'm going to this real estate networking event down the street from your house. Do you want to go? I was like, oh man, yeah, sure, I'd love to do that. So we go there and they have a speaker there. He's talking all about wholesale and real estate. But those of you don't know what that is. That's just flipping a real estate contract. So essentially, you put a house under contract to sell and then you sell that contract to a buyer, an end buyer for a spread, and so when I heard that was legal, it blew my mind. I was like, wow, this is a way I can get into the game without paying an arm and a leg. So we started doing that. We had that business and we were doing some deals there. But I quickly came to realize that that was very transactional. That wasn't the game Mr Carter was playing. He was a property owner. And so after some time I started to pivot and try to understand how I could go about acquiring these properties for myself. And immediately after the experience in wholesaling, I knew let me bring some partners, let me find some JV partners. And so you start to analyze deals like that. You look at a duplex with a partner, three family with a partner. By the time you pay back the bank and you pay back your partner, there's like $7 of cash for a lift, and so I was like, oh man, this is not worth it. So I started looking at slightly bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger deals until I started to find a sweet spot of where the numbers just made sense for everybody participating in the deal, and that led me to the fund and syndication game, where this is big game hunting. Here you know what I mean. We're intentionally targeting very large, commercial sized properties because the economies of scale are there and there's enough scale on the bone, enough meat on the bone for everyone to get a slice.

Yeah, that's amazing, and I love your story because we actually got into real estate in similar ways. So, for me, I seen this $500 wholesaling course, and it was like no credit needed, no real estate license needed, just have to be 18 years old, just have to pay $500. I was like man, is this a sign or what? I can get into real estate no money down, I don't need to have big amounts of money, I don't need to have credit, I don't need to have any of that stuff. I can get into it. Unfortunately, though, I spoke to an attorney who sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and there's a lot of I call it, I think, five or six attorneys. Four or five of them didn't really know what they were talking about, and they was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They clearly never talked to an investor. And then there was one guy who you could just tell like he was a teacher's pet. He read everything by the book, crossed the the T's, died of the eyes, and he was like oh, he has something. You can't do that in Connecticut, you can't transact in real estate without a real estate license, and I was like, man, this, my plan, is ruined now and then from there I was like you know. At that point I already had my logo, I had my domain name, I had my LLC file, I was ready to get it going right, and then he told me that and that pretty much shot my dream. So I had to pivot and ended up getting my real estate license, and I ended up also dropping out of college shortly after that time period because I was like, everything being uncertain, I'm just gonna bet on myself, and the first route I wanted to take got shot down. Let me try this other route and that's how I got into real estate myself is that through wholesaling? That was what initially intrigued me? That's what initially got me started. I just never ended up seeing it through. So now let me ask you right. So we got this real estate game going a little bit. You made this wish to look for bigger and better deals. Let me ask you about mindset really quickly, because you went from seeing Mr Carter to being Mr Carter. You mentioned limiting beliefs in your story. Talk to us about what it was like overcoming those limiting beliefs and what work did you have to do within yourself in order to overcome those?

Yeah, sure, so, um, I always tell this story because I think it really exemplifies the effect that limiting beliefs formed when we're young can have on us as we get older. So when I was a kid, my dad would take, take us to the you know corner store, to the bodega, and you know, you got the 50 cent candy, the Snickers, the Twix payday. But there's this 75 cent candy for rare a row shares, like these three chocolate truffles in the wrapper. Right and Me, my brother, my sister, we could get whatever 50 cent candy be wanted, but the 75 cent for a row share was off limits. That was exclusively for my mom. I Kid you not. I did not buy a for a row share until I was like 23 years old, and it was simply because I had this belief in my mind that this candy is not for me. It has nothing to do with money, it has nothing to do with whether you can afford it or not. It's just we form these beliefs in our mind that this thing is unattainable for me. It's not for me. So I'm just gonna walk right by it down the grocery aisle every single time. And for real estate, that's really what the problem was for me. I like, I like I mentioned before, even after I was working, a job where I could afford to, you know, start looking at rental property and start acquiring rental property. In my mind I had just formed this belief that this was not for me. And so it really took me, speaking to other people who had a similar background to me, similar story to me, and who were pursuing real estate through these other creative avenues, to really open up my mind and say, hey, you know, there's a lot more ways to go about this. This, this is. There are people out here from your same walk of life who are, you know, having a lot of success doing this. There's no reason you can't do it too. And so that took some time, and I think it's something I'm constantly working on, because every stage you get on, every time you go on, you know, go to the next level, you get that feeling like, oh man, do I really belong here? And you know that imposter syndrome starts to creep, creep through. So I have kind of some frameworks that I use to kind of work, work past those things.

