Ep 150: Why It’s Important To Have a Side Hustle Despite Having a High-Paying Job with Pranay Parikh M.D.

Now they could use that forever. And it showed to them that hey, I have this talent. They can go out and pay someone 20, 30, $50,000 or they could give me a small stipend every month and I get to do this stuff that I am doing and enjoying.

Welcome to the Next level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show we have Dr. Pranay Parikh. Pranay is a physician, co founder and president of Ascent Equity Group, a serial entrepreneur, online course creator and host of the MD to Entrepreneur podcast. His unconventional journey to medicine helped him learn the skills to excel in entrepreneurship. He's helped launch a seven figure online course, buy over $1.1 billion in real estate, and has helped hundreds of physicians launch their own business. His goal is to help launch 10,000 physician led businesses and he's going to join us today to share some of his secrets as well as what his team is working on today. Dr. Parikh, welcome to the show.

Hey Chris, thanks for having me.

Absolutely. I'm fired up to have you on. I think you have an amazing story. We've had a couple other physicians, surgeons that have been on the show and shared their stories. I know we have some in common, like Dr. Ryer that was just on talking a little bit about, you know, what he does and optimization. But what's interesting is we all have something in common which is real estate. So I'd love to for you to tell the audience just a little bit about your story, catch us up about your background and how you ended up to be a multifamily syndicator.

Yeah, so, you know, I got into medicine, I was well rounded. You know, I had all these other interests. I used to do charity art shows for Doctors Without Borders and just kind of all over the place. And that's what they love in medicine. Right? They want you to be well rounded. And what do they do with those people? They get rid of all the edges. Right. And they make a nice little circle of medicine which just like everybody else. Yeah, just like everyone else. And so throughout the process, some of my edges stuck out. So, you know, I had a couple times that go that Well, I didn't match into the best residency spot that I wanted. I didn't get the fellowship that I wanted because they looked at my application and they're real. Is this all you want to do? And I was like, you know, I have a couple other interests, real estate being one of them. And so I graduated. I don't really know what to do. I was expecting to get this extra training, that I would get this a lot bigger salary. And now I had a very good salary, but less and a lot of time on my hands. So kind of looked around, I was like, yeah, I could do what all the other doctors do, put in 20% in my retirement accounts and wait 30 years and finally enjoy my life then, right? And we doctors are the kings of delayed gratification. And I thought indeed, has to be something different, right? And so I looked around, I didn't have a business at the time. I didn't know stocks very well. I was like, real estate. Like, you know, I've played a lot of video games where I buy real estate. Like how hard can it be, you know? And I had an unfair advantage. My sister in law, I was dating my wife at the time. She was a real estate agent in Los Angeles who I trusted implicitly. Everyone knows your real estate agent super important. So I bought my first four unit. I went to final inspection. I had no idea what I was looking. I was like, is this normal? Is this good? And fortunately, my sister in law had prepared me for the inspection report. She's like, okay, we're paying this. We want him to look, we want it to look really horrible. And he comes in with this hundred point thing to fix. I was like, what did I buy, right? He's like, foundation issues. The roof is leaking, you know, know, just water heater needs to be replaced.

I'm like, those are, those are big items. Yeah, yeah.

I was like, can I cancel? And then like she like held my hand, she's like, okay, calm down, let me do the talking. And after, after we leave and we talk to the inspector, he's like, oh, this place looks pretty good. I was like, that's not what this thing says. It's not. But we got a discount. Like, There you go, $10,000 discount. At the time, real estate market was super hot. So I was like, hey man, I bought this property, I'm an expert inspector, let's go out and buy more, right? And I didn't know at the time that it was a home run, right? In a grand slam, it was closer to water. It's in Long Beach, California, one of the few affordable places. It's the 4 unit, you know, all individually. How was, you know, and I spent hundreds of hours trying to find my next property. And I was like, there has to be something different, right? I. I can't spend all this time. I should just go back to work, you know, get paid for all the work that I'm doing. So that's when I found syndications. And when I get, when I go into something, I'll just go in a little bit. I go in a lot of it. So my wife always gets mad at me. She says I have too many things going on. But I looked around and your podcast, there wasn't all this other great sources of information. Your book Next level Income. But so it's like, okay, how do I ed people on this? I used to teach at the med school at the time. How do I tell this? Right? So my business partner at the time and I created teach you how to find deals, vet them and invest in syndications. And we did that. We had a couple thousand people, mostly doctors go through it.

