Scaling Your Business and Building Wealth Outside of Your Business With Gino Barbaro | Ep 83

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're going to be discussing scaling your business and building wealth outside of your business with Geno Barbaro. Thanks so much for joining us today, man.

Phil, how you doing, brother?

Great. Yeah, we're talking pre show. I'm really excited to talk with you. Quick, quick bio. Gino Barbaro is a pizza guy to apartment owner. He's the co founder of Jake and Gino llc, a multifamily real estate education company that has helped thousands of investors build wealth through apartment investing. Also owner of Barbaro 360. And the sole mission of this is to change the world one family at a time. Starting from scratch, he built a portfolio of over 1800 units with more than $400 million in assets under management. And we are excited to have you here, man. So can you tell us a little bit, how did you go from pizza guy to apartment owner? What does that look like, Phil?

It was painful. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and tell you, man, it was great because it wasn't great. But you have to go through the suck to get to the other side. And if you give me 30 seconds, I can at least share with you why I did it. Because. Because for me, I grew up in the pizza world. My dad was a restaurant owner. I graduated College. I was 22 years old. I didn't want to be in reinsurance accounting. It's like watching paint dry on a wall, bro. It's in a cubicle. 99 John Street. This updating myself. The next year there's the first World Trade center bombing. I'm actually in the city February, I'm going to the subway. I just got out and I say to myself, I don't want to be here. So the next thing that I did was I started looking for jobs. And yes, there was a recession back in 1992 and recessions were different in the past. Like there were no jobs and I was entry level. And I'm like, dude, I have to make my own fortune. So I ultimately went out. My dad, my mom, my brother, we bought a little restaurant in I would say upstate New York. Anything north of the Bronx, New York is upstate. So we're in Westchester County, Putnam County. And I loved it. 1995 to 2008, it was freaking phenomenal. We actually made a ton of money as a small business. The Internet had not taken hold yet. There was no paneras. People actually went out, sat down like Decent human beings. And there was not as much competition. But my dad passes away in 07. And at that point, I'm saying to myself, am I living his dream or am I living my dream? 08 comes and it disrupts the entire world. I read T. Harv Eker's book, the Secrets of the Millionaire mind, and to me, that changed everything because I was being a victim. I was blaming everybody and everything instead of myself. And that word responsibility entered the vocabulary. And I'm like, oh, dude, what do I need to do now? I met my business partner, Jake in 2009. He was the pharmaceutical guy going out, taking orders from our restaurant, bring him to doctor's offices, selling vaccines at the time. And we partnered up, Jake and Gino. We bought our very first property in 2013. It took 18 months to buy that very first property. But after that, three months later, we bought our second property. And within five years, we had almost 1500 units. But the old Geno had one restaurant for 20 something years. The other Geno had 1500 units. And if you want to dive into what were the couple of tweaks that I made to make that massive difference. But for me, going from the pizza guy to the, you know, to the apartment owner, really, there's a couple of things that I had to change to become that. That apartment owner.

Yeah. So this is. This is the whole reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because most people are. They listen to the show. Home service business owners, 1 to 10 million revenue. That's their jam. They're running that play and, you know, single location. Then they get money coming in. But they need to figure out, like, how do I diversify my wealth and go to the next stage of investing? That's just all your assets, you know, are in your business. So can you talk through, like, how did you make that shift from. From, like, what were those. Some of those things?