But it's still something that you know, you battle with as you continue to grow, and something that as you battle with them more and more, your sword gets a little sharper, your shield get a little more durable and you can conquer some of these bigger and bigger limiting beliefs. Because as you go down the rabbit hole of looking within, into the abyss, you see that there's a lot of things in there that are tucked away, that you probably didn't want to see or you even know. We're there and Uncovering that is its own like never ending life journey. We're always gonna be uncovering more and more by herself. But actually, because our brain doesn't want us to remember a lot of the stuff that didn't help us out growing up, and I want to ask you to, because you remind me of the old proverb you want to go fast, go alone. You want to go far, go together. Right, you've realized at a certain point in time where wholesaling it was like man, I could do this, it's not mr Carter, I hear you know it's not mr Carter and so you wanted to bring people in because you knew with more people you could do and accomplish so much more and on such a bigger scale. Tell us about what was that like, cuz? You know, in our communities growing up, inner city we're not really taught to collaborate. We're taught the rider or ourselves. We taught to keep our cars to our chest we taught, we taught to really just be Get it on your own, don't ask no one from help. My grandma used to tell me like if you had someone's house, don't ask for anything. Like it made it very clear Do not ask for anything. So collaboration was something that wasn't really in my mind at all until later on. But what was that like for you breaking out of that? Hey, I got to make sure I fend for myself and everyone's out to get me type of mindset so you can really start growing and expanding and spreading your win, your wings.

Yeah, man, you bring out a huge, huge point. I don't think I've ever Thought about it like that before. But you know, that's definitely the mentality that we grew up with. They're like the same gay goes the game is to be sold, not to be told, right? You don't ever tell anybody anything for free, don't ever help anybody out for free, but that's so backwards, that's. That's really really gonna limit how much you can accomplish, because you have to have the abundance mindset and that's not something that's easy to develop, because it's easy to look at somebody who's doing the exact same thing as you as your Competitor and maybe to some extent they are right like, obviously there's a limited amount of business for anybody out there. So, collaborating with somebody who's also trying to do the same thing as you could, you could be inviting in the competition or you could be exposing yourself to that person's network which is at least the same size or larger than yours. These are people who you have never interacted with otherwise, that now you get to get in front of and put an add value to and receive value from. So Understanding that and really getting that abundance mindset, that hey, if I'm legitimately bringing value to a community of people, I'm gonna be alright. The person who's the most helpful will always have a job. So as long as you're legitimately out here helping people, even if you are giving things or some things away for free, even if in your Collaboration you've exposed some of your inner, you know, your, your knowledge to a different person and you feel like, oh man, now they're gonna try to take advantage of me. If you're bringing value to a group of people, you Inevitably you will be taken care of, even if it's not through them, but just because you're a valuable person. Being a valuable person is really the key. And then once you have value, obviously the way that's valuable is because you're sharing it. You're sharing with other people. So, really changing the way we think about other people and stop looking at everyone as competition, we start to appreciate the value in working together and in collaborating and realize there's more than enough food out here for everyone to eat.

Yeah, and another way that abundance minds to teach you is you only run out of food when you're not cooking. It's not like you cook one meal and that's it and once that food is done, it's over. But if you get more people that learn how to cook, there'll never be food to run out of because you're all cooking your own food. It's only a zero sum game if you're taken from each other and you're all competing for the same size of the pie. Who said you got to compete for one pie? Right, just get an oven and start baking some pies. Correct your own pies if you can't find any. And so many times that people say oh you know, I had one time someone told me hey, john, be careful when you get real estate agents on your podcast, especially ones from out here that are local, because they're competitors. And it's like well, I'm not even focused really on real estate, but two, it's like, even if I was, this is my platform. Yeah, they may come on, but I'm the common denominator. I'm always going to be the guy that shows up. So it's like I was never worried because it's a collaboration. What's this saying? The high tide raises all ships. That's it. If we all come together and we realize that it's not a zero sum game and not something where there's going to be a finite amount of things, even in real estate, because they're both in real estate, right, there's only so many deals that can go around. But let's say, you start helping people make more money, but then more people get more deals. It's like sometimes you just got to create, and when you're creating, when you're operating out of abundance, that leads to doors that you'll never, ever foresee. But as you start operating in that way, doors are open in places that you never seen before. So I want to ask you ever since you started collaborating, how has your life changed personally, in real estate-wide, the size of your deals, how has that abundance mindset just changed the scale at which you just lived life at?

