Should I get a mentor? (Minisode)

Welcome ladies to The Real Estate Investor Show, providing inspiration, strategies, and insight to empower women investors to live balanced and financially free lives. Now here are your co-hosts, Liz and Andresa Guidelli.

Welcome back ladies, this is Liz and this is Andresa.

Welcome back to The Real Estate Investor Show. Our mission is to empower women to live financially free and balanced lives. We are back with a minisode.

That is correct. Today we're going to talk about should you get a mentor? And at the end of this episode, you're going to have some fun with our stories, but also you're going to get out with specific questions you should ask yourself in order to get to the conclusion if having a mentor is the right fit for you. Are not.

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Okay, so we've been talking about mentorship and mentors, right, Andresa? Because we hear about it so much. So episode 303, if you've not checked that out, talks about where to find a real estate mentor, which is a great episode on that topic. So what we're gonna talk about today though is a little different. Should you even get a mentor, right? And that's a really obviously prerequisite to where to find a mentor. So Andresa and I have kind of different, two different unique perspectives about this, and we're both gonna kind of share with you Andresa having gotten a mentor early on and me and my husband not so much getting a mentor and what that kind of did to our businesses and how that played out. So, and actually ironically, we both spent $30,000. We just did it in very different ways. So here's how we spent $30,000. Excuse me, I should say lost $30,000. But let me tell you the quick story. Our first flip was we flipped a house in New Jersey and it was a, that's a whole other episode for another day, but it was a lot of unknowns with this property. And anyway, we did not get a mentor. We had a couple contractors that we were working with. We had to fire one, we had to hire one. Literally everything that can go wrong on your first flip, I think we experienced. And about a month, 6 weeks into the project where we thought it, it was structurally sound, we could just rehab the property. It was a probably a 2,500-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 2-bath type of home, single family. We put a new roof on as, as one of the main suggestions, spend about, I don't know, $10,000, $15,000 on it. And lo and behold, had another structural engineer come through and gave us a different opinion because we just kind of had a revolving door of people helping us and supporting us, or we thought was supporting us. And lo and behold, we had ended up having to tear the house. Down, which was rough, right? Tearing it down, a house that we thought was structurally sound with a brand new roof. So that was tough. And we proceeded, we kept moving forward, we got the deal done. And I know some of you listening have had projects that just, that don't work out the way you think they're gonna work out. So we got to the finish line. We did end up rebuilding it. We did our first new construction actually. We ended up losing $30,000 on the project and it was tough, right? It was a very tough deal. It was a tough, situation and we borrowed the money. So then it was, we had more money to owe someone. So it wasn't even our own money, which was even worse. However, we learned a lot. And so, you know, in thinking about what would I have done, should we have gotten a mentor? You know, I, I think at the time we didn't because we were young, naive. We thought we could figure it out ourselves and we kept moving forward though. So that didn't stop us. And then we went on to have successful flips and have successful projects. So that was not, that didn't keep happening. But that was a lesson for us. And could that have been different if we had hired a mentor? I would probably say yes, but did we learn what we needed to learn to move us towards our business? I would say yes to that too. So I'm gonna throw the ball to you, Andresa, a little bit about your experience with, you know, getting a mentor.