Well, Phil, I've got six kids, and all I hear. And all I heard was, you got six colleges, you got six weddings. Not boy, you're. It's amazing. I love family. The MO for the majority, you know, that's what I heard. There were people that were like, oh, it's great. You got a big family. But I was so worried and had so much stress in 08, I'm like, I need to do something different. And listen, if anybody's going to go diversify and put any money anywhere, you need to build a financial foundation. I at least had a foundation. I knew what my money Persona was. I Was a great saver. I just didn't know how to invest my money. And if you're going to go invest in any venture, don't say to yourself, I've got a couple hundred grand, I want to buy a duplex. A person with money meets a person with experience. The person with the experience gets the money, and the person with the money gets the experience. How do I know that? It happened to me a couple of times until I wised up and I said, you know what? There's two ways to learn. You either learn on the street or you learn in the classroom. I learned on the street cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it cost me years of my life. Once I decided I want multifamily, how do I do? I went out, I joined a couple mentorship programs. At the time, it was an expense. Now I know that anytime I spend money on myself, it's a massive investment. Then ultimately also I went into life coaching. I became a life coach. And that changed everything for me. Because then all of a sudden, I become clear. I start asking better questions, I start getting around different people, I start looking at things a lot differently. That changed. And for me to tell anybody out here, once you've got a little bit of money, your first inclination shouldn't be, let me go and invest that money. The first inclination is, what's the vehicle that can serve me the best? Now, what I ended up doing, which I should have continued on, I had a restaurant background. I ended up buying a strip mall up in New York, which is the worst deal ever, but it had a restaurant there. What I should have done was I should have taken the restaurant over, and then I could have been the co tenant of this 18,000 square foot facility. So if you're a plumber or you're an electrician out there, maybe you buy a little industrial building, a flex building as your investment. You have five spots. You take up one, you have your office, you've got a little cost segregation there. You've paid yourself, you know, you're paying yourself, and then all of a sudden you have three little spots as rental income. Maybe that's the first thing. I'm not telling you to do that, but that to me makes logical sense. I mean, your owner operating this, that's the first step. You're getting into real estate. But it is another stream of revenue. And you may be saying to yourself, well, how am I going to get the money for this building? Well, you have your money. And then you possibly have maybe some people who work with you let your employees invest into the building and then all of a sudden they have some type of ownership. I'm not talking about, you know, every employee, but maybe somebody who's been with you for five years. You want to show them some type of ownership, create a syndication structure where all of a sudden they become part owner of that building. Do you think they're going to clean the building up? Do you think they're going to help you with the business? There's so many ways to get into it. But before you say to yourself, I've got this money and I need to get a return, that's the wrong question you need to be asking yourself. The first question is, what should I be investing it in? What's my money Persona? What do I want to invest in? What's going to help me the most? What are my goals? And then let me go out and learn about it before I invest any money into it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes complete sense. And there's a couple of things I want to unpack there. So the first thing is, you know, you've been running a successful business. You have $200,000, $300,000 in the bank, and a lot of people are like, okay, I just need to go invest this. But I think what you're saying is first you need to figure out what you're going to invest in, but also you need to get the education so that way you're not just blindly throwing money out there and praying that it actually works.

Absolutely. And that's the thing. Maybe, maybe like you said, Phil off camera, maybe you reinvest it into your own business, maybe you expand, maybe you buy more trucks or maybe buy another location, maybe you go and buy a franchise from that. That's, that's part of your business. So you learn their systems and it can help you. I'm not here to tell you what to invest in. All I'm here to tell you to do is to do some due dilig. And that may be some. Hey, I may need to speak to a coach. I may need to speak to a business coach. I may need to speak to a money coach. I'm training to be a money money coach. And for me, what I've seen, because I've taught hundreds and hundreds of people to invest in real estate. Some of them who have no business buying deals are owning hundreds of units. And then you have people who have seven and eight figure net worths can close a deal. What I've noticed is that it comes down to your money Persona. Your money bio and your relationship with money that's so important, especially for us in the small business world. How did you grow up? I grew up as a saver. I thought, you know, my whole goal as, you know, son of two immigrants, let's stay small, let's buy one little building here. We can't diversify. The restaurant is our business. It's our job, it's our life. And then when I met Jake, I said, you know what? I can start buying deals. I had to go back and look at that relationship that I had with money and saying, hey, I'm saving this money. For what? For an event. I'm saving for college. Why don't I save it to buy an asset and that assets will pay for the event. And when that college is over or that trip is over, guess what? I still have that asset. Printing dollars, making cash flow instead of putting money into a 529 or a 401k and hoping and praying the market goes up. But before you do any of that, you have to learn what kind of assets and what's cash flowing. So for me, that's truly important. Getting crystal clear what works in your life. And obviously tax advantages. I mean, the tax advantage that real estate allows, they're incredible. So I think you really need to understand what you're trying to accomplish.

