How to Build Wealth Before You Even Have a Credit Score (500k+/Mo)

And it was my 21st birthday. I was turning 21. I had $6.51 in my bank account, and I owed about $25,000 that I didn't have. Define what you want, figure out how to get it, and then do so much work that it is statistically impossible that you don't accomplish your goals.

Today's guest is going to be Rivers Rodriguez, a college student, 22-year-old who got into the business of real estate and Airbnb arbitrage. Specifically, he's gone in about 15 months from zero to multiple 6 figures of revenue per month from his real estate business. And so today we get to deep dive into what is working, why he's doing it, and maybe how you could get started with something similar. Hope you guys enjoy today's conversation. I personally had a blast interviewing him. Let's get to the episode. Today's episode is sponsored by Empire Management Group. Whether you're a business owner looking to improve employee benefits, strengthen your insurance coverage, grow your sales, develop your leadership team, or build long-term wealth, Empire Management Group provides practical solutions all under one roof. That's right. Their team helps businesses attract and retain top talent, improve operations, and create sustainable growth. Plus, through premier partnerships like AFLAC, they offer career opportunities for individuals looking to make an impact in their community. Learn more at empire-management-group.com. Let's get to the episode. So tell us about that. Tell us about the Cornerstone Housing thing. How did you get started? The whole thing. Yeah, so I was 20 years old, um, and which you're how old right now?

I'm 22.

Okay. 22.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I haven't been doing it a super long time. I think 15 months total. I wanted to get into real estate. I wanted to buy investment properties. I've seen my parents do it relatively successfully. But as a 20-year-old college kid, I lacked lending power. I lacked a credit score. I lacked the capital needed for a down payment on a house. And so, did research, looked online. And came across subleasing or Airbnb arbitrage. And so, I went to local landlords here in Abilene and offered to sign long-term leases, guarantee their rent, whether they're looking for $1,500, $2,500. I guarantee their rents on a 12-month lease or sometimes longer, kind of depends the structure of the deal. And then, from there, if the house is empty, I furnish the house, I throw furniture in it, and then, As soon as that's done, as quickly as possible, throwing it up on Airbnb, VRBO, and trying to get it re-rented for profit. So, if my rent on a house is $2,500, but I can rent it out for $6,500 on a daily basis on Airbnb, then my profit is after cleaning and utilities somewhere maybe around $3,500, $3,000. Yeah.

So landlords around here, do you have stuff just in Abilene or around?

I have, so it's predominantly in Abilene. I have some stuff in Clyde, Merkel, Buffalo Gap, and Haskell as well. Haskell as well as Hamby. So mainly, I think probably 90, 95% of our portfolio is in Abilene. With some stuff on the outskirts as well.

Yeah. Are landlords typically pretty open to this type of thing?

It's one of those things. I think when people are trying to get into this at first, the main thing that they don't realize is that unless you know how to speak in a way that landlords are going to recognize and trust, you're not going to have success whenever it comes to that aspect of it. It's the hardest part. It's the people where, It's the part where beginners struggle the most. Whenever you are talking to a landlord and discussing the opportunity of subleasing, unless you know how to speak to them, you're going to get shot down.

Which is, how would you— because for me, talking to business owners, because I run a business and I've been working with them for 4 or 5 years now. I know what they're going to be asking. And so, what are some of the things that they ask?

So, the biggest thing that you have to realize is you have to build trust. If you don't have trust, if you don't build trust throughout the meeting, whenever you go for your close, you're not going to be successful. Some of the main things that they ask is, How do you guarantee the rent? It's if the property goes vacant on your side and you're not pulling in money, do I still get paid? It's if the property is damaged because of Billy Bob on your side that you rented to, who pays for that? And if you peel back the layers and you peel back the objections, it's all based around the fact that they don't don't trust you or they don't see you as an authority, um, in, in the conversation. Yeah, if that makes sense.

So how does some of that stuff work?

Yeah, it's— and you can do it. If you look at a sublease or a lease agreement, it's just a legal contract. It's a legal contract. 90% of the time it's between a landlord and a tenant. You can structure that lease, that contract, uh, however you want. Some of the things that I do for my landlords is If it is a service repair under $250, we pay for it. So if the toilet gets clogged at 5:00 PM on a Friday, rather than that tenant calling the landlord and bugging him and say, hey, my toilet's clogged, come fix it, they're calling my team and we're going out and fixing it. And assuming it's a simple repair, we cover the cost. Another thing is the lease. If you're signing a 12-month lease and it's $2,000 a month, I as a person or my company that I signed the lease under is legally obligated to pay that $2,000 a month, whether it's vacant and we made money, whether we're barely breaking even or we're making a ton of money on the property and it's super profitable. We're obligated to pay that. And that's where the risk comes in.