Awesome.

Over time, people were like, yeah, you know, like this is a lot of work. Even even though you teach us how to do it, like it's still too much work. Now I understand how work you do. So why don't we just invest in all the same deals? Like all of us, we get together and we can get better deals, better terms, all that stuff. So created a centequity group. We were a very small piece of oma much larger deal. But over time we've been able to take down whole deals in terms of the equity needed. So that's it. You know, we're kind of able to throw our weight around a little bit. And we'll probably talk about this a little bit different later, but you know, we like to think that we do real estate a little bit different than other people.

Yeah, no, I love that. And you know, Pranay, you talked about a lot of different things there. I think it's interesting, you know, especially for, you know, for a doctor. And we have, we have physicians that are listening and you know, if you are out there and you, you're making, you know, hundreds of dollars, in some cases thousands of dollars an hour. Right. For specialized surgeons. You know, you, you have to give up that time to go, you know, find these deals and it takes a long time. I mean, I think I did the math and I added up and my break even point, you know, when we started getting into commercial real estate, was about four years. If you, if you actually take into account the cost of your time and what you put into it and, and all that, that's a long time. You know, it's like going to. Well, I won't compare it to med school, but you know, it's like it. Right, it's, it's like you said. Yeah, it's, it is, it's a, it's a college degree and I think it's a, it's wonderful that you can educate, you know, investors or potential partners or even those that may go into it. But a lot of people realize that, you know, what this is, this is a lot of work. So you're really out there doing a lot of things. But you mentioned, you mentioned some other things I think I've seen. You know, I started my career, you know, over 20 years ago now working with, working with physicians. And even during that short period, relatively short period of time, I saw something change. You know, some of the older physicians, they, they were more entrepreneurial. And then over the course of those, those two decades, I saw physicians kind of go from like more of an entrepreneur running their own practices to employees. You know, they were employed by hospitals and we saw this shift. I forget what the metric was, but you know, when I, when I exited, you know, a few years back, you know, over 50% of physicians were employees. When, when I started that number was less than half that. It was, you know, like maybe a quarter. What, maybe you could share your opinion on that because I think it's, I think it's, it's potentially good in some ways, but it's definitely had an impact on medicine and the way, you know, the types of individuals that get into medicine.

I think I bet if you kind of graph that out and you graph burnout. I bet they would be on a very similar access and tre.

Interesting. Yeah.

What is happening in medicine, and it's unfortunate, is that people are getting overloaded with administrative work in insurances. You tell this patient that they need this medicine to survive and someone at some insurance company doesn't have a medical degree says no. Right. And you have to fight it for hours. Right. Their literal life depends on it. And now that's one patient. And now you do that for hundreds. Right. And people have had, you have to hire someone that's own job is to call insurance companies and fight, fight to get paid. Right. I mean, think about that. Think about if you owned a mechanic shop. You had to have a full time employee sit there calling the credit card companies, saying, hey, you Guys need to pay for this. It would be ridiculous, right?

Yeah.

