134: Breaking Barriers: A First-Generation Immigrant's Rise to Real Estate Success with Min Alexander

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Welcome to win the Women Investing Network, the podcast where you can learn from successful entrepreneurs, business leaders and real estate investors who are winning in business and life. Learning from others is the fastest way to grow your skills, gain knowledge and avoid pitfalls so you can win. Join your hosts, Jason Hartman and Rich dad, author Sharon Lechter. Sharon is a business mentor, international speaker and best selling author. Jason is a self made multimillionaire investor, entrepreneur and highly acclaimed thought leader. Together with their successful guests, you'll get the tools you need to win.

Hello everyone. Welcome to this segment of the Women Investing Network podcast. I'm Sharon Lechter, your host and I get to introduce you to somebody that I am meeting for the first time as well. So I'm excited to hear a story. Min Alexander, thank you for joining me today.

Hi Sharon. Super excited to be here.

Your background, as I spoke off air, is pretty impressive. For as young as you are, you have been incredibly involved in innovation in the real estate industry as well as other industries. Currently you're CEO and founder of bosscat and is an online real estate platform digitizing home inspections to automate estimates and online ordering for repairs, renovations and lifecycle services. So I love that. But your background, you go all the way back. You truly have been in the combination of technology and real estate and making things simpler for, for real estate investors. So I just want to applaud you because I just, I'm so impressed with all of the background that you have.

Oh no, I appreciate that. Some of the things that I think about, and especially for maybe some of the listeners out there who want to get started, it's only dawned on me in recent years that sometimes you get to a place where folks see some of the outcomes of many, many years of being, you know, grassroots, very local and starting small and that sometimes it's easy for folks to, you know, feel they're disconnected from some of that. And I love being proud that, you know, my roots in real estate started as a time townhome investor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so when I think about my track record and how I got to where I am, a lot of my success has been that I've always started out as an outsider, having to learn ways to get really comfortable and then that brought a different perspective. But I think investments is something that every woman should be looking at in terms of driving and having control over in some way. And for me, real estate has to be a core piece of that. It's the largest investment that most Americans will make in their lifestyle. Lifetime in real estate is still the number one maker of millionaires in this country.

That's right. If they don't make it in real estate, they hold it in real estate. So it's really a huge part of anybody's portfolio should be investing in real estate. I can't agree more. I started, I tell people, I started real estate investing at the age of 11 because I was living with a father who was a real estate investor. And I had to clean out bathrooms, scrub bathrooms out between tenants and our three shoes. So I said, yeah, it's in my blood. In my blood. So men, I love to ask people to just start off by talking about little men. Give a little bit of your history because people will relate to you.

I am an identical twin. We immigrated to the States when we were five. So, you know, some of the things that I think about that really left an impression on me is I actually have active memories of when I didn't speak English. And that's really odd now because I dream in English. I'm about as American and so proud as you can think that there was once a day when, you know, everything was very new. But one of the things I do remember is we immigrated to Raleigh, North Carolina. You know, my family, we literally had just suitcases, you know, coming over from South Korea. And this is in the late seven early 80s. And so, you know, my parents, they wanted to have a much more different life of being able to be self determined, you know, not being locked into where they were or what society's expectations were from many different angles to be able to be anything that you wanted to be. And that's what America stood for. Us. And so they packed their three girls up, all under five and below. And so we headed to Raleigh, North Carolina. And my uncle, he was a mechanical engineering professor at NC State. But one of the first memories I have is my uncle's house. And so coming from the airport and living in Korea, we were in these high rise apartments, which are very common but super dense, you know, not a lot of trees, not a lot of yard space. And my uncle's house, it was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen up until that time. And it was just like a castle. And so I really think that I fell in love with American homes. And the dream of everything that American homes embody was actually, you know, when we stepped foot into this country.

I love that, I love that story because it Is, you know, you, I tell people when you travel internationally and you come home, it makes you appreciate America even more because there's ye. We have such, such wealth here and such abundance. And it's something that as Americans, we need to appreciate that and definitely love it. So you went to college, you met your husband in college. You also started off with Anderson Consulting. I was at Cooperson Library. But tell me a little bit about the trajectory of your career as how you. Because you went through several incredible different careers on the way up.