You are assuming the risk.

I'm assuming 100% of the risk.

Yeah. Has there been many times where you didn't bring in enough revenue for that month, so it was a loss?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You want to structure and kind of run your numbers to where you want to make sure that over the course of the 12 months, that house is profitable. But there's been entire months that a house has been vacant. You know what I mean? And if the payment is $3,000, then That's coming straight out of the account. You know what I mean? So the idea is as you grow your portfolio and as you get better at researching and not only that, just building connections and essentially a client list, you don't run into that problem. But yeah, it 100% happens and there's kind of no way to avoid it.

Yeah, it happens. I feel like in every business it's inevitable. There's gonna be, there's always risk involved and you're taking quite a bit of risk Yeah. In arbitraging.

Yeah.

Um, which people arbitrage in any industry, I'm finding out. Um, no, that's awesome. So at the very beginning, whenever you're first getting into it and you're like, okay, I'm gonna try this thing, whenever you went to go find your first client, what was that experience like? Did you have resources available to you before, like personal connections, or how did you go about that?

I was lucky enough to have a head start. Um, my parents, like I said, they've been in real estate a long time, so they connected me with the guy who wanted to get his house rented out, and I just had a direct conversation with him. But, but if I was starting over tomorrow—

Which, by the way, before we start, um, we were talking about it earlier, but for context, how many homes are you guys managing And how long did it take to get you there? Just real quick.

Yeah, we have just shy of 100 units in Abilene, mainly single-family homes, but have some duplexes. I have a 12-unit apartment complex in Clyde that we're involved with on the management side. So just under 100 units.

Okay.

In Abilene.

Yeah. In how long? How many months?

In roughly 14 months.

That's a lot.

So we're, you know, it's, Whenever you have consistent cash flow, you're in a good position because I can hire people to automate different processes in my business and it just speeds everything up.

Yeah.

So, I have a guy who's dedicated just for service requests. Whenever anything goes wrong in any of the properties, they contact him, he contacts the plumber, the electrician, and it's taken care of. We have 10 people probably in our cleaning team. I have a guy dedicated just for anything lawn care related. He mows all the lawns. Trees fall down, that's him.

Wow.

I have a guy who's just on the finance side and making sure all of the landlords, all of the investors get paid. He's looking at all the different transactions. And then I have another guy who's looking at deals all the time. So he's scouring Zillow, Realtor.com.

Yeah.

One that a lot of people don't know about that we use a lot is Facebook Marketplace.

Yeah.

And so he's looking for deals. And then once he said, hey, Rivers, we got a meeting for you booked, 12:00 PM on a Tuesday, then I'm going in for that meeting and trying to close the deal, assuming the numbers work on it. So it's, yeah, I have a really good team and super blessed.

Okay, cool. So now we know kind of context How did you get your first client?

So I got my first client. I won't share his name, but my parents knew him for a long time, a pretty big investor here in Abilene. And he wanted to rent his house out. I went in and pitched him. And the only reason why I think he said yes is because he knew my parents. Like, I don't think there's any other world where I went in for my first time trying to close a deal. Yeah. And he says yes unless it's almost a family kind of favorite.

Very personal connection.

Correct. Correct. But looking back with everything that I know today, if I was to have to go get my first property tomorrow, the process is super simple and it's all controllable. You filter out on Zillow or realtor.com, whatever site you want to use. You filter out to rentals. You look at if you want a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, You filter out to 3-bedroom, 2-bath. You filter out to the price range that you want to look at. And then on there, you can see the email and the phone number with the landlord or the realtor attached to the listing. You're creating a template email or a template text, or you're calling and you're sending out as many emails as possible. And out of all of those, you're just trying to book in-person meetings. You book the meetings. If you can get 20, Maybe you get one that says yes, maybe you don't and you get a bunch of nos. But even if you get nos, you learn so much through the nos and then you can repeat the same process.

So that's like your outreach method. Do y'all just do emails or do y'all cold call or?

We cold call. The 3 methods is call, text, and email. And it's in that order. For us, if we can get on the phone with somebody, that's always preferable. If we can't get on the phone with them, we want to text them. And if we can't get a response over text, then we want to email. And if we don't get responses on any of those, then it's like following up every day. So.