Yeah, I just wanna throw a disclaimer here. There's no right or wrong of having a mentor or not having a mentor, and I'm sure you all have seen very, let's say, hot nerves, expressions from different angles. You should not get one because they are gurus and scammers or whatever that is, because basically their experience was different. And we have others that swear by it, saying that they were able to grow much faster, much quicker because they loved their experience of the mentor. So we have both angles here and all are valid. What really matters is what do you do with that, right? What do you do with that? In, in my case, in 2011, we invested, my husband at the time, we invested $30,000 on a course and I was definitely committed to get that money back. We were able to get $25,000 back on the first deal. It was a good return on my investment, in my opinion. And let me explain what we did. So the mentorship really, the course itself was about market, the market analysis and how to evaluate a market. And that gave us the confidence to really put pressure on the realtor to find a property that we really knew all the criteria. So when a property show up to the market, I remember it was before Labor Day weekend and I called the realtor and I said, listen, I need to see this property like now, this weekend, tomorrow morning. He came on a Friday. I said, I need to see it tomorrow morning, Saturday morning. And he looked at me and he said, I'm going to the beach. It's Labor Day weekend. And I said, listen, I love working with you. I'm going to see this property with or without you. So you let me know where you are at, because I know this property will not be available on the market on Monday. I know that for sure. So we went in, put a full price offer because I knew the potential of the house, walked the house, and it was very solid and we got the deal done. During that week, the owner got other investor offers, but we were under contract. So that, that, that was that. And during that process, it was a primary house and we did a HELOC. What happened there is that was the game changer that I recouped my money right away, right? I recouped my money by buying the right property. And then we sold it, I think 2017 or '18 after a very high profit. But the money that I made back, here's how. We got an appraiser and the appraiser came lower. And because I knew the market and I knew how to run comps as an appraiser, because I learned that during, with my mentorship, I was able to appeal the appraisal report and therefore increase the HELOC $25,000. So the total HELOC that we got was $68,000, but I consider the extra $25,000 something that I wouldn't have gotten if I haven't had a mentor. Liz, I just want to turn the gears here. Yeah, for people to understand one thing. A mentor will not take you to A to Z. A mentor will take you to A to B, and others, other mentors will take you to B to C, C to D, and go along. I think it's the wrong expectations to think that your first mentor, your only mentor, will take you to the whole way. It's a compound effect. As you evolve, you will have different mentors. You're going to be a different mentee. Keep that in mind as you are growing your real estate business.

Absolutely. Yeah. And we're gonna leave you with some questions in the show notes to, to really explore, you know, for yourself, because there isn't a right or wrong. I think something that really is important is, you know, where do you wanna be in 5 years? You know, and how fast do you wanna get there? I had time on my side, right? We were in our 20s. We had time to kind of take a really long time to kind of figure it out. Would I make that same decision now in my 40s? Probably not, right? Because I don't have time on my side. Not that I'm about to die, Andresa, but it's a different— it's a different game, right? Your timing of life, your resources, your energy, your active versus passive, right? All those things are in consideration. So we're going to leave you with a lot of great questions, that being one of them, obviously. And because there's no right and wrong, but you have to make the right call for you. And to Andresa's point, this mentor's not gonna have a magic wand, but there's certainly, if you do what they say to do, you're paying for that. And how are you gonna— and I love Andresa's way of being, how am I gonna get that money back? Which should be everyone's question when you invest in anything.

Yeah. No. And another thing you're talking about time, right? And another thing that people talk too much about it is the investment or the cost. And it's not a cost, it is an investment. And I want you guys to flip the coin and also think like, how much is costing me not having one? Correct. And that's your time and that's your mistake. You're going to pay either way. You're going to pay for a mentor, you're going to pay for a mistake. That's it. The bottom line for a mentor, in my opinion, is that you're going to be able to leverage this person's experience and resources. Right, Liz? I can't tell you like how much a resource, a contact, a referral is worth.

It's enormous, right? It's everything in this business.

You can't put a price tag into it. And I cannot emphasize to you, the people, if you get a referral from your mentor and it's a rockstar referral, that alone has, you know, dollar signs across the board. And I can tell you from our perspective, CPAs, attorneys, it's just one move, you can recoup your entire investment on a mentor. So it's, it's very broad. I don't want you guys to only think about, all right, this is mentor, this is the price tag. We have put on our show notes and check those show notes for the questions you should consider before you make a decision either way, to get a mentor or not to get a mentor, because the bottom line is that. It's your life. You are in charge. You design it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let us know if you have more questions, tag us on the comments.

Okay.

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