Finding Your Why: The Core Of Real Estate Success With Steven Pesavento

On today's show, I'm excited to have Steven Pasivento, host of the Investor Mindset podcast. I love that name. And an active real estate investor. He flipped over 200 homes within his first three years in business before pivoting to commercial. And based out of Denver, he now manages teams out of state as an expert at not only finding but also funding deals. Through his top rated podcast and private membership community, he brings together real estate investors focused on growing their business and their lives, uniting around the belief that investing in yourself leads to the biggest roi. Steven, welcome to the show today.

Well, hey, thanks so much for having me and I'm grateful to be here. I love the stuff that you're putting out into the world and I'm really grateful to be able to come here and serve because that's what I do.

Absolutely. Likewise. So, Stephen, for those in the audience that don't know your story, tell us a little bit how you came from a professional background to flipping homes to now syndicating deals and managing commercial projects.

Yeah, so, you know, I think my story is similar to what a lot of folks are going through in life. You know, I had read Rich dad, poor dad at 17, so I got bit by the bug early. You know, that book and you know, Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek and some stuff from Tony Robbins made a huge impact early. But I never took action right off the bat. Something always held me back from getting into the game. It took nearly a decade before I finally had my first deal under my belt from a purchase perspective. So, you know, I went to a phenomenal university, St. John's University up in Minnesota, prestigious in the Midwest. And I graduated, I went right into management consultancy. And I saw I was making phenomenal money working with some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies and doing process improvement. So really, really getting deep into understanding how do things run and how can we make them run more effectively. And so I loved the role, but I mostly loved the title and I loved the paycheck, but it wasn't passionate about it because the folks around me weren't quite passionate about what they're doing. So many folks were showing up for that paycheck so they could spend more time with their kids on the weekend. And I thought to myself, there's gotta be a better way. So I started down this path of searching from different company to different company, looking to find a way to kind of create that passionate environment. And so I was drawn towards tech. Started working in the startup space, doing digital marketing, working for a number of different companies, you know, starting my own, working on that for a year with some other graduates from Stanford and what I would call a huge failure. But it was a huge lesson learned during that entire thing. And glad it was pre raised before we raised that capital from other folks so we didn't have people breathing down our neck if we weren't going to deliver. But coming full circle, when I finally dove into real estate, I went in head first, I said, you know what? Finally, now is the right time.

And.

And I burned the boats. And so when I finally dove in, I started investing in real estate. I remember jumping up off the couch saying, now is the time and I'm deciding right now. And the big key takeaway for me in this whole thing was that once I made that decision, it was a foregone conclusion, it was happening and I was there. But all the way up to this point, for all of those times that I went and looked at houses and made offers, and all those times that I thought about going down this path, I hadn't quite decided. And when I did decide, things, you know, ended up working out really well. That first year, went from zero deals, never even owned my own personal home, all the way up to 75 houses. My first year, 152 and 203. As we kind of scaled back and started focusing on multifamily. And it's such an interesting path to be able to go on, to be able to say, hey, I am going to go all in with everything I have to make this work. And when you go and do things like that in life, things start happening for you.

Absolutely. And man, my hair started to stand up. You talked about rich dad, poor dad. I remember when I was in the bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, picked it up for the first time, somebody actually said, hey, have you read this book? I was looking through the financial stuff. Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek. I talk about it in my book, how I kind of implement a lot of those, lot of those processes. And I imagine from a management consultant perspective, he kind of walks through a very similar thought process. But the one that really hit me was, and you said this talking about Tony Robbins and Tony talks about taking massive action. Steven, I want you to tell the audience when that decision was made, when you said, okay, I'm now going to shift from thinking about this to taking massive action, doing it, you said you jumped up off the couch. What inspired that?