Trust is the foundation of every single great business. And the Better Business Bureau exists to protect that. So the Better Business Bureau helps consumers find businesses they can trust, offers scam prevention resources, and supports local business owners through accreditation, networking, education, and visibility opportunities. Brittany Brown, she's the CEO. She's been serving the big country, and she says strong communities are built by strong businesses. Whether you're trying to grow your business or make a smarter purchasing decision, the Better Business Bureau is in your corner. Visit bbb.org to learn more. I'm in the world of inbound leads. Through social media and that sort of thing.

100%.

Have you experienced much inbound yet?

As we've gone, if I've learned one thing in the last year and a half, it's the more money that you can make other people and the better that you can treat other people and the better service— and I'm sure you've seen the same thing— the better service/product that you can provide, the more deals somehow find their way to your doorstep.

Yeah.

And the more people start calling you and texting you. So at the start, zero of that, 'cause I don't have a name, people don't know me, I don't have trust. That's the biggest thing is trust. So I didn't get any inbound leads really at all. But the more I've worked with people, and again, built trust, built a name for myself and kind of reputation, the more landlords call me and say, I have this house. Do you want to rent it? Or investors will call me, hey, I'm building 10 houses off of 1234 Mockingbird Lane. Do you want to manage those for me? Or, do you want to help furnish them for me? Or deals find their way to you.

Yeah.

the better service or product that you can provide.

Yeah, I feel like if you can grind out those first couple months of just outbound, outbound, outbound, because I had to do that at the very beginning. I moved here to Abilene in 2019, zero connection to the city other than I was going to school here. I made some connections at the university and then carried those kind of through college and some of those were through church, some of those through university, but I had to go to them and make an offer basically. And a lot of it, I, in my situation, I could do stuff for free.

100%.

In that industry, I mean, you're— the whole point of it is to profit.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of how I look at it, is you've got to grind out the outbound and eventually you'll start getting more inbound.

100%.

And if you're active on social media, I know this is like obviously simple to people who are under 30 years old.

Yeah.

But you'd be surprised how many people don't even have a Facebook page here.

Yeah, 100%.

And it's strictly word of mouth, which is a great way to have good trust in the community, but you're not going to reach new people as much as you could.

100%.

Um, and so what type of I guess, content have you been putting out on your socials?

So there's, there's 2 types. Um, by the way, 100% agree. A good analogy is a snowball. If you roll a snowball down the hill, at first it's, it's tiny. It needs a lot of— you got to guide it down the hill. But the more momentum and the longer it goes, it just keeps building up snow, and then you have this huge machine that, that rolls itself. And it's a similar way with leads. But we make a few different types of content. On my personal page, I essentially just document my journey, post silly, stupid stuff. And then I also post— I try to document my journey while teaching people for free. I don't have any course, any mentorship. The idea is I'm building this business. This is the journey. I'm showing people what I'm building, how I'm building it, why I'm building it, the wins that I have, the losses that I have. If people find that entertaining and want to tag along, throw me a follow. If people want to learn about this industry and see the mistakes from another person and what's worked for them and try to get in themselves, follow along. And then on my business page, my Cornerstone Housing page, it's Every piece of content that we put out, and it's in your page, every piece of content that we put out is marketed to our exact demographic and it's trying to get leads. It's trying to, again, build trust, build a platform to attract the type of clients that we work with.

So are you marketing towards landlords? Are you marketing towards getting tenants for your short-term rentals? Okay.

Right now, we don't have a supply issue. We have a need for demand. I wouldn't say we have a demand issue because out of almost, well, easy numbers, 100 units that we have, we have zero empty right now. So we focus more on the demand because tomorrow, again, because of the connections and the trust that I have, if I needed to go pick up 10 more houses, I could. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Um, so every, every piece of marketing that we have is, is for tenants. Like, we have yard signs on all over. I have, uh, 4 billboards across Abilene that are, that are up. Um, the social media stuff, those are the 3 main channels.

Have you gotten many leads off the billboards?

No, really, to be 100% honest. And again, for, for somebody watching, it's Um, we've gotten a lot of business off of the yard signs. I get calls all the time saying, hey, I saw your yard sign. Um, what do you do? Do you have houses available for rent?

Yeah.

Uh, gotten a lot of, a lot of calls off of the yard signs. I haven't gotten many off the billboards, and, and they're newer. I, I think I got my first one 2 months ago, roughly, give or take. So no business off the billboards, even though there's a substantial investment on a, like, a monthly basis for those. But the yard signs that we put, like $1,000 for a batch of 100, calls like 5 every day. Yeah, maybe.

I always like to ask that question because a lot of people do have billboards. I've never bought a billboard.