Yeah, 100%. So there's a saying you can own 100% of $100,000 or you can own 10% of $1 million. Now, obviously those numbers are the same. In the end you still got $100,000. How much work did it take if you had to do it by yourself? How much effort are you putting in? How much time are you putting in? How much of your own resources did you have to put in to get that 100,000 solo? So that's what I've learned and that's really what I've been able to experience. Last year, like I said, we acquired 81 doors. That's not because I'm out here going to see 81 different properties and calling 81 different realtors and networking with 81 different property owners and all this type of stuff. That's because we have a team. And that's one thing I really, really love about the syndication space is that, more than any other space in real estate, this is a team sport, because it's too big for one person to just go around doing it. There's too many moving parts, too many slices and different lanes within the deal, too many different assignments within the organization for one person to handle anyway. So leveraging a team not only gets you the economy of scale meaning things are cheaper when you buy them in bulk, your property management is going to be cheaper, the cost of your repairs are going to be cheaper, everything is going to be cheaper because you're doing it in bulk, but also, too, the wisdom and the knowledge now that you get to pull together. So let's say I've only been in real estate four or five years and I'm getting into deals people who have been doing real estate 20 years, 15 years. So now, whenever we face problems and situations, we have that knowledge to draw on, even if they're in a different aspect of the deal than me. I'm on the equity side. Maybe this person is in the asset management team or maybe that person that was on the acquisitions team, but their knowledge is there and at my disposal, really, and not only my disposal. All of our knowledge collectively is at one another's disposal and there's wisdom in a multitude of counselors. Doing anything by yourself, you only have your own knowledge. You only have your own wisdom. You have no sounding board. So it's so important to have a team, because that is how you're going to scale. You can't scale anything by yourself.

Yeah, and it's one of those things where you have to put that ego aside, you have to give control. You have to realize, like there's an old saying that everyone always throws around, that if you want something done right, do it yourself. And it's like no, you don't, don't do it yourself, you have to waste your time. Like where's your time better spent? People tell you you hear a lot of time growing up, oh, someone so messed up, the stapler, I'm not going to do everything myself. And it's like no, just train them a little bit better and refine someone that knows that part of the process and is a more of an expert in there, so that you can leverage out your time. And Alex Harmose we were talking about him before the press record he always talks about inputs and outputs. The people who become the wealthier, who find the most success, know how to leverage their inputs to get maximal outputs. And you're exactly doing that with the syndication spaces. Now that you have a team with you, you're running with a squad. It's a pack of wolves, like, for example, and a hyena not going to take that. A lion on a one on one, you get a group of them. Same thing with sharks and dolphins, a dolphin not going to get a strike down one on one. You get a bunch of them together, though A dolphin's going to take out a whole bunch of sharks. That they got a squad with them and they got a squad running. So let me ask you now so we got this collaboration thing going, how has that helped you out in the syndication space in terms of the, not just the properties that you were able to acquire, not just the knowledge that you were able to acquire, but the credibility and the authority boosting that it also helps out with? Because now it's not just hey, I'm me, I do XYZ, it's hey, it's the team. And how was it like taking out your ego from that place and know that you're just a team player and now you're not that lone man, the soul, the one man band? Or was it like leveraging out the other hats, not having to wear other hats and being part of a team versus being a one man band?

