In this solo‑host podcast episode aimed at women real‑estate investors, the speaker outlines three actionable steps to help listeners choose their next strategic move with confidence and reduce decision‑making pressure. First, she urges listeners to define a personal “North Star” – a vivid five‑year vision of success that reflects their own values, lifestyle, and financial goals – and uses a personal story about expanding into Lancaster to illustrate how aligning decisions with this vision creates clarity. Second, she emphasizes choosing opportunities based on alignment with that North Star and one’s investment criteria rather than chasing excitement or shiny‑object strategies, sharing an example of deciding whether to sell a high‑performing Lancaster property. Third, she advises against making high‑level decisions in isolation, recommending the creation of a supportive circle of like‑minded women who can provide perspective, accountability, and blind‑spot detection; she suggests identifying three trusted peers for regular collaboration. The episode concludes with an invitation to InvestorCon, a three‑day conference in Scottsdale that gathers high‑level women investors, offering networking, education, and community support to further empower women to take control of their financial futures.
Chapters
How many times have you thought, I should know my next move by now? You're running a real estate portfolio, juggling a family, and making decisions all day, yet choosing your next step feels heavier than it should. It's not because you lack experience, it's because you are carrying every decision yourself. The more your portfolio grows, the more pressure you feel to choose the right thing. So today I'm breaking down how real estate investors choose their next move, the filters they use, the decisions they can make, so you can have clarity instead of pressure. So let's jump in. I'm going to break down 3 critical steps that you can take so you can make your next move with confidence. Because what we've found within the investor community for so many years is that when you're not feeling confident about your next move, your decisions aren't as crisp, you don't think as clearly, you're second-guessing yourself the whole time. And so we really wanna break down the 3 steps that you can take so that you can avoid that and move powerfully through not just the decisions you're making, but the move and your next steps in your business and in your portfolio, and most importantly, in your life. So let's jump in. The first step I wanna encourage you to do and something that we talk about all the time within our community and with our mentees is determine your north star. So many times I chat with so many different women, obviously throughout the years, but, and recently even, I was chatting with a few women and the one woman was very, I remember the moment she said this, she said, I'm really in between whether I should buy a short-term rental or do the co-living strategy. And I looked at her and I said, where do you want to be in 5 years? Like, what does your future life look like? And you know what? She couldn't answer that for me. She couldn't really define where she wanted to be. So here's why that's so important. Before you can start to say, okay, what is my next strategic move? How do I know if this is a distraction? How do I know if this is the right pivot for me? Or is this gonna move me towards my goals? It's one thing to move towards your short-term goals, but in order to make the right next move for yourself, it should align with your north star. Think of a north star always guiding you, always helping guide those next steps, right? As we think about the Christmas time and, you know, people being guided by the north star, it's the same thing for yourself. And I want you to really think about, not just this vague vision for yourself in 5 years, but really what does that perfect day look like? What are you doing? How are you holding yourself? Who are you with? What's going to light you up in 5 years financially, emotionally, physically, right? All the different areas of our lives. But most importantly, what does that picture of fulfillment look like for you? What is living life on your own terms? Look like to you? Because how it looks like to you is different than how it looks like to other people. And Andresa and I get really frustrated when we hear so many people talking about, oh, if you wanna build wealth, you wanna create financial freedom and take control of your financial future, here is the prescribed strategy. And I have to tell you, that's complete crap, to be honest. So what you wanna do is say, what is your north star? What does success look like to you living on your own terms? What does that look like for you? I remember the time my husband and I were looking at expanding into a new market in Lancaster. And at the time we were doing all projects locally. So it was very, it felt a little overwhelming to be honest, because we're like, whoa, we can't handle a project an hour and a half away. And I remember we were in between, do we buy this property? Or don't we? An hour and a half away from our house. We'd have to, you know, find a third-party management company. We'd have to find a local partner. And it was just beyond where we were in terms of our own local market. And I remember having the conversation with Matt. I remember like we were going back and forth, back and forth, and we finally had peace, a peaceful answer to that question when we