So overhead, meaning the cost, it. The cost of running the business of medicine has gone up tremendously. And so the only people that are able to take care of that are the big companies. Right. And you'll see there's a lot of successful groups and even I'm part of a successful Dr. Ed and owned group. But they started many years ago. The chance of doing that now is extremely difficult. It's almost like hitting the lottery. And so being able to do that and going into something like entrepreneurship and seeing how much stress it causes people, how much administrative and logistics operations, it just feels painful. So what's happening is that these doctors that were entrepreneurial, starting their own business before, they're still like that. But what's happening is they are doing it outside of medicine. And it's unfortunate because we need these doctors all to be medicine. And there's no doubt that those people are giving even better care. And they're taking their talents, their skill, intelligence to something else, like coaching or informatics or, you know, being authors and all that stuff. And it's, it's.

Yeah, no, I, I've argued the same thing. You know, you see that brain drain and yeah, they go to the smartest students. They don't always go into medicine now. And I even, I saw doctors say to their kids, don't go into medicine. You know, they go to business school instead or they become an engineer, God forbid. Right. Like, but which, you know, you actually see a lot of, a lot of great doctors that come from an engineering background. But what's interesting, what I, what I think, and you know, maybe we share this here, is that to me, the solution is, is the same as the initial problem, which is you need to like, as you advocate for like a side hustle. And you know, I, it's funny, I had a conversation with, I don't know if you can hear my security alarm going off here in the background, AKA my dog, but. So what happened was I started buying real estate when I was 21, before I ever had a quote unquote, real job. And when I was, as I got, as I got further along in my career, as I was in a leadership role, I had a conversation with the president, my company. He's like, hey, Chris, it's come to our attention, like, you have this real estate company. And he's like, you know, some people are talking about it. Maybe you're distracted. I was one of the top performing areas in the country at the time, and I Said, I won't say his name, but I said, hey, we're actually still friends. I said, I said, hey. Couple reasons you have to be worried about it. One, I said I was doing this before I ever got a real job, before I ever worked for this company. So I've always been, you know, a real estate entrepreneur. I said, and two, I said, I don't have to be here because I have enough income coming in from my real estate that I don't have to have this job. So you can be confident that I want to be here. And, you know, that's what I, you know, you say everybody should have a side hustle or, you know, especially high income professionals. Pranay and I agree. I think it makes you better at what you do because you don't have to compromise for, you know, a dollar. You don't have to compromise your ethics, your time, you know, your family. You can commit fully, you can be yourself, you can be ethical. And I think most people down, you know, down at their core are good ethical people. You know, what's your perspective on that?

Totally agree. I couple quick stories, you know, people come to me. So I was looking at my schedule the other day and I saw someone's name for the day shift and the night shift. I was like, hey, that's weird. Why are they working 24 hours when our typical, there's some people, some specialties that you do 24, but most people do 12 hours. I'm a hospitalist. And he was like, yeah, you know, he needs it, I guess he has a couple maids and a lot of kids. And I was like, yeah, like, and I know he's a good doctor, but you don't, you want a doctor that has to work that much to make ends meet. You want someone that's spending their free time listening to podcasts about medicine in or going to conferences on vacation and relaxing or spending time with their kids. And some, you know, otherwise some people will say, hey, I'm this high paid special, I don't need this. But it's like your life would be different. Think about how much time do you spend with your patients? It's probably 15 minutes. That's what insurance will pay for. But if you have money coming in from elsewhere and maybe you Change that to 20 minutes, maybe you change that to half an hour, I bet your life would be a lot better. And importantly, your patient's life would be just way better. And so money, it's a tool. And it's not necessarily to work, it's not necessarily to leave medicine, but it's to craft medicine into how it looks for you. And for some people, it's one day a week. For two people. For some people it's two days a week. Or maybe you just see four or five patients a day. I. I have a friend who's a psychologist, and he just, he's like, I can't. As soon as I, like, I'm making progress with the patient, he does hour blocks, they have to leave. And he's like, yeah, so now I'm able to. He has a coaching practice and he's able to do two hour blocks and three hour blocks.

Yeah, it's like a Joe Rogan podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just he makes. He makes a month's worth of progress in one day. And if. Think about your mental health, like, right. Can you really wait four weeks to make that breakthrough?