Yeah.

And so I'm just genuinely curious. Same thing with radio too. People buy radio ads. I'm like, How, how many leads are you actually getting off the radio? Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, interesting question because I've run into this before. Have you had anybody shut you down strictly because of your age?

100%. 100%?

Tell me more about that.

It's hard to point out a specific time, but I think walking into any room as a— I turned 22 like a week ago, so 21. I'm barely like old enough to vote or buy a beer. No, not vote, but, uh, buy a beer. And this guy wants to, you know, do business with you. It's always tough.

Yeah.

It's always tough. Um, and again, we've talked about it a lot, but It goes a lot back to trust. I remember this one time I walked into a house and I was messaging back and forth with this guy and he kind of just seemed like a jerk but I went to the meeting anyways, wanted to sublease his house and I walked in the door.

I knocked.

I knocked, he opened, and he was showing us he had probably 5 listings lined up for different people. I walked in the house, I was talking to him. I have somewhat of a script. I was walking him through, and I got to the end and said, okay, so if we work out a deal where I can pay you this rent, guarantee you the rent, I can cover the maintenance cost under X dollars amount, and Um, furnish the property and run it as a— and I didn't even get short-term, like, rental out of my mouth. Um, I don't even— I said corporate rental. Uh, he stopped talking to me, like, completely turned his back, walked out the door, and, and didn't speak to me again.

Uh, did he know that you were in that business beforehand, or were you approaching it as, like, a potential renter?

I think he probably thought That I was lying, if I had to guess.

Really?

Yeah, yeah. And that was an extreme case. He might have just been having a bad day. I have no idea. His cat might have died that morning. But yeah, he turned around, he walked out, and and I was confused, and I tried to walk behind him, and he just got on his phone and was probably texting his next listing, and. Got him on camera.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's, it's, it's nos like that, it's, it's experiences like that that will discourage people from going down that path.

Yeah.

And the nos, in a lot of senses, in many senses, are more valuable than the yeses. A lot of times. You learn more from those experiences and getting a no, if you look at it through the right lens, than a lot of time you will with a yes. I am not necessarily talented. I'm not like a great speaker. If you picture a homeschooled 16-year-old kid who's 5'6 and, you know, not, not like 10 out of 10 Brad Pitt. That was me, you know what I mean? Um, and I think if I would have allowed the nos that I've gotten across my life to discourage me to the point where I could stop trying completely, I would have never had any success, any success whatsoever. So it's, you know, you can look at a no as in, oh, I suck, I'm the worst thing ever. Or you can look at a no of, okay, at what point did I make a mistake? How can I correct it? And then how quickly can I go get my yes? No, my next no, and then the next one, and then the next one. And then eventually you break through.

Yeah.

And you get a yes.

I feel like the fear of rejection is just tremendous among new business owners.

100%. The fear of rejection has killed more dreams than anything else. Anything, anything else.

Yeah. Now I'm at the point because, I mean, it stinks. Like, it feels like somebody punches you in the gut whenever somebody says no. You're like, and then you get all uptight about it. You're like, oh, well, why? Like, what's wrong with me? Blah, blah, blah. But the more that you do it and the more that I do it, um, I mean, every probably 8 calls that I have, like sales calls where I get on, we're talking about maybe closing a deal. I've come to realize that I'll get probably 2 of those.

Yeah.

To sign a deal that I'm willing to work with.

100%.

And so if the quicker I can get through those 6 nos, the faster I get to those 2 yeses.

It just becomes a numbers game.

So yeah, literally like the law of averages. To a T. Um, but yeah, I experienced the whole age thing a lot when it— because I, I got my real estate license whenever I was 19.

Yeah, literally. Like, that's a super saturated market too.

Yeah, in a super saturated market during COVID Abilene, they thought it was booming, the real estate market was booming then, but like now it really is.

Yeah, 100%.

And so it was a competitive time to get in. I sold maybe 5 or 6 houses. Never had made that much money in my entire life. I never had seen a check for over $1,000.

Yeah.

And then they would hand you like $6,000. You're like, one? I just made—

Yeah.

So that was crazy. But I feel like because I was 19, like, people, every time I showed up to a showing, they thought I was like the tenant.

100%.

Who is the college kid renting out the house. And then I'd be like, no, I'm the realtor. And they're like, um, yeah. And then they would like ghost me after that because they don't want a 19-year-old to help them with it. But which—

I get a question for you. What, what did you find helpful in that time to overcome that?