reconnected with where we wanted to be in 5 years. So very specifically where we were, we were managing everything ourselves. Not us physically, but we had a team and we really wanted to build the type of company that we weren't personally managing everything ourselves, that we started to partner with third-party management companies. So this purchase of a building outside of our local market allowed us to align with our future vision. So that's the same type of work I want you to do here. The one action I want you to take with this particular step, what does your North Star look like? Don't get hung up in having to have this perfect vision. But what does that look like? What does success look like to you? Not anyone else, but to you. Who are you with? What are you doing? How much money are you making? I mean, simple questions. So that is your first action step I want you to take. All right, let's get to the second one here. The second one I love because the word alignment is literally one of my favorite words right now. I think I say it, I think my kids use it. Literally my 8-year-old and my 11-year-old use the word alignment all the time. So Clearly I use this word a lot if my children are using the word alignment. So the second step after you've really gotten clear on your north star, second thing you wanna do is choose from alignment instead of excitement. I don't know about you, but I think there was various moments of my entrepreneurship, real estate investing, that, that I felt like we were chasing shiny object, the next best thing, right? The next best strategy that people were talking about, or the next best market. It lacked alignment in hindsight. I didn't realize that at the time, but I would say that's one of the lessons that I've learned over the literally 20 years that I've been investing, is that alignment— and again, alignment to my North Star, alignment to my goals, alignment to like what What investment criteria is important to me matters, and it matters more than projected returns. It matters more than just cash flow. It matters more than the equity. It matters more than the numbers. So what I want you to think about for this particular step is that when you're making that choice, this next move, this next step, you're really choosing from alignment with what's important to you versus what's exciting, which is pure excitement or pure financial return. An example recently for me is being faced to whether to sell or hold one of our best performing assets. And it's the property located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Very good cash flow, strong return. It's almost doubled in value over the years of the 6 years we've owned it. It just checks a lot of the boxes of growing market, close to transportation, high occupancy. You know, it just really— and it really has a lot of character, the actual building itself. It's about 50 units. But as we are determining, we were determining, do we keep this? Do we sell it? We own it with investors. We made a decision, you know, in the GPs and said, okay, have we fulfilled on the business plan? Have we gotten this building to as financially and operationally as far as we can get it, obviously on that side of it, but also personally asking the questions, what's important to us now? And for me and my husband, just from a personal perspective, we're looking to deploy active income because we're receiving cash flow from this property into passive opportunities. That was an important criteria for us. So, and then other criteria that we wanted to bring some more projects locally to our, we wanna do more local versus outside of our local market. Not that we won't do anything outside of our local market, but I, we wanna start to sell the right properties that make sense for us to redeploy that cash into some of the local opportunities that were being shown. So for a variety of reasons, we decided this was a decision being made from alignment the next move, sell or hold onto a property versus it being pure excitement. Should we sell or should we keep? What do other people think? And there's a level of excitement that can happen that you can get pulled into in this business. And excitement or just kind of like the outside of it can kind of feel like superficial. Well, when you're truly aligned with your north star and also aligned with your investment criteria, it really, really helps you move forward with power, with grace, and with confidence. So the question that I want you to think about before committing to that next move, before committing to, yes, saying yes to buying something, selling something, moving into a new market, moving into a new asset class, you wanna ask the question, is this decision aligned with my short and long-term goals? Or is it distracting me from them? That's the question you need to ask when this next move is in front of you, literally, and you're asked to make this decision, right? Is this decision aligned with my short and long-term goals? Once, of course, you've created your north star, or is it distracting me from the very goals that I've established? So that is lesson number 2. So first, always determine your north star. What does success look like to you? No one else, but to you. Number 2 is choose from alignment versus excitement. And number 3, and this was a lesson that took me a really long time, really long time to get, to be honest. So I really hope you get it much sooner than me. I'm in my 40s. I hope you get it in your 20s or 30s. Don't make high-level