Yeah, it's definitely tough to put the ego aside, for sure I mean you think about, especially for somebody who's like me. I'm a DIY person. I actually enjoy doing different types of things myself. If you look behind me, I'm doing construction in my own house myself because I just enjoy it, right. So I'm a very hands on type of individual. So passing that off now to somebody else is definitely a matter of putting the ego aside and being able to swallow some humble pie and realize like, hey, this other guy is actually better at this than you. I think that's where the humility comes into play and that's really the huge. The biggest problem with any team and any collaboration is that we're not humble. We have to humble ourselves to understand. I'm not going to be the best at raising money and the best at managing the asset and the best at acquiring the asset and the best at selling the asset and the best at managing the people like you're not perfect. No one, no one of us is perfect, and we have to be willing to accept the fact that there are people out there who are smarter than us and can accomplish things better than we can. So why not leverage them? Because we can maybe accomplish some things better than they can right. So we have to understand that it's a reciprocal nature in these collaborations and in these relationships. So and then, once you do that I'm sure you've gotten to see it yourself when you're the person standing next to the really smart person, you receive you get an insane amount of credibility. You get a ton of credibility from hosting the Oscars. You don't need to win an Oscar, just go be the host. You get an insane amount of credibility and insane amount of opportunities just from being the host at the Oscars. Now you may have a chip on your shoulder and say, no, I'm only just showing up to the Oscars if I win one. How stupid do you sound? That sounds ridiculous when you put it like that right. So being able to really understand the benefit of just getting into the room with very smart people bring value to these very experienced, intelligent operators, and that's going to, like you said, that rising tide is going to lift all ships. As they do better, you'll do better right along side them, and as you do better, you're going to lift them as well.

It's back to the law of proximity. Right, there's your own proximity with some of these people. So in a later you're going to have to rise up, because it's only natural, it's only right. And as you get to the people and that's something that I've been learning as I've been starting to host these podcasts and stuff I've been landing bigger guests and it's like, hey, I know that guy, you want to be in the show. It's like, oh, you know so-and-so. It's like, yeah, I had so-and-so on the show. Yeah, I hop on your show. And I've been doing that to get more and more guests, and that's been my secret sauce. I've been circle prospecting. Same thing I've been doing in real estate. I've been applying it to this space and really just using that and now hosting a couple of events. The second one's on the way, or at least from the time this drops, it's probably already be done. But like hosting these events and getting people together, people look at you like you're somebody, because you happen to know all these people, and it's like, well, all these people done more than me. All I did was get them in a room, and so it definitely boosts the ladder credibility. Let me ask you now, too, with the syndication space because a lot of people are like, okay, we talked about the community part. We had people like really understand that you need people to grow at this level? Let's switch the gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the syndications. We had one person come on my very first guest actually to talk about syndication. So for anyone that hasn't listened that far back, give us a quick refresher. What really is syndications and who are they meant for and why does something that we should look forward to in the future?

Yeah, for sure. So, in the simplest form, syndications are just pooling resources together to buy a piece of real estate or many pieces of real estate. Now, obviously, it gets more complicated and there's a lot more different entity structures that we can talk about, but at the end of the day, it's literally pooling a bunch of resources together. You're pooling you say you're pooling money from 10 different people. You have one person who has the net worth to be able to sign on million dollars worth, millions of dollars worth of debt. You got a few people who are really good at managing property and assets and managing people. You have really some people who are really good at acquisitions and going out and finding properties. So we're pooling these intellectual resources and financial resources of groups of people together in order to go out and buy really big real estate. So whenever you see in your neighborhood the mall got built or there's this $10 million apartment building that somebody just sold it wasn't one guy walking around with $4 million to go put down on the property and then buy it it's a group of people pooling their resources together in order to take down a deal like that. So, at its base level, that's what a syndication is for, or what a syndication is Now, who a syndication is for. Up until just a few years ago, honestly, it was really only something kind of reserved for the mega wealthy. There was a certain level of wealth that you had to have to even participate in these deals. But now some of those laws have changed and really anybody can participate in a syndication deal. I mean, there's a bunch of websites that do syndication something similar to syndications and in crowdfunding where you can go invest with $50 if you want to $100 bucks, $500, you can go and get started investing passively in real estate. Some of the deals that we do. You know, $25,000 is the minimum and I always tell people, you know that may seem like a lot of money but in reality it's not. If you think about how much it would cost you to go, whatever market you're in in the United States, whatever whomever is listening to the show, how much would it cost you to put 20% down on a two family property right now, not on an occupied. I'm willing to bet it's more than $25,000. Now not only that, but you have to factor in your input and output. Like her rosy says right, how much effort did I have to put in to go find this property, to lease up this property. You know, manage this property and repairs on the property, managing the property management people on the property, so all these other things that you have to put in and your buy-in is probably higher than $25,000. So I always like to bring this opportunity to people who are looking for a way to get into real estate and they've already been successful in whatever career they have and they're probably busy, more than likely. If you can afford to buy non-onoccupied investment property, you are busy, you have a job that pays you well and it also keeps you busy. So I tell people, why would you want to add something else to your plate in looking for property and becoming a landlord? Because everyone knows becoming a landlord is passive right up until it's not, and then it's not passive at all all of a sudden right. So why add that to your plate when you can put a little bit less money down, also take a lot less risk, and you know it could all be completely passive? So really anybody can invest into a syndication deal as long as you are able to form a relationship with the operators.