I think, you know, what some folks may not realize is, you know, being a first generation immigrant, everyone is driven and pushed into being a doctor. The second best option is marrying a doctor. I actually failed at both. But, you know, it drove me into a business path. And so I was pre med in college and my twin sister and younger sister, they're both doctors. And it was, you know, one of those realizations I had senior year. I was volunteering at, at the Duke Hospital and I loved being there. But there were also some realizations of what I had as my skill sets were not going to make me successful at being a doctor. My level of patience, there were a lot of things that I just realized my path is I really wanted to push into business. And so I started going on the interview circuit for investment banks and consulting and Anderson at that time, they're called Accenture now. You know, I got in with their strategy group and it was just dynamic, you know, being able to lear about business, being able to learn about problem solving, being able to network and create relationships. I think this was really the most exciting part that drove me further and further into business. And then it really rooted the seeds of watching how successful businesses run, watching how businesses become successful, it really plants seeds of why not me? I'm, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I think that really did inspire me to start in real estate super, super small. But it's really, you know, through path in consulting.

I love that. So you may not know too much about me, but one of my mantras and why, when I left public accounting to go into, you know, entrepreneurship, it. My mantra is why not, why not do something different? And you just said, why not me? So I love that. Why not take the path less traveled and chart your own course. And you indicated already that you've been a trailblazer your whole career. So I love that. So keep updating us here.

I think that's a message that most women, especially when you're young, you don't realize how much power and influence you can have if you have the courage. And, you know, for me, starting out, it didn't dawn on me, you know, we talk about why not me now? And it's, you know, many of the times I just felt that whatever the path was, I didn't fit into it or I didn't. I didn't feel that I fit into it. And it was, you know, I have to try something. But most folks don't realize, like, it starts with you and the willingness to get uncomfortable, you know, then you can do anything. But I think, you know, there is some hesitation. I read something earlier on and it was, traditionally, we raise our sons to be brave and we raise our daughters to follow rules. And, you know, this is something that I know in Korean society, it was very much like that. And I think, you know, we're getting much better about that, you know, with more equal opportunity and, you know, societal support. But women, you know, just as courageous, you know, taking risks, calculated risks, when you know that there is a good outcome. I think this is something that we should definitely stress more into. Real estate is a very calculated risk, High risk, high, you know, somewhat. It can be tempered, but, you know, high reward industry. And I think we need more women.

I love what you said. That willingness to be uncomfortable. I think that's so important. And really, I mean, that's. I, I agree. Same thing for me, I can. I never was a follow the leader kind of person. I was like, you know, if somebody else was doing it, why would I do it? Let's find something else. So it's always that, the curiosity. And that's one of the things I talk about our kids today. We're drumming curiosity and creativity out of them because the school system is teaching them conformity. And so as parents, we have to keep that curiosity and creativity alive because that's what generates entrepreneurship. And that's the whole why not spirit. Why not triggers your subconscious to start solving, solving problems and serving needs. And you've done that so many times during your career. You were, before you started Bosscat, you were part of Auction.com. tell us a little bit about that.

I love my time at Auction. You know, founded by two founders, larger than life, really disrupting how real estate was sold. You know, with market transparency, getting to price realization and through technology, you know, that wasn't really around at the time. And so we were going through some digital disruption. You know, like all companies, there are many components of work that were manual. And so I came on board in 2018, April 10, 2018. And it's really about the vision that we had for the business to drive forward a lot more automation, a lot more pricing, sophistication of machine learning and AI. It can be scary if you're not a part of the journey, but there are so many things that technology will not do, like being creative, coming up with these ideas, you know, creating algorithms of how things should work, subject matter, expertise. And I think being able to lean into that because that is the direction that the world is heading toward, but mastering it versus being afraid of it. And this is really the journey that we took at auction. And, you know, love the folks that I met there, learned so much about, you know, driving businesses forward, being creative. And I think a lot of that, you know, really set me up, you know, for a lot, lot of more success, you know, at bosscat. Certainly, you know, now that, you know, I'm the CEO, first time CEO and first time founder.