I don't know. I feel like I've always had this, um, this weird desire to keep going and go a route that is not a typical route. Like, still to this day, I will do anything that I can to not have a normal corporate job because I've had a taste of it. I didn't have any expenses at that time, so like, it really didn't bother me that I lost out on business. Like, okay, cool. And then I just went to the gym or whatever.

Yeah.

Now that I, I'm married, I have a kid, I have a mortgage, now it matters a little bit more. Um, but still, like, I, I would rather be doing this and getting nos with the occasional yes than having to be tied down 40 hours a week at a— in an accounting position.

100%.

That's me personally. If you're an accountant, don't be offended. We need you. I pay an accountant. I have to have you.

Yep.

That's so good. But personally, like, that's not what I wanted to do with my life. And so real estate kind of fizzled out. I didn't really enjoy how competitive it was. I wanted to find what they call a blue ocean where there's no competitors. Like, there's people who kind of try to mimic what we're doing, but I don't know what it is. A lot of those don't end up making it. Real quick, today's episode is sponsored by your boy, Daron. I wanna ask you a question. If you feel like there should be more business coming your way, then you're probably right. And it's probably not because your product or service isn't good enough, because not enough people know who you are, which is exactly why I created a 3-day live coaching experience called the Profitable Personal Brand Challenge. In this challenge, I'm going to show you exactly what you need to know in order to turn your expertise into a profitable personal brand through content. My goal with content and business is not to actually make millions of dollars, but it's actually to build a life around what it is that I want to achieve. And for me, it means more time with my family, more, more traveling, less stressing about work and working my life away so that I can go do things that I am called do and serve others, and ultimately more freedom. So if you are ready to become known, build a personal brand on your terms, and grow your business all at the same time, scan the QR code on the screen or click the link in the description below. I'll see you in the Profitable Personal Brand Challenge. Let's get back to the episode.

I think, uh, the mentality of an entrepreneur is, uh, A special one.

It's special. And, and people don't realize how stressful and risky it can be. Like, there have been times— there's been great times, like, oh my gosh, I figured it out. But then the next day—

It's usually followed by a—

The next day I'll lose 3 of my biggest clients, and then I'm like, well, crap, I just committed to a 3-year lease with this new cash flow that I had. What am I going to do? And then you got to figure out, okay, okay, there's a problem. How do you solve it? Problem solve.

It's all problem solving. It's all problem solving. And it's just the, the size of the problems that you're solving grow bigger and bigger through time.

And yeah, there, I mean, there's been times where I started literally losing hair because I was so stressed out. But at the end of the day, like I have learned over the years, to hand those burdens over to the Lord because I can't do it on my own. And so he's called me to do this ultimately. I know that for a fact. So it's going to work out, and it does every time somehow. Amen.

I love that.

Yeah, dude.

Yeah.

Um, so tell us about kind of your, your faith. And I know you mentioned you started a community, or was it a coaching Yep, a private soccer training program. Private soccer training kind of targeted for Christians, Christian athletes. Tell us about that whole journey.

Yeah, so at 15 years old I started coaching. Um, just like any other Mexican family, I had, uh, like 5,000 cousins and a couple— yeah, so I started coaching just cousins, siblings. I'm the oldest in the family of I have 5 younger siblings. And so I started coaching a little group, and I've always closed all the practices that I do with a prayer. And so I grew that from just doing it for free, volunteering time, coaching siblings, to I got my first person who said, hey, Rivers, I'll pay you to Work with my son one on one. I'll give you thirty bucks for an hour. Can you do that? Yeah, absolutely. So I grew from one that one person. It's kind of like the snowball. That one person liked what I did, referred me to a teammate, two, three, four. You know, before you knew it, at sixteen, seventeen years old, I had a full list of of a full schedule of people that I would train one on one. So I started doing groups. So I could fit more, and then I started hiring my my friends so I could do more and help more people. And at at about thirty-ish kids that we were training between myself and and two friends, I decided that I wanted to rebrand the training program that I had as a Christian private training program, and I wanted that to be a big part. heart of our identity, of our reason why we did what we did. Soccer is great, but it's this compared to— it's compared to, one, the life lessons that a sport can teach, but two, the impact that you can have on a kid's life and a kid's story through the faith.

Hmm.

And so we became a Christian brand. We ended every session with a prayer. We held a couple larger Bible studies with free events with 100 kids, 150 kids, and as we continued to grow, it was 2 coaches, then it was 3 coaches, then we got up to, I think probably at the peak, maybe 15 coaches and a social media guy and a guy who ran our ads on Facebook.

Yeah.