It's kind of like a football team, right, you mentioned earlier, you got to have a team, some people doing that. It's like football. You have your defensive coordinator, you got your head coach, you've got the offensive coordinator, you've got the people that are actually on the field playing as the acquisition people. Right, they're playing in the game. Right, and playing sports is something that really helps you for things like this. Like for me, like when just grasping these concepts of getting teams together, and like when you play football, if I'm the safety and you're the D-End, I can't do anything about the pass rush, right. If you're pass rushing, I got to make sure I get back, so I can't be worrying about these other things. You have to have that humility, that trust to know that the other person is going to take care of what they got to take care of, so that you can do what you got to do and make sure that your job is done well. And then, to touch on the second point you mentioned too, is taking that less risk. A lot of people realize that you don't have to take all the risk in the world. There's people such as yourself that specialize in things like that was like I'll just take this off your hands and we're good. You catch us things. And that's some of the reasons why my first guess was a syndication investor as well, because when I heard about this I was just so like mouthwatering, like yo, you can just like pull together people and get these crazy big properties and next thing, you know, you don't have to do much. You're not really a landlord, but you kind of are, but you're not Because you don't have any of the risk, as you say, because it's only passive until it's not. And so I was like man, I know it's going to take me a while to really get into the bigger deals, but by the time I'm at the bigger deals I'm probably not even going to be worrying about money. So it's like I just put that in there, get my return, go on about my day, keep my peace of mind, and that's something that yeah, and here's something else too when it comes to these deals is that they're not only for solo investors.

So what you can actually do is form or take a group of people and pull together. Let's say, you and four of your friends like, oh man, we don't have $25,000, but we each have $5,000. You can pull together, form an entity and that entity can then go invest in a syndication. So that's always an option too for people. But I always tell people the two cheapest ways to get started in real estate. In my opinion, the two cheapest and lowest risk ways to get started investing in real estate are owner-occupied multi-family. So that means you go out and house hack and you get, hopefully a four family, but at least a duplex, because you have the lowest down payment right, and really your risk is low because you're putting a lot less money down and you're going to live there. So you're going to you have to pay that mortgage anyway, yeah. The second is investing in a syndication. Again, the barrier to entry is low and the other side of it is the other side of it is you don't sign on any debt. You're not taking on debt to get into this property, because that's the really where a lot of the risk starts to come in with property is when you have personal liability for debt. Now your risk is no longer. Your risk is asymmetric in the wrong direction, because you have exposed yourself to more liability than money that you put into the deal, whereas in a syndication your liability is limited to the amount of money that you put in. So let's say everything goes terribly and it just is a crap deal for everybody and nobody makes any money. At worst you will lose your investment. But in a property with your name on it, with your name on the debt, you could end up owing money beyond what you put in. That's asymmetric risk in the wrong direction.

Yeah, that's one of those things. That's like everyone talks about getting in debt and there's a lot of people like Dave Ramsey and a lot of people that say out of debt. But it's definitely a healthy mix of figuring out what you're willing to tolerate and then finding out a strategy that best suits you. That's why, once I start getting going, I'm going to have to give you a call, hollis, and say, hey, I finally made it in life. I don't want to be a landlord man. I've got to get into real estate some way. And let me ask you, though, in the syndication space, what's it like actually being in this space? Because I think I read something in last year. It was like only around 200 or so thousand people invested in syndication last year, so I was like extremely niched down. So what's it like actually being in this space?