Yeah, I love it because all the things that you've done built on your expertise to be able to do what you're doing now. So you mentioned off air, you have, you're in 13 states, I believe. So tell me a little bit about what is the future for bosscat and what is the future for Min Alexander.

Well, for bosscat, we're so entwined right now. You know, this is really a baby that I started out in 2015. And so for folks, if you're thinking there isn't a good time, I think, you know, starting a company, getting into something different, it's all. It's actually very similar to having children. There is never a perfect time. And so you drive forward when you have the energy and you have the level of commitment that you can give. Because, you know, starting a company, leading a company, growing a company, it takes the same nurture as you would, you know, bringing a new life into this world. And I think, you know, this is how my leadership team and I approach what we're building at bosscat. We want it to have a life as large as it can be, to grow and build a legacy that's larger than any of us. And so this is the vision that we have. We are in 13 states, we're in 14 markets. But, you know, with new partnerships that we're forming recurringly. We were selected as the preferred estimate provider for the national association of Realtors. This contract was just renewed. Renewed. That's a big one for us. We love brokers and partners, you know, creating growth together. Now we're serving homeowners directly through our maintenance programs, through our technology. There Was a time when brokers, when you wanted to buy a house, you get a home inspection or you get an and you need an appraisal. The two most important documents that you will need to really understand what it is that you bought and what it's worth. And having a home inspection in a 50, 60 page PDF, that's really daunting for most first time home buyers, whether you're an investor or you're living in the home. And what we did is we are technology. We extract the 50, 60 pages. You just have to upload it onto our website, we digitize it and then within about a minute, for most average inspections, we will give you a price range and a table to understand what your home inspection says about the repairs that you need. And so a nice little bar, a pie chart of high priority functional issues, cosmetic issues. And then we line item price what the repair will cost. Trust you in an online shopping cart. So you order the services directly on our site and then once you approve, we trigger and dispatch our order and then we manage it through completion. So rather than two weeks of calling, getting competing bids, competing estimates, and then, you know, getting ranges, but a range of an estimate is only as good as someone who shows up at your house to complete the work. And so this is really the vision that we have to make homeownership easy, accessible and simple. The same as the way that you now buy toilet paper on Amazon. You wouldn't think twice about it. It's just easy and it's thought through and it's intuitive and that's what we're building.

Yeah, I love this. I think it's fantastic because it really takes a lot of the stress out of the purchaser of a new house. You know, you're providing a service and the most successful businesses solve a problem and serve a need. So tell us how people can find you men. And then also you should. You've already share shared so much incredible advice. For those of you listening, please rewind and re listen with some notes. But let's wrap up with you sharing a little bit about your thoughts and encouragement for women getting active in investing.

Yeah, so you can find us@bosscathome.com and feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I think this is a journey that, you know, no one really has a clear answer of where you want, you know, but the more you educate yourself, the more you expand your network, the more that you look into horizons. And really it's about growth mindset, whether it's in your industry, in your company. And for me, I guess the best way to summarize it is I'm an overnight success, 45 years in the making. There are random experiences and random friendships and partnerships that I've formed that it's only at the culmination of when you look back at threads that you realize there was a connection there, there was a driver of why you seek out certain things. So embrace it and then certainly take calculated risks. Nothing good ever happened from being stagnant. There's a quote that I also like is the pain of not growing and the fear of growing. It's, you know, you're. It's uncomfortable either way. So why not seek growth?

I love that. And of course, let's go back to why not? You know, why not you, why not me, why not now? Because, you know, don't get comfortable with the way things are. Find that discomfort in discovering and creating something new. So I just love that man. Thank you so much for sharing your talent and your time and congratulations on all your success. I look forward to seeing it continue to grow. Thank you.

Thank you, Sharon. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. And for all of you, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Please reach out to men and understand that you, you have the ability to do anything you want. Just a matter of making yourself choosing to be a little uncomfortable. I think that's great advice. And discovering how you can start, solve problems and serve needs. So until next time, thank you for listening to this segment of the Women Investing Network. I'm Sharon Lecter, your host. Thank you.

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