So we had a pretty big operation and Again, in all honesty, the reason why I enjoyed it so much is because I was able to have a bigger impact through the faith on so many athletes.

Yeah.

The level of joy and fulfillment and gratitude that I had from teaching a kid to do a new skill move was so— is incomparable to, for example, I had this one kid who I've been training since he was like 4 years old, 5 years old. Phenomenal, like just absolute beast of a player. Um, and I closed out the practice one time and I asked him, hey, do you want to close out the prayer? And he was like 6 years old, uh, and he said, I don't know how to, I don't know how to pray. And I was like, well, just act like you're talking to a friend, you know, act like you're talking to your dad, you know. Just talk to him. And he prayed, and it was this awkward kind of 10-second prayer. And anyways, this kid, again, he's a phenomenal player. He trains all the time on his own, just incredibly incredible personality. And next week we came back, and it was in a group of like 5 other kids. And I said, does anybody want to close us off in prayer? And he starts jumping in the air, both hands, me, me, me, I want to do it. And I was like, okay. You got it. Close it. Close this off. And the most beautiful prayer ever.

It was just—

it was so genuine and pure, and it was amazing. And after he said, I have been practicing, I've been practicing my prayer.

Yeah.

Every night before I go to sleep. I didn't tell him to, but in his head, because he's just such a disciplined, motivated child to get better at soccer, it was practicing to him.

Yeah.

And so he, he, he, uh, Yeah, he led the prayer. It was beautiful. Um, and stuff like that, stuff like that is, is, is, is just, uh, it was amazing. That was an awesome journey.

Is that still going?

It is. Um, because of the amount of time and energy and focus that I have to put into the real estate aspect of it, I still Coach with Next Level, but one of my longtime friends, known him forever, teammate as well at Harden-Simmons, he now runs, runs the program and operations.

Thank you.

Everything like that.

So transitioning to like the real estate thing now, did you expect it to go well from the beginning?

It's a good question. I think similar to what you were talking about, about the mindset of an entrepreneur, I never thought that it wouldn't go well.

Yeah.

If that makes sense. And there was times where I had every reason to believe, like, this is over, I'm screwed here. Um, I don't necessarily know if You ask 20-year-old Rivers, hey, do you think you'll be at 100 units in a year's time? I don't, I don't think I would have been able to like quantify that and have that prediction.

Yeah.

Uh, but I think I always kind of felt that I was going to be successful in whether it was real estate or trading Pokémon cards. You know, I always had a feeling, um, and an inner confidence, I think. Yeah, myself.

No, yeah, that's, that's awesome. Um, I— yeah, I didn't think— I didn't know what I'm doing now today. It's kind of like I had to go through one season and one step to figure out what the next thing was going to be, and then the next thing, and then all—

100%.

5 years down the road, now we're here. I have no— I, I really don't know how I got here other than the Lord was guiding me the whole way.

Yeah.

Um, have you had Any moments specifically that have been like a massive hurdle on the road where it's like, okay, this is something that I didn't even think that I was gonna have to handle, but you had to do it?

That's a great question. I think you're always kind of— we talked about problem solving and different hurdles kind of arise My business model is midterm rentals. I lease to corporate clients houses at bulk, and there's been clients who have 25, 30 houses with me that pay me. Like one client might bring in $200K a month, and and like. 3 weeks ago, that client said, hey, we're leaving all of the houses at the end of September. So it's stuff like that.

So now you gotta figure out—

Yeah. Or else I'm paying the lease on 25 houses, which may be $75,000 that I'm on the hook for. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So it's always solving for hurdles like that. I think one of the biggest hurdles is And one of the biggest problems that I had to solve, one of the scariest moments for the business was I was about 4 months in and I was just growing very aggressively. Like, if I made $10,000 in a month, I was reinvesting to get more houses $9,999.

Yeah.

And I did that for month 1. And then month 2, I made $20,000. And so, I was reinvesting $19,999. I was reinvesting every dollar that went into the business because I found it to be so profitable so fast. Um, and I was just being extremely aggressive, and I was taking on way too much risk. And, and like, looking back, it was like a very horrible decision for me. But like—

Were you overleveraged?

I was, uh— I never— I've never taken on any debt.

Okay.

Um, well, that's, that's a lie. I'll explain it in the story. Um, but I was very, very— I had too much risk. Um, And so because I was picking up all these properties so fast, I remember it was September 2nd, 2025, and it was my 21st birthday. I was turning 21, and I had $6.51 in my bank account, and I owed about $25,000 that I didn't have, and I wasn't For real estate? For real estate, to pay off leases for my houses, or else like you default on your lease and you lose the house.