Man. A huge part for my team and I is education. We try to educate people as much as possible on the opportunities available, on what it looks like, the process from A to B, from when you meet us and you find out what we do, all the way down to Z, to where we've gone full cycle on a deal and you're now getting that final payout. And the reason behind that is, to your point. It's not a very common thing. People hear the word syndication or syndicate and they think, oh shoot, mob families must be a crime, right, and really it's obviously not. And so we're taking the time to try to educate people on that and I think for most people in the space who want to be here for a long time, that's kind of where it all starts Because, again, up until a few years ago, these opportunities weren't available to everybody. So not a lot of people even know that it's possible, and it's not about people being able, being in the financial situation or not. They literally don't know that this exists. So taking the time to educate as many people as possible. Like I said, for me I focus on working with real estate agents and brokers, so we go around to different brokerages providing education on how to get into syndication deals and why it's so important as a real estate broker or agent to invest in syndications.

Yeah, and that's deep man, because a lot of this stuff is awareness and we're not aware of a lot of things and opportunity is everywhere. We're not smart enough to recognize a lot of them and it sounds like oh, what do you mean? I'm not smart enough and it's like, yeah, you're not smart enough Like I could be making a million dollars a year right now. I'm not smart enough to recognize the opportunities that are in front of me that I probably could be taking advantage of. And as we learn more, as we become more aware of what's even out there, then it's like oh, shoot, because you don't know what you don't know and I don't want to know those things. Where it's like don't, nobody know about it Because it's not talked about enough, it's not as trendy as forex or day trading or options or one of those sexy vehicles ways of investing that it can lead to a lot of. Definitely. I mean I interviewed a couple of people here talked about options, but it hit it so hard to grasp and it's so like I mean they know what they're doing so they don't lose money, but the average everyday person is like that could take a while to get into, and so stuff like this, where it's like you really minimize the risk. It might take a little bit while a little while longer to get into, but it's so much worth it just having that goal. And for me, I always said that I could care less about a blue checkmark and on Instagram I would have much more to be an accredited investor with the SEC. That's my blue checkmark. That's what I'm aiming for Really. That's what I'm trying to get to, because I know I get to that point. It's like all right, I'm doing something, I'm doing something for real and I kind of want to actually kind of bring this whole conversation full circle. This before the investing the little kid Hollis versus Hollis now that's investing. You said 81 properties last year. Right, that's a ton of property acquiring deals. You're a round successful agent and real estate investors with you know hundreds and hundreds of properties, most likely. What's the difference? Because you've seen the spectrum of wealth. It's different. On your had it from the bottom when you struggled, and now you're on the other side of things. It's like you're living a lot better than you once were and you're connected with a bunch of people who have found success in life. What's the different worlds like now that you're living in this and you've seen the other side of the spectrum. You're living in the other side of the spectrum a little bit more now.

So going from having Going from living in poverty to being around people who are not living in part and poverty. I would say one of the biggest differences is the way wealthy people think, the way they look at challenges, the way they look at debt, the way they look at competition, the way they look at their health. All of those things are Involved and I think that's the biggest difference that I can see is these. I mean these people think differently, like, for example, I had the opportunity to meet Neil Bawa, who has nine figures and Assets under management. So this guy, he does a lot of volume, you know. I mean a lot of people have entrusted him with their money and you can tell the way he looks at the world is a little bit different. You know what I mean, and I think From somebody who came from the inner city. You get stuck in a box, like they call the projects the projects because it's a project. You get stuck in this project and you can't really figure out any way out of here. You can't learn to think a different way because everyone around you is thinking in the same way and it's a hamster wheel. You get trapped on and the biggest thing you can do. The biggest thing that's gonna make a difference in your life is to invest in yourself In a way that's going to teach you to think differently. It's not about making money, it's not about becoming wealthy, it's about thinking differently. And that alone is the biggest differentiator that I've seen and dealing with. You know people who are kind of stuck in that hamster wheel, stuck in a bad situation, versus those, who are not.