Well, what I'll say is that, you know, I was in this place where, you know, I haven't shared this story a lot. But I was in this place where I was in incredible pain for about two years, a little bit longer than that. I had these awful headaches. They were tension and migraine cell headaches that never went away. Every single day was waking up with a level 3 or a level 4 on a 10 pain scale. And if anybody has been in chronic pain or ever understood that scale is that's not a good way to live. And you end up starting to think and believe that there's no way out of this. And thank God I stumbled on, you know, to some of these amazing people like Tony Robbins. And I was just searching for a way that I could get rid of this pain, that I tried everything I possibly could, from, you know, pain management specialists to physical therapists, to acupuncturist to massage therapy, to every single thing you could imagine in between. It was to a point where it was like self medicating was the only way to be able to be able to socialize, interact because there's always this pain there. And so I had almost come to this point of accepting it and thank goodness I didn't. But I was going through this exercise that Tony talks about and personal power too. And the last time I did this, I shut my startup down. So whenever you go through these exercises, big things happen. And you know, I had this realization that I needed to make a big change in my life. And fortunately for me, I had this spiritual experience. This healer did some of his magical work and the headaches were gone. And I haven't ever gone back to that again. That's a story for another time. But what had happened there was that I had spent some time getting extremely clear on what it was that I wanted and why I wanted it. And so once I got really clear on the what, really, really clear on exactly what it was that I wanted to accomplish and why that was important to me. It ended up becoming an extremely easy decision to be able to look and say, that's exactly what I want. And so I need to find a way how to get there. And the how came after the how was not something that I knew when I made that decision, but because I knew exactly what I wanted and why I wanted it when I made that decision. And it was a foregone conclusion. And you can start figuring out that plan of exactly what you're going to do after. And everything started kind of building from there.

Well, I see your book in the background. Start with why by Sinek. And that's another great book. Steven, you said It's a story for another day, but I'd love to go a little deeper here. I talk about in my book the loss I experienced in my life. I lost my father at a very early age at 5. But a really impactful moment for me was when I lost my best friend. I was nine, I just turned 19. He was only 18 years old. And it took me a little while to process through that, but that's when it hit me. I didn't wake up one day. I finished a bike race one day. That's what I was doing at the time. And it hit me and I was like, this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be honoring the life of my friend and getting the most out of this. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what your why is and what drives you? Because what, 75, 150, 200 homes. Flipping those homes for anybody in the real estate space. If you don't know that, that's a ton of work. What drove you to do that and get to the point where you are.

Well, I think there is always this feeling of not enough growing up. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. Maybe it's not enough money, maybe it's not being enough. If people are really true with themselves, it ends up coming to just a handful of things that almost everybody has in common. Most people don't talk about it. Maybe they're not open minded enough, they haven't gone deep enough to understand this stuff. But those who have, they end up coming to a point where they realize some of these things. And so there is this burning desire to live a life of success. And I look at my grandfather who was very successful. He was a teacher originally, then he started a Dairy Queen and then he started and bought a insurance company and was very, very successful. And I grew up, my parents are both absolutely amazing people. We didn't grow up with a lot of money. You know, my mom was a, was a, and is a bartender now. She owns a bar. So she's an entrepreneur on her own. But growing up without a lot, I always knew like, oh, well, that's the view of what the good life is. If I can be an entrepreneur, if I can build my own business, I can have the ability to, to get rid of all of the stress, all of the fear, all of those anxiety and emotions that go along with not having enough, enough money in this case. But for me in this situation, what had actually happened was that I had met this spiritual healer and that person came into my life by the universe or God's good graces, just at the exact right time. I was living in California. I had previously been working for a company called Growth Hackers, which was started by the director of marketing for Eventbrite and Dropbox. And I was sitting on the beach and I was sitting with my friend, and we were there, and he mentioned that this person was going to be coming into town and he wanted to know if he could stay with us. Well, he was coming from Richard Branson's island, where he was healing. Richard coming to work with Oprah and Maria Shriver. So, long story short, this person does incredible work. Stuff that I would have never believed in or been open to before. My sister had kind of introduced me to this stuff because she was big into it. And then obviously having this experience. Well, that person came in and he did some work, which is very difficult to explain, but the long and short of it is coming out the other side. He essentially told me, well, Steven, because you won't stop asking me what it is that I did. Essentially your mind and your heart, or your mind and your soul were out of alignment. You were believing that you needed to go out and do something or be a certain way in order to live the life that you wanted. But I just put that back into alignment. Now you're good to go, and you can move forward. And sure, there's more to the story than that, but at the end of the day, that coming into alignment and getting aligned on that, what? And that why? And most importantly, getting aligned internally, getting to that center place, When I made that decision, it was like there was nothing in my way. I was able to just move straight forward towards success because there was that much clarity. And so whenever I feel like there's a lot of tension or a lot of resistance, I have to remind myself to go back there. And I don't always do it perfectly, but when I do, that's when good things typically happen.

I love it. And I've had manual work done since I was young. My wife and I live in Asheville, North Carolina, which is a very spiritual place. A lot of people move here intentionally. So if people are listening, they're like, yeah, whatever. Whether you believe in this or not, or you take it as a metaphor, like you just said, if you're in alignment, whether it's a car or a human being, you perform way better. And I appreciate you sharing that story because, um, if for. Especially for people that have been through pain or suffering, you know, whether physical or mental or spiritual. I think a lot of people are shaking their heads right now, up and down.