Wow.

No, you can't. So people, A lot of people look at money and they look at it as evil. Right? But it's. It's really a tool. And. Sorry, one last story.

No, please.

Yeah, someone that was talking about real estate and they posted an article on about how all these rural towns, people are getting stout.

Right?

So, yeah, people out of state are buying it. And I was like, yeah, that sucks, right? That. That's horrible. We have an affordable housing crisis. I was like, okay, like, this means you need to do it even more. I was like, the fact that you're thinking about how to do this in an ethical and humane way, your landlord, your. Your tenants would be lucky to have you on the landlord. Lord. Instead, if you don't do it, someone else will, and they're not going to be as ethical as you are. So there's a way to do this, right? In a way that everyone wins.

Yeah. No, I love that. And I know there's some people listening. They're going to say, well, hang on a second. You know, you say pranay that in Chris, you guys should, you know, start. Start a side business or go learn about investing. But here I am, I'm in school. I have a family, I have a. I have a job. I'm working around the clock. Or like, I was like, you. Were you on call? How do you. What do you say to that person? Trying to play devil's advocate here, you know, how do you make time to learn about all this stuff? How do you make time for a side hustle? Because isn't that just compounding the issue that, that you're already trying to solve?

So, Chris, I've been Working on. I wish I had the master class, but it's going to be a master class. But basically, when I was trying to lose weight, someone had recommended taking a food diary. I was like, what? I know exactly what I eat. And I was like, okay, I'll do it. I wrote down every single thing I ate, how much I ate, how often I ate and how many calories it had. You guess what? I ate like 500 calories more than I thought I ate. Right. And no wonder I wasn't gaining. Losing any weight or gaining weight when I wanted to gain weight. And it was putting a flashlight on what I do. Right.

And what's measured matters. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I recognize recommend people doing the same for their lives. And one thing to do is so every 15 minutes, even if you're doing the same thing, write down what you do. And some people do it for 24 hours. I would recommend doing it for a whole week. And you're gonna realize a couple things. One, you switch very often and there is some attention to do, meaning you're doing one thing. Like, hey, I'm on this podcast from Chris and I'm gonna be thinking about how good he looks for at least the next hour and not going to be able to do anything else. So.

Go back and go back and listen to that joke. That was good. I like that.

So I'm not, I'm not gonna be able to do anything. But is it, you know, especially true in medicine? I'll get a call from a nurse and complete. My wife yells at me this all the time. I, I like turn on the dishwasher but forget to close it all the way so it never turns on. Or I'll leave the, you know, I'll forget to put something. After I'll turn the washer on and there no clothes in there. You know, just easily distracted. And so you'll realize that you switch tasks very often. And so there's Cal Newport, Deep work. A lot of people talk about that.

Yeah.

What you will also realize.

Great book, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. You also realize you have a lot more time. You think you do. You have a lot of episodes where you're just sitting around. Right. Probably doom scrolling on your phone. Maybe you're watching TV or just, you know, reading the sports or what I call it is productive procrastination where you're responding to email, reading blog posts. It's things that feel like you're making a difference.

So busy.

Yeah, yeah. Or reading a book. Right. It's getting you in the way, for example, like Chris and I finding guests, listening to podcasts, booking podcasts, recording podcasts, like, those are things that needle. But if anything gets in the way, it's productive procrastination. Even though it's moving the needle a little bit. But we want to move it, a lot of it, right? And then the last you'll see is that a lot of people, other people, control your time more so than you do. Right? So when are you getting put onto these random meetings? What. When are you asked to do stuff that maybe you don't have to do, maybe you don't? Like, I've had a maze since, since I can remember. Even when I was in the medical school and I could barely afford it and I was like, okay, maybe let me make a little money on the side. But it's. It saves you. You know, I could clean my house. It'll probably take 10 hours. Well, it'll take a maid an hour to clean the whole place. And yeah, it's 100 bucks, which is a lot of money, but it just buys back so much of my time, so. And then the next step would really be adding value to the things you do. And that's a topic for another conversation.