It goes back to that experiment of the lobsters in the cage. Right, you get lobster in the cage, you put all them together and you get one that's tried to escape. The others will pull him down so he doesn't escape, and then they get conditioned to not try after a certain period of time. Then you get new lobsters that are put in there and they try to escape because that's the only thing they want to do, and then all the Condition lobsters will pull them back in, and now the new lobsters are now conditioned to not even ever try to escape. And it it's back to that, that collective consciousness that's in there, it you would always fall back to that Level at which the collective is. That and it sucks to say, because a lot of the times they may not do it intentionally, but they'll sit. You know, though, their insecurities in there. Oh, you're gonna do what? Oh, you're gonna buy 81 units in a year, but you sure, like, is that possible? Like little things like that. They're saying it out of a genuine place, out of genuine concern, but that's gonna keep you from getting to where you need to get to, sir, surrounding yourself for people, as we talked about the law proximity earlier you get. So in front of some of these people that are just thinking in, viewing the world in such a different way, and it's like, oh Well, I want to think like that and I want to. He has something going for himself. And that's the big thing that changed my mind is reading rich, that poor dad. The reason I was so interested. It's like there's people that think like the rich, that because I resonated so much with the poor, the poor dad, and that's saying that was a bad thing, because I think in a book the poor dad was making like a hundred thousand a year, like just about, and but he was living paycheck to paycheck, making, I think, six figures, a very, very low six figures, which is a lot more than the average income here in the US, and still was kind of stuck on that hamster when that you mentioned. And so it's like really just switching that mindset that we're in and not chasing the check and selling ourselves out.

And exactly what, exactly what I, what I was gonna say. And, like I said, it's not about money, it's about changing the way you think, not only about money, but really about yourself and about life in general. And I kind of have a framework that I like to use for that because, to your point, I think, whenever we get stuck in a spot, in a box that we put ourselves in, or maybe we've been put in, it's oftentimes because we don't have Another voice in our head that's saying something different than what does it our own right. So we have a limiting belief that maybe has been Engrained in us or maybe we put in ourselves and there's nobody telling us anything different. So whenever I find myself in that situation, I like to rap. It's W. Rap the W stands for right, so take time to actually write your thoughts. So why don't you believe you can buy for a rossier candy Like why, why, why is that a belief that you even have in the first place, right? The second thing I do is I go out and I try to read. So I'm not gonna seem like the biggest reader, reading hundreds of books a year, but I just try to read something that's going to expose me to a different way of thinking that I've had In the past. And then after that it's association changing associates, because where we are the sum of our five closest friends, they say, right, so if we have deeply ingrained limiting beliefs, it's likely that someone else around us is reinforcing that, those limiting beliefs. Right, so maybe it's time they either change the associate Association or discuss that openly with your associates, because maybe you can help each other out of the box, right? And then obviously the P is once you've kind of changed, gain this new perspective, you have to put it into practice. So you can now feel comfortable like, okay, cool, I can, I can get there for a rossier. I think I can do it now. Well, just go buy one. Like, just go do it and see what happens. Right, turns out it's only 75 cents and you've had a dollar in your pocket the whole time.

So W RAP is the framework I like to use that's amazing man, and how has he been dropping nuggets this entire conversation? We definitely talked about some deeper concepts that will hopefully didn't fly over anyone's head, because we really talked about community and Collaboration and some of the things that we had to overcome to even get into this space Mentally first, before we can even find our steps, and so thanks again for hopping on. Where could we connect with you? Where could we find you at, if we want to know more about what you got going on and we got to keep up with your amazing content that you've been posting lately man speaking about content.

Find me on Instagram at REI.

Hollis alrighty, nice to to the point. Now it's time for our famous live questions to get right into it. Question number one what is the most impactful lesson you've learned in life? I say it again.

Reach for the stars and grab the moon. Set really, really high goals for yourself and even if you fail, you'll have achieved more than you would have otherwise, what is the most admirable trait a person can have humility.

If you have to change someone's life for one book, which book would you recommend? The Bible, what is the legacy that you're trying to leave behind? Hard work, and for anyone that wanted to embark on their walk to wealth today, what is the first step that they should take? Rap?

You've now finished taking the first step. Now Let us help you take the next one. Subscribe to our newsletter at walk to wealth comm. That's walk the number to wealth comm, so we can keep you moving on your journey. We'll see you on the next episode of walk to wealth with John Mendez.