Yeah, I agree. So you mentioned this relationship with Jake and him being able to just say, hey, maybe you're thinking about things the wrong way or in a way that's not going to be conducive to your goals. What was the relationship like? Because I think a lot of business owners, they don't have that person like a Jake, to help pull them out of that. But what were some of the things that he helped you uncover about? Like, you're a saver, but that mindset might get you this. Or what were some of those things that you would say would help people change how they think?

It's interesting, Phil. I didn't have a Jake for a long time because I didn't know how to look for a Jake. I think that's important. And my first deal that I partnered up back in 05 with what I, who I call Maserati Mike, dude came in to the parking lot at the restaurant driving a nice gold Maserati. I'm like, bro, that is cool. He's like, hey, I got some mobile home parks. You want to invest? I said, sure, I've got money in the bank. He's got a deal. I didn't know what due diligence was. I didn't know what long termism was. I didn't know mobile home parks. I didn't know median income. I didn't know lot rentals. I didn't know a lot. But I gave Mike the money. Mike took the money. 18 months later, money. Money vanished. And when I look back, I can blame Mike all I want. He was a moron, he was negligent, he was fraudulent, he did a lot of things that were shady. But I'm the one who stroked the check and gave him the. And when I look back, one of my mentors told me, every time you make a decision in life, whether it's finding a partner, whether it's getting married, whether it is investing, you need to look at your values. You need to make your decisions based on your values. Values based decision making. And when I met Jake, I'm like, bro, this is great. I love Jake. I saw how hard he worked. I saw how dedicated he was. I saw the fact that he was a family guy. All of these things align well with me. And I'm like, huh? He wants to invest for the long term. He doesn't want the shiny object. He wants to get out of his job. I want to get out of my. My job. We had about the same dollar amounts, and it was great. And then ultimately he moved down to Knoxville from New York. And I'm like, jake, I can teach you the business, and then let's partner up your boots on the ground. So when you're looking to partner with somebody, you better make damn sure that you can bring value to the table. Number one, how do you fit in that partnership? Do you have capital? Do you have experience? Are you willing to work hard? And the thing with partnerships, if you're not the type of person that is willing to sacrifice and willing to put the partnership first amongst everything else, that partnership, I'm sorry, is going to fail. Because there are times when you don't want to work. I mean, a lot of weekends that I had to go away on these trips for Jake and Gino, that I don't want to work because then I got to work all weekend, then I work the next weekend again. I'm like, but you know what? That's what partnership's all about. And setting clear and honest expectations. Those are hard conversations. And most people, you know, in the life coaching world, we call it an assumption. Oh, I can't get into a partnership because I had a bad partnership a couple years ago. You're making an assumption that's called an energy block. Which basically you're saying, I'm going to repeat the same thing I did, you know, three years ago. And if I had that same mindset, I never would have met Jake. I understood it wasn't the partnership's fault. It was my fault. I accept the responsibility. I learned from that, from that massive problem. I thought there was an opportunity there, and I learned it. And then I said, oh, that's how you find a partner. I'd recommend one book to the listeners about scaling by getting bigger, about getting, you know, what you want for your company. It's called Small Giants by Bo Burlingham. I was trying to think of the author. That book. Small Giants, to me, was incredible, because when Jake and I both interviewed the author and we read his book, we're like, dude, that's what we want to be. We don't want to own 17,000 units. We want to own our own units. We have 1800 units. We have no investors. It's just our own capital. We're growing slowly. We're not outgrowing our infrastructure. We're looking to purchase 25 to 30 million dollars of real estate per year, and we're focusing on the profitability. When I say ppu, nobody in the real estate world understands what that is. That's profit per unit. That's how much you're making per door that you own. Most people don't have that metric because they're looking for equity and they're looking for scale. That's not our jam. And us knowing that makes us even better at what we want. So read the book Small Giants. You'll get clarity on what you're trying to accomplish. Because what we wanted is we wanted a small company. Small. We have 100 employees. Now, some people may think that's big, some people may think that's small, but it's manageable. We want a company that has core values. We want to create a company with a lot of culture that people want to be able to work there and we. To be able to buy these apartments where we can have a nice, clean, affordable, safe place for our residents to live. And Small Giants really delivered on a lot of what our mission, our core values were all about.