I could just say that I didn't believe in any of it myself. You know, my sister passed away about six months ago, but she was a. Which is obviously really tough, but she was a spiritual healer herself and big into massage therapy and all these things. And I'm a business person. I'm a logical person. I used to joke with her, because she's my younger sister, that this is this witchcraft. But she started doing this stuff on me while I was having, you know, these terrible headaches. And it was giving me relief only a little bit. She didn't quite have the power that this person was bringing to the table, but thank goodness, because I had almost come to the point of just accepting that I wasn't going to be able to do thinking work because I couldn't use my brain. But bringing it back to real. Did I lose you there?

Oh, no. I was just shaking my head. It's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a life changer. But bringing it back to real estate. What I was gonna say was, at the end of the day, the most important thing that I can recommend to anybody is to get super clear on what they want and why they want it, and then they can put together an action plan about how to get there. And the key thing here is narrow focus, because I think so oftentimes people want to do everything, but then they're not very good at anything. I see it happen every time I go to a real estate meetup and I hear somebody tell me that they're doing more than one type of real estate at a time. Unless they're telling me that they're an absolute expert or they've been doing this for 20 years, I usually write them off or recommend that they go down a path to get more focus, because once you get focused, things really start happening in the right direction.

I agree 100%, Steven. So let's talk about. You were in single family, then you made the switch to multifamily. So going from one area of expertise to the other. And I just finished up your series on. Or actually, I'm in the middle of your series on single family versus multifamily. So tell the audience a little bit about why the switch.

Yeah. Well, I highly recommend you guys, if you want to listen to the series Chris is mentioning, head over to the investor mindset on your favorite podcasting app and go take a listen. Or head over to the investormindset.com multifamily where we've got a whole list of resources available to you. If you're looking to invest passively or actively and just learn more and check it out.

We'll put that in the show. Notes for everybody that's listening. Highly recommend it.

So why did I make the switch? Well, I was flipping so many houses and wholesaling and running this big team and had spent over a million dollars in marketing in two years and had huge overhead and, and was running this business where I was learning so much and I was growing so much and the team's growing and we're making great money. But what I was also realizing was that I was getting farther and farther away or I wasn't getting myself closer to that ultimate goal of building passive wealth, passive income. And I also realized that there was some limits in my ability to scale because of the type of business that I was in. It's really a hustle business, you know, going out and flipping houses or wholesaling. It's a business that has a low barrier to entry, meaning anybody can go and get started now to build a company like I did. It's definitely a little bit more challenging and most people aren't doing that. But what I realized was that if I wanted to build the kind of passive income that I wanted, I was going to need to buy a lot of rentals. And I started going down this path of buying a lot of rentals, right? I had this pipeline. We're buying between five and ten houses a month and then we're reselling them. Well, it was becoming so difficult to actually find properties that the numbers pencil that they made sense. My main market of operation is Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm based out of Denver and so I invest remotely. And it was so hard because so many people wanted to buy and own there. So the market economics just weren't making sense. And so I was looking at how can I scale up and, and take advantages of some of the economies of scale. And I remember going to a conference, I had met with some amazing people. I'd been introduced to some of the benefits of multifamily. And it immediately clicked for me that in order to be able to scale and hit those goals that I wanted to go after, why not just go after a much larger asset, right? Because I've been through the extreme amount of work that it takes to go buy one single family home. Why not go buy 100 units at once rather than go try to buy 100 single family homes? And so I essentially had this realization instantly realized that this was going to be the future of our focus at Von Finch Capital and for the investor mindset. But I wasn't going to just make a rash decision and shut everything down. So over about a year's time, I slowly ramped back my production on the single family front and essentially have stopped flipping houses altogether. We still wholesale a few deals here, there we still work with sellers buying their home and selling them to other real estate investors. But we've stopped flipping because we just realized there's so many advantages on the commercial side. Why not just jump into that space and go and partner with people who have a lot of experience? The same way I was able to scale up in single family, but just moving over to the commercial side, I.

Couldn'T said it better myself. For anybody that listens to the show regularly, they know we're big fans of multifamily. Here I talk about, in my book, the reasons that I moved from single family, like you, Steven, into multifamily. But what were the. You mentioned talking about scaling up, you know, management. What are the three things that if you're talking to somebody that says, hey, what should I. Should I flip homes like you, or should I get into multifamily? What. What were your reasons for getting into multifamily, specifically?

Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. If you are regardless of what type of real estate you're interested in, there's benefits to multifamily and there's benefits to single family. I think one of the big, big benefits to single family is that it's easy to get started and there's a low barrier to entry. Most people have lived in a home that they've rented. Maybe they've owned a home themselves. They're able to understand that asset because it's something that they' personally gone through. Everybody's lived somewhere at some point. But the difference is once you get past that first or second or third single family deal, you quickly realize that the ability to scale is going to be pretty tough and that you're really not able to set up anything in a passive perspective. So one of the big advantages that drew me to multifamily is that, you know, the barrier to entry is higher. So that means it's gonna knock out a lot of folks who are just thinking about jumping in and trying to swim with the sharks, per se. Because the type of folks who are succeeding in multifamily, these are elite investors. And so one of my philosophies has always been focus on my strengths. And I Look for other people who are absolute experts. And so what we've done is we've essentially partnered with phenomenal operators who've got 5, 10, 15 years of experience or more in this space and we're able to bring a lot of value to the table because we're absolute experts at marketing. We've got this phenomenal thought leadership platform that brings in a lot of folks. And on the asset management side, there's some incredible things you can do marketing wise that old school folks just they're not really aware of. So when we can find synergies and come together, it's makes a really great opportunity for our investors. Happy to go more into some of the upsides of multifamily. If you got a specific question for me, Chris.

Yeah, well, I encourage everybody to listen to your series because that really goes through a lot of that. Yeah, I'd actually love to hear more about how you've built out your coaching program, Stephen, and talk about the Investor Mindset podcast and your goals on there. Because I told my this is what resonated with me. I have two boys, 8 and 10, and I tell them your thoughts become words become actions and you have something similar that you say on the Investor Mindset. Do you mind sharing that?

Yeah. So we at the Investor Mindset are really focused on helping people reach financial freedom through real estate investing. But I'm a super solid believer that the core to success really comes with understanding your thoughts and beliefs and how they end up leading directly into the actions that you take every single day. So you don't need to join our mini online coaching program where we do these monthly calls with extremely experienced coaches like Trevor McGregor, who's over 25,000 hours of coaching experience with the Tony Robbins organization, coaching millionaires and billionaires. It's amazing to be able to come in and kind of have a curated set of folks to learn from and listen to and kind of fill your mind with that great stuff. But at the core of what I want to point you guys to is just to make sure that you're doing it. Spend a little bit of time every day listening to something that is going to put you in the right state of mind, that's going to put those beliefs and those thoughts in your mind so they can start being, they can start replacing the ones that aren't serving you. So one of the ways that I do this is that every single day as part of my morning routine, I am listening to something that is really going to put me in that right place, you know, that could be, I could be listening to an episode of the Investor Mindset. I could be going and listening to some Tony Robbins. I could be listening to anything that's coming from a leader who thinks the way that I want to think. And we can essentially install those thoughts into our brain so that we can make really, really big things happen. And if you guys are interested, after interviewing over 100 people on the Investor Mindset podcast, thought leaders like Chris Voss from Never Split the Difference, Jay Papasan, author of the One Thing, Joe Fairless, Rod Khalif, all types of phenomenal investors. What I realized was that there is just five core principles, five things that end up making up the successful investor and just one of them is getting super, super focused. But if you guys are interested, I've put together this free ebook. It's like 25 pages. It's got some of the best information summarized in there. You can head over to the investormindset.com principles. It's got some really, really good resources that I actually go back to myself to remind myself of the way that I need to be thinking and operating. And so those five beliefs or those five waves of action can really change the way that you invest yourself.

I'm going to pick that up. We're going to put that in the show notes as well for anybody that's interested in getting that again. What's the Website Again, Steven? Theinvestormindset.com principles investormindset.com so again we are going to make sure we have all this in the notes. Before we let you go today, there's one question we ask everybody on this show. If you can go back and give your 25 year old self piece of advice, what would it be?

It's such a good question and it's a question that I love asking some of my favorite mentors and the answer that I would give because just, you know, as you can see, I'm pretty gung ho. I'm pretty, I take things pretty seriously. The advice that I would give to myself is to take a moment, it's okay, slow down, it's all going to work its way out and just remind myself that what you can accomplish in 10 years you would never ever imagine. But sometimes it takes a little bit longer to get to the place that you actually want to go and we've got to just flow instead of being so forceful. And so that would be the advice that I would give to myself is just to slow down and enjoy the process as much as the destination.

It's so good And Steven, I love your energy, I love your story, and I love your content as well. I encourage everybody to check out Steven's website, his podcast. Go on and subscribe to that. You can also get our book@nextlevelincome.com just click on the book link and you can get a free copy of that as well. But Stephen, we want to thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story with our audience and bringing more value to it. Thank you so much. Sam.