decisions alone. So when we're faced with that next move, and again, we've done number 1, we've done number 2, I still encourage people, and of course women, because that's our community of InvestHer, stop making these major decisions alone. Okay, here's what I mean by that. Every decision ultimately comes through us, right? We are the ones making the decision. No one's No one's making these decisions for us. So that's in your power, correct? But in terms of really exploring possibility, exploring the options, exploring the pros and cons. Now, some of you listening might be like, yeah, I do that all the time, Liz, and I overanalyze. I overdo it, right? Or I can pro and con my next move and then I don't do anything for 6 months. I am not suggesting that. I am not suggesting that be a strategy for yourself, right? What we wanna do is, what we're encouraging you to do at this particular step is to don't feel the pressure to make those decisions yourself. Before you can make a decision, you need to have options. Are you exploring the options that you need? When you're looking at something like, this is my next move, are there other possibilities that could be also there that you're not even thinking about? That's the power of being part of a community. That's the part of being part of a group of women that can also add insight that you may not be able to see. It's like a blind spot, right? They'll be able to see it versus you. And especially from a possibility perspective, we often think our next move is this or this, this or this. I always like to have 3 possibilities, and I really like to create those possibilities with other people because I often will see things one way. Even with my experience, I love to see other people's perspectives because they might have another way to think about that next move than just me heads down figuring out by myself. So the key here is to build a support system for you, right? What is a support system? A support system we like to define as women standing for you, holding you accountable, being sometimes a mirror. You know when sometimes we need a mirror where we've been talking about something for a year and then you have people that are in your life that are standing with you, cheering for you, and in the arena with you saying, "You talked about that a year ago. Maybe it's time," right? So the key is support system, not just like, "Oh, you're great, you can do great." I mean women who stand with you, challenge you when you need it challenged, and support you along the way. I'm gonna encourage you to think about the women that, are in your circle, right? Think about the women who understand your goals, who stand for you in creating the life you want. I know it's hard to even talk about, like, I don't like sometimes get together with neighbors and say, hey, this is the life I want. You have to be in the right circle, right? You have to be around the right people. You have to kind of feel safe to talk about that sometimes. So let me just review all 3 that I think are the 3 critical steps to really feeling confident and clear on your next move. Number 1, make sure you start with that North Star. What is your North Star? That is always number 1. Number 2 is choose from alignment instead of excitement. And number 3, don't make high-level decisions or figuring out your next move by yourself. Don't put that pressure on yourself. And my encouragement is to think about who is in your circle and choose women that you're in consistent contact with, 3 women that can support you and you can support them. And I wanna encourage you that if this, I wanna invite you, I should say, if this, today's conversation about choosing your next move and, and how to do that and when to do it, you know, inspired you to take action, make something happen because you're kind of in between, do I do this or do I do that? I really wanna invite you to join us at InvestorCon. InvestorCon is in Scottsdale, Arizona, June 14th, to the 16th. This will be our 5th annual conference. And what we do at this transformational experience over 2.5 days is you are in the room with high-level women. Last year we had $1.95 billion in the room of assets under management. Over 55% of these women had, had done more than 5 deals, and at least 45% of them have at least $1 million of net worth. These are women who are making things happen. But they, they understand the value of not figuring it out all by themselves. 'Cause we don't know what we don't know. So I invite you to come play in the arena. Come to this conference where Andresa Guidelli and I are the hosts. We have over 30 speakers talking about real estate investing, mindset, business. We have some powerhouse speakers, mindful breaks, phenomenal sponsors that will be there. It's a beautiful resort and I just invite you to come. Be with us. That's why we do this. That's why we are passionate about our mission to help women take control of their financial future. And a step towards that is to be around like-minded women doing the work, right? Expanding their portfolio in a way that works for their life. That is what we stand on. So I invite you to join us. We'll put the link in the show notes, basically just TheRealEstateInvestHer.com, and you'll see InvestorCon right on the website. So invite you to be there. I'd love to personally meet you. Um, but it's June 14th to the 16th, so we'll see you soon. Do something with what you got today, and thank you for listening, and, uh, cannot wait to meet you at InvestorCon.