Yeah, you just said a lot of things, and my ears perked up. And I'm sure other business owners about buying 25 to 30 million per year of apartment buildings. And I want to. I want to talk a little bit nuts and bolts here. Like, let's say there's a business owner that has, you know, $200,000 that's sitting around that they're like, okay, I could invest this money back in my business or I could invest it into real estate. Let's say their values. They say, I want to do real estate of some capacity.

Sure.

Where, where do they go about getting started of learning these things? Or like, what, what would, what would you do if you were in their shoes?

That's a great question. Because things have changed a lot since I've started. There's something called the Internet and searching and something called bigger pockets. And everyone's writing about real estate nowadays and AI and chat, although don't rely on those. That's a to start. But ultimately there's so many different ways you can start getting into real estate. There's something called investing passively. Now, I wouldn't take a hundred grand and just go out and give it to a sponsor. I'd first learn the business. So if you like self storage, go out there and try to join a mastermind or a group. Because people say to themselves, I got 200 grand. That guy's charging 25 G's for his program. Let's say that's a lot of money. Well, is 25 grand a lot? Or are you, you know, losing 100 grand? Because I've had a lot of students come to me and go, man, if I was in the program before, I stroked a hundred thousand dollar check, I never would have invested in that deal. And I've heard that so many times. And I know it. It's the fear of loss. You don't know you're gonna lose the 100 grand, but you know that 25 grand, once you pay it is gone. So for me, if you're getting serious about a niche or about investing in something, only then do you and spend the money. And hey, a great thing can happen. You may spend $25,000 and after six months find out that, bro, I hate this. This is not for me. I'm gonna stick to my business. That was the best 25 grand you'll ever spend in your entire life. Trust me. So for me, pick the niche. Let's pick self storage. Then go out there, start googling self storage and start looking at operators. Start looking at people who are like, investing in self storage, owning self storage. Possibly drive down to the nearby self storage in your town, see if you can speak to the owner, talk to him about the business. Yeah, or an apartment complex, whatever that is. Start going to events that are self storage focused. Go to seminars, go meet people who are doing the business. Because listen, you need to be a steward of your money. And as small business owners, we have that capital. If we become lackadaisical, that capital, say, hey, it's only 100 grand, that's how the rest of your life is going to be. That's the relationship that you have with money. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but what happens is we tend to sabotage ourselves if we start thinking like that. So what I want you to do when you're listening to this, just pick something, like I said, self storage. And then possibly when you learn the business, income, expenses, occupancy, median income, traffic counts, all that stuff within self storage, you're understanding that, then you can start underwriting and looking at deals. And I'm not saying that you have to do it yourself, but then possibly find someone that you can invest passively, stroke a check for 50 grand, or go out and buy like a little 10 unit self storage facility, a small one to start out with. You don't need a 300 unit self storage facility. Jake and I started with a 25 unit. Our very first deal, it was 600 grand. We had seller financing. I started way back in early 2000s with the fourplex. That fourplex served my business. It was up the street from the restaurant. I had four little apartments then I had garages where I used as storage. I actually charged the restaurant rental income so that the businesses getting rental income, the restaurant had the expense. As you know, there's no, there's no Social Security, Medicare on that. Right? You're saving 9, 7% right there. And then I had more storage in the back. So I had one little rental income property right there that actually helped the restaurant business. But I only started with a fourplex. Don't be, don't be scared to start small. Don't listen to these people that tell you, go big or go home. That's not how the majority of us become really successful in business. We tip our toe in the water, we see if we like it, then if we do like it and we can make sense of it, we learn it more and then we start buying deals. So from the 25 unit, Jake, when Jake and I went from a 25 unit, our next deal, three months later it was a 36 unit. And then six months later it was 136 units. Then we went back down to 22 units. Then the next deal after that was like 300 units after that. So you can see, see the progression of starting small. You know, even, even if you're in the plumbing business and You're a plumber. You start out with a truck, you start out with an employee. And then all of a sudden you may get another truck and then a third truck. And then all of a sudden you have another area. It doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen rather quickly if you learn the fundamentals of the business.

That's right. I think what I'm gathering is you need to get immersed in. If you want to be in some type of real estate investing or whatever it is, immerse yourself in that for maybe call it six months a year, and get your feet under you, spend money to learn, just like, you know, you got to learn this stuff. Then once you get your feet under you, you can make better decisions and say, this looks good, this looks good. And then start slowly and build from there.