No, that's fantastic advice. And actually I have a blog post, so if you're listening, you're like, okay, this all sounds great. What are some practical ways that we can do it? You just gave one pranay. I have a blog post. How to create 20 to 40 more hours in your week. And there's simple things out there. Have your groceries delivered, hire someone to clean your house. If you were a professional, if you're a high income professional listening, and you make a hundred, 200, $500, $1,000 an hour. What if you could pay somebody $20 to mow your lawn, to clean your house, to go grocery shopping? And by the way, chances are those people can do it better than you and they want to do it. And you're providing opportunities out there for people which allows you to do what you're meant to do, which I think is fantastic. And then just delete. Like I was just telling a friend, he's like, chris, how do you, like, how do you manage, you know, all the stuff coming in? Turn your phone off, put it on, put it on silent. And take all of your apps, like social media apps, news apps, all that stuff off your phone, or make sure you have to like log in. There's little things that you can do to avoid those switching costs that you were talking about. And create a lot more time. I'd love to shift gears a little bit here. Renee, you have a great podcast from MD to entrepreneur. As I said, we have a lot of physicians, a lot of people in the medical community that listen to. What do you talk about on your podcast? What are some of the topics? What can listeners learn if they tune in?

So we talk about how important it is for people to become an entrepreneur. And when I heard the word entrepreneur, I think of Mark Cuban, Elon Musk. But I think we can all take control of our lives and come in entrepreneur and if nothing else, have an entrepreneurial mindset. And what that is, is, is that you see a problem and instead of ignoring it, you're like, can I be the one that fixes this? Could I do this? And we talked a little bit before about being an intrapreneur.

That means, what is that? Yeah, Intrapreneur. Describe that.

So intrapreneur is someone that's in a business, they're employed, maybe they have a W2, and they are innovation in their own company. So for my position, or a position that I had in the past, my company realized that I was doing a lot of educational content, a lot of video podcasts and stuff. And they, they needed someone to do that for them. So they're like, hey, Pranay, would you do this for us? And they created a position for me to do that. I got paid extra, I got to do less clinical time for something that was really easy for me to do and potentially could just take that stuff and repurpose it for other things as well. And so there wasn't that position before. It wasn't this frat for everyone to get this one totem pole, try to get up this one totem pole. Because in medicine, after you become a full fledged doctor, there's only a couple ways that you can move up. Medical director, a hospital director, there's a handful of people and there's a lot of politics that goes into that. But if, say you have a. Called the blue ocean strategy, where it's completely wide, blue ocean, no one else is fishing, and you get to really call the shots and pick it right. And it's something that comes easy to you and that you love. So intrapreneurs seen a problem in the business. So the problem I saw specifically was that we had to watch all these compliance videos. They were all like filmed on VHS in the 80s. They were hours long. And no one watched. No one watched them. So what I did, I spent five hours, I watched them All I compressed it so literally five hours, minutes. I did a script, I recorded it. So you know, took a couple hours, but now they can use that. And then I added a little quiz. Now they could use that forever. And it showed to them that hey, I have this talent. They can go out and pay someone 20, 30, $50,000 or they could give me a small stipend every month and I get to do this stuff that I am doing and enjoy anyways.