Which is better than a foreclosure.

Yes, correct, correct, correct. Then you just lose your furniture cost, really. But if it would've gone bust at that point, I would've never really been able to like bounce back and get to where I am now. So I remember it was my birthday, 21st birthday. My girlfriend threw me a surprise party and the whole time I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I owed $25K to all these different people. And I don't have $25K, I have $6.51.

Yeah.

I don't think I'll ever forget the number. And so it's the life of an entrepreneur, you gotta make things work, you know what I mean? And so I was able to, on the payment processor that I used for my first company, Next Level, you can apply for business financing, but you have to sell off a percentage of all your future transactions until you pay off the amount that you borrowed.

Okay.

And like interest, of course.

Yeah.

And so, I took a huge bet, essentially like bet my first company on the fact that I was going to make the second company work. I took out $30,000 in business financing. At a stupid interest rate and selling off again all of my future transactions for that company. And at the time I was still running Next Level, very much cared about Next Level.

And was that just the same thing, but, or what was Next Level?

Next Level is a soccer training company.

Oh, okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah. So I gambled the future of my first business. Thought I was gonna make the second business work and be able to make payroll on both companies. And so I applied for business financing. I paid off the debt, uh, and scraped by, by the skin of my teeth.

Yeah, it's great.

It's always hurdles like that that you're having to solve for.

I feel like one day, like, I don't know, you probably do— your revenue differences are very different from a cert— like, from a marketing business. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And so One day there will be like, oh, there's $20,000 in the account. And the next day you're like, oh, I am negative $5,000. I'm in the red. Like what?

Yeah.

You got, you pay rent, payroll, everything, taxes.

It's like, oh yeah. My, my monthly expense is like more than I ever thought I would make in a year.

Yeah. So I guess right now it's a good market to be in real estate in Abilene, I'm assuming. What are like the margins look like, profit margins look like?

Yeah, so we, we have a couple different arms of what we do with our company. We sublease houses, we manage houses for other investors. So if you own a rental property and you're making $1,500 a month on a 12-month lease but you want to try to increase your cash flow, You can bring in my company, we'll furnish the property for you, we'll rent it out to our corporate contracts— contacts and get you more money. So we sublease houses, we manage houses, and we also buy properties now. Now that we have bigger cash reserves, we can buy properties.

Yeah.

And so on a sublease, I really don't recommend anyone getting into any deal that you're not going to make 50% margins or more on. That like industry standard, that's kind of like outlandish and kind of crazy. But if you do it the right way and you find the right deals and you structure the deals properly and you are doing your research and you know your area and your market and what you'll be able to make on the house as a midterm or short-term rental, you can make at least 50% profit margins.

Yeah. I think.

Managing properties, it's all profit. So we have a 20% management fee. If we rent out your house for $5,000, we keep $1,000 and we have no expenses on that. If like something breaks, and of course it's not our house.

It's just management.

Exactly right. And then if we own the property, you know, you're looking after your mortgage with the type of Contacts and clients that we house specifically, you can make 70%, 80% profit margin if you own it. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's after like, what are some expenses?

The general expenses that you'd be looking at as a midterm rental is you have your lawn care, you have your taxes, you have your liability insurance, you have your cleaning fees. We clean all of our properties minimum once a month because one, we want to make sure that our properties are being kept And two, it's a value add for whoever's living. Like, who doesn't want their house clean? You know, so we clean it once a month. Beyond that, you want to budget in service repairs. You want to factor in one month you're going to have a clogged toilet. The next month you're going to have to replace something in the AC for a couple. You know, you want to factor in. A budget on each house for your service stuff. But those are your general costs.

How much do you use AI?

Good question. As much as possible. As much as possible. ChatGPT and me are besties. We're besties for everything. Yeah, we have, you know, our CRM is powered by Airtable and Claude. Um, whenever we are—

Do you have like automation set up through—

We have different automation set up. It's, it's different in my soccer training business. So many different automations like inbound leads, um, outbound leads, um, session reminders, coaching reminders, uh, blasted out text messages. You know, you have the things that you can automate now are Incredible. In real estate, there's not quite as much that, that you can automate, but we, we automate everything that we possibly can.

Yeah. So do you use it to write up contracts? Yeah, because I do.

Absolutely.

Like, I have had lawyers write up contracts for me and it was $500. And now, sadly, for lawyers, I mean, AI can write a better contract sometimes than a lawyer can, depending on who you go to.

And faster and cheaper.