Phil, what I would say, and this is unfortunate, you know, 30 years ago, you didn't have to do this. You made active income. My dad, back in the 80s and 90s, he had his restaurant, it was about a 300 seat restaurant. There were four families that were eating out of that restaurant. They were four upper class, middle income families, my family and three other families that were actually, you know, living off of that one business. Yes. Unfortunately, nowadays that's not the reality. The reality is, as rich dad says, you need to take your active income on, on that, that quadrant. Take the active income and invest it. Become a business owner or an I, the investor. Take the active and try to start turning that into passive. So you have both. And at some point, listen, the next 10 years, if you do one real estate deal a year in the next 10 years, that's 10 deals or even five deals in the next five years. You could start all of a sudden, start replacing some of that income from the active side. And then if you have the business at one point, if you'd like to walk away, you walk away. If not, you continue to do that along. And here's your retirement income. You're just trying to take active and move it over into the passive side. You need to do that nowadays. That's the reality. I'm sorry, because you're trading time for dollars. And that's what I was doing. And I'll leave you with this quote before you ask the next question. The question that really hit me hard was, am I working hard for my money or is my money working hard for me? Man, Phil, I was conditioned at the age of 8 when my dad gave me $2 because I worked all day. I broke my ass. I worked harder than most Adults did at the age of eight, I was so conditioned to say, hey, work hard, make money great. You need to work hard for your money. You always need to do that. But ultimately you need to have your money working hard for you if you're going to create some type of wealth in this.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that a lot of people, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, is like when, when you think about investing in something and shifting over to the other quadrants, right? You could get. You could get a single family home or a condo or something like that, but. But that then turns into a whole nother job of, like, managing this thing.

It does. So. But.

And you're saying more multifamily or commercial space might be better, but then how do you make it so that it's not turning into another job of, like, managing this thing?

That's a great question. In the beginning. Hey, listen, when I started with Jake in 2011, the first 18 months, I was sitting at the restaurant during the day, bounded away for lunchtime, and I know I was doing the right thing because my mom would stop by. She was, you know, working with me. We were partners together. Gino, why are you always working so hard? And I knew that I was doing the right thing because I loved what I was doing and I needed to learn. I had five kids at the time, and I'm not going to put the financial peril of my family because I didn't know what I was doing. My wife gave me the grace and the understanding to say, hey, I trust you. So if I'm going to get that level of trust from her, I need to make a huge commitment on the front end that I'm learning. And in the beginning it was harder. Right, because you're trying to create another business. That's what you need to do. I think people, when they look at investing, they'll put their money in mutual funds or whatever. I mean, to me, that's the biggest Ponzi scheme going. Because what do people do? They buy high and they sell low. I mean, don't tell me, oh, 10 for the next 30. No one does that. Even the term. Buy term and invest the difference. 90 of the people do not buy term life insurance and invest the difference. They just don't do that. I'm sorry, that's a fallacy. If they do, great, but show me somebody who does that and then I'd be like, bro, you, your money relationship is spot on. I wish there are more people like you, but they're in there in the minority. So what I'm saying is early on when you're starting out, it may look like a job, it may feel like a job, but you learn how to hire property management companies. You become the asset manager. The problem with condos and single family homes is there's, there's a lot of risk. You have one resident in that space, so when you lose that resident, all of a sudden you're 100% vacant, you're paying the mortgage. Although that's a different kind of play, that's an equity play. Because people think they get rich on cash flow, which is what you want to ultimately create cash flow. But what you really do is you get rich on equity. And let me quick example, you buy a home for 100 grand. Your cash flow, maybe $2,000 a year in that property. So at the end of three years, you've got six grand in cash flow. But at the end of three years, that property is worth 150,000. So you made 50,000 in equity, but you only made six grand in, in cash, in cash flow. So you need to understand where you are. If you're younger, maybe you go for those equity plays because you want to extract the equity and start putting that equity into work and cash flow. Now if you're a little bit older and you're like, hey, I want to start clipping some coupons, then you start looking for other deals. And the thing that I like about multifamily is if you do invest in multifamily in these larger deals as a limited partner or as possibly a general partner, getting on somebody's team, you have control of a larger asset, there's more residents, less risk. It's more of like a business. But you got to choose your poison. Anytime you start anything in business, it's going to be tough. For the first couple of years. You're starting out as a plumber, you're starting as an electrician, as the pizza guy. Those first six months, there's a lot of hard work that goes into it. And I think you should view real estate that way. Every time you buy a six unit or an eight unit or you're buying a flex building, every single one of those, we like to call them, like little revenue generating machines. There are little businesses. And that's the mistake that I made investing early on in real estate. I thought I was just buying properties. No, I was buying businesses that had a future stream of revenue. That's why I love real estate. And then you put cost segregation and all the Tax benefits on it, bro. It's a fricking home run. I mean, I'm, I don't want to tell anybody this, create more competition for myself. I always joke around that, but there's so much real estate to go around. And if people really understood the tax code, that's why you want to get the money actively and put it into these investments because they generate income and they're also great for your tax, the tax side of your ledger.