I love that. And I think, you know, the, at the core of that and we were talking before the show, James Altucher has a great book called the Rich Employee. And the thing is like I was in a sales role for most of my career, sometimes with small companies, sometimes with large companies, sometimes as a 1099, sometimes it's a W2 employee. But you know, as a salesperson, I always love the fact that you're kind of like your own little entrepreneur operating, you know, with your own territory, which also means you kind of feel like you're out there on your own island sometimes. So it's got its pluses and minuses. But you know, in that book what James talks about is if you find ways to, like you said, be innovative, be creative and just solve problems. At the core of what an entrepreneur does is they solve problems, problems. And you know, that's why I think what you preach, what you talk about with doctors, doctors are trying to solve a problem for a patient. Right. They're trying to improve a patient's health. If you do the same thing, if you try to improve the situation with the business that you're in, that's what an entrepreneur does. And in my, that's why I'm so optimistic about the future of the country. Even though in the world, even though, you know, we have, you know, climate change and we have, you know, the banking crisis, the that's going on, all these things, I have faith that humans, entrepreneurs will solve these problems that are out there.

Love it, Love it. And you're right, it's this innovation and seeing and it's also, you know, a lot of times my business partner is amazing. He has three eight figure businesses but all he does is he sees a problem and instead of saying hey, someone should fix, he's like, what would it look like if I fix this?

Yeah.

How much work would it take? And it's just that small little change in mindset has made him very fee and more importantly than that, he's helped hundreds of thousands of people since then.

And that's what it's all about if you can help more people, then you can make more money. And that's one of the things you're doing, Pranay is you and your partners are helping others invest in real estate. And I know we share a love for multifamily real estate. My book is about value add multifamily real estate. And tell the audience a little bit about what you guys focus on with your company, Ascent Capital.

So we buy. So we go, you know, value add multifamily. So we, we buy. We buy big apartment complexes, we renovate it, and we, we sell. So in that sense, it's similar to what a lot of people do. The. The difference is how we go about doing it. Right? Execution is important. So absolutely. For example, and it's three physicians that started this business, including myself. Someone brought us a deal. We, we have a big group of investors. So people will bring stuff to us. So we're fortunate. But it was a deal in Portland, and it was Portland, Oregon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So was affordable housing. It was expiring. So the plan was you buy it, you kick out all the people that can't afford it. You spent $600 and you make a fortune. And it business plan was great in terms of making money, but it just was something that go according to our values. So we decided not to do it. So we do, we do real estate different, you know, we do with similarly how we do medicine. One of the, one of the other benefits that we have is because we work with so many other groups, we have this extensive network. So a lot of times people will hear virtually integrated. That means that one business has everything involved included in it, right? So property management, construction, and all that stuff. And typically in our world, that's the gold standard. But we bought this property. We were looking to buy this property, and we walked it ourselves. We walked the properties around it ourselves. And we said we found one that was just so much nicer. It had granite counters instead of the quartz. And so we reached to the group that owned it. We're like, hey guys, we're doctors. Who do you guys use for vendors? We got that information and sent it to the verdict interview people, the people that are the gold standard, and they got a quote that was $600 per unit less for a much better renovation scope. So our network is just so powerful. And typically people that are in the business or vertically, they don't think about reaching out to other people. And that's kind of a lot of the value that we add to the groups that we partner with, with, yeah.

There, there's, it's, it can be a blessing and a curse. You know, in certain circumstances, vertically integrated can have advantages. You know, with our, with our mobile home parks, we're, we're vertically integrated. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of great management companies that you can hire to live on site at a mobile home park. But when you look at the scope of the projects that you guys are engaging in, per, you know, having that network can be very powerful, especially when you're multiplying it times hundreds of units like the one you guys are, are looking to acquire. Right. We talked about a lot of different stuff here today. If people are listening, they want to subscribe to your podcast. They want to learn more about the investments that you have, the courses that you have. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

So the website for the podcast is from md.com you can subscribe on Apple Spotify. And if you want to learn more about our real estate company, how we do real estate different, you could go to ascent equity group.com and there's an easy way to me on there as well.

Excellent. And I have both of these links here. I'm going to put those in the show notes right now so that everybody has access to them. Berne, I look forward to continuing our conversation in the future here. Wish you the best on your upcoming deal that you guys have looking at and hopefully next time you're on the east coast, we can, we can catch up here in Asheville.

Awesome. Thanks.

Thank you. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.