Yeah. Like I had to write up 2 agreements the other day for some new clients. And I used this platform called Poppy AI. It's big in the content world, but you can basically give it like physical context beyond, like you can give it videos, voice recordings, PDFs, conversations, YouTube channels, whatever. give it all this context and it feeds it into an LLM. And so I'll take every call that I've had with the client, I'll have every proposal that I've made, um, any podcast that they've done or we've done together, and I'll feed it into an LLM. And you can choose whichever one you want, and then it helps you come up with an agreement based on the conversations. So it doesn't miss anything, and it happens in a few seconds.

100%. And it's $10.99 a month, or I don't know exactly, but like, it's crazy.

I was just curious to see.

Yeah, no, AI is, uh, it's, it's here. It's happening. You know what I mean? You know, there's, there's a million different opinions and political views, and, uh, everyone has their own idea of what AI should look like, but what AI is gonna look like is, is completely different, you know what I mean? It's, um, if anyone is trying to get into the job market and they do not know how to use AI and leverage AI, there's one of the highest ROI skills that anybody—

100%.

Can learn. One, one guy going into a company that knows how to use AI is, is easily worth 5.

Yeah.

And you can get paid accordingly. You know what I mean? And that's whether you're going to be an accountant, that's whether you want to be a lawyer, that's whether you want to be a— you want to start an electrician company. You know, you have to be leveraging and using AI.

Yeah. And now I feel like it's the easiest time to get into that because you can literally go to these platforms.

Oh yeah.

If you don't know what you need to learn, you ask it.

100%. The barrier to entry is—

Say, hey, I am trying to become more valuable in this field. I'm an electrician. I want to maybe go interview for this job position. How can I master and utilize AI specifically in this industry to make me more valuable? And it will tell you. And then, and then you could have it teach you every step and everything that it tells you.

You can tell it to give you learning plans. Give me a 3-month plan to make me an expert on this specific topic for this specific niche, this specific company.

So there is getting to be less and less excuses that you can make.

No, there's no excuse. Look, I think your story is a testament to it. For me, if a— again, if a 5'6 kind of chopped Mexican homeschooled from Abilene, Texas, can amount to anything, it's a testament to one, it's God's glory. It's God's work in my life. It's allowing God to work in my life. But it's proof. It's proof that anyone—

Yeah.

Can accomplish anything. You know, define what you want. Define what you want. Figure out how to get it. And then do so much work that it is statistically impossible that you don't accomplish your goal.

Yeah.

The roadmap is simple. It's just who's going to walk. The road is simple, but not many people are going to walk it.

Yeah. I think, and I agree with that 100%, the AI era that we're in, like I can say, I know how it feels for people who are like, oh, I went through school or did this before the internet. I went through school before AI. And I started and built this thing before AI, which is— was ridiculously more hard, difficult than what it is now. Like, literally things as simple as writing a contract or an agreement, you would either have to rip somebody's template and put in your own stuff on a Google Doc, which would take hours at that point.

Yeah, easily.

Because you don't wanna send it over and like you forgot to change a template spot. of like insert blah, blah, blah here, or you go pay $500 to a lawyer. And which starting out, like you don't always have $500 to pay a lawyer.

No, absolutely not.

And so I feel like that's been one of the biggest game changers. But now that AI is here, I'm like, thank goodness, because I wouldn't be able to do what I do now without it.

100%.

Video editing. I'm praying in a year I don't have to ever pay a video editor again. Yeah.

Yeah, it might be less than that.

Or if I do pay a video editor, they can produce about 10 times the amount of videos for the same cost using AI.

Because they can use AI.

Yeah. So I don't know, it's crazy times. Um, where can people connect with you?

The best way to reach me is going to be, um, my Instagram page, rivers_rodriguez9. Um, I, like I said, don't have a course. I don't have a mentorship. Um, unlike 99% of gurus, I, I'm just actually just building the business and documenting my journey and trying to teach people for free. Follow me on there, DM me. I try to go through at least once a day and respond to all of my DMs. I'll throw you a voice note. Questions, um, anything that you have related to The tiny bit of knowledge that I have over a specific business model. Um, I like, I like helping people. Sweet. I love helping people.

Sweet. Go check him out. Instagram. Do you have a YouTube channel or anything?

I do. I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing it yet. It's, uh, yeah, it's a work in progress.

You got to get that up, bro.

Yeah, 100%.

You got to get that up.

100%.

Okay, cool. Go give him a follow. Make sure you go watch some of the other episodes if you haven't already, and we'll see you next time.

Peace.