Yeah. So if I'm understanding it's. You got to think of this as a whole. Another business.

Yes, you have to.

One, you have to learn about the business, spend money to learn on how to run this business, how to source deals, find this right stuff. Then you have to actually devote the time to running this business and actually building a real business out of this so that it's profitable, makes money, but the benefits outweigh pretty much most of the other investments from a tax perspective. And if you look at it the right way from an equity side of things, then he's like, yeah, this could all make sense, Phil.

What I'll do is if anyone wants to reach out to me ginoakengino.com I'll send them a free PDF copy of our wheelbarrow profits book. It lays out the strategy. We call it buy right, manage right and finance right. It's in the shape of a wheelbarrow, the two back legs. It's buying the asset and financing the asset. Once those are both done, they're fixed, you're okay. The wheel is the manageright and you can buy a self storage using this framework. You can buy a business using this framework. It's the same thing. You need to buy the business properly. You need to have buy right criteria. You need to have metrics on buying the business. How are you financing it, sba, seller financing, community bank, and then the managed portion of the business. So it's very similar. So when I'm looking at buying a business or I'm looking at buying a multi family, or I'm looking at buying a self storage, I need to look at that framework and try to see how I protect myself. Because if one of those three pillars is off, the wheelbarrow is going to tip over and you're going to have a really, I don't say risky asset, but you're going to have a, you're going to have an asset that's got more risk to it.

Yeah, and I love that analogy. I have not heard that before and I think it's really good. And I think it's a good way to think about it. What was the email? You said that people can email you.

Oh, gino.com.

Okay, cool. I do want to ask you about Barbaro360, about changing the world one family at a time. What is this all about?

You know, you have your midlife crisis. I had mine around 38 years of age. And it wasn't like I gotta run out and I gotta buy a car or I gotta do something crazy. I was just unfulfilled with the, with the restaurant job. I mean, I knew. It's interesting because I knew that God had given me such an amazing opportunity. Two great parents, I had a great childhood. I had a good business, I had a great marriage, great kids. I just felt like I was missing something at work. I felt as if I was being a little slothful. I felt as if I was hiding in the kitchen. I'm washing dishes, I'm in my shed putting away stuff and I'm doing like this $10 an hour work. And I just felt so unfulfilled. And I felt as if I was sinning, to be honest. And that's why one of the reasons that propelled me to get into real estate now at this part of my life, and I created Jake and Gino because I really loved helping people. I love the life coaching aspect because I saw the change that it made in my life. And then all of a sudden, my wife is making fun of me. Oh, you life coach. Six, seven years ago, she became a life coach. She saw how empowering it was and how amazing it was because we're at an event in Cranford, Cranford, New Jersey, and this is right around the holiday season six, seven years ago. And I just presented downtown downstairs at a real estate office afterwards, people are coming up to her, they're crying and they're going, you know, thank you for sharing your husband. And she looks at me, she goes, what do you do? I said, I'm a life coach, damn it. You don't hear me? And she's like, I want to learn about this. So she ended up becoming a high performance coach and all. And, you know, I had my kids go through life coaching school. I wanted to all get certified because I saw the power in it. And as we were going on 2021, 2022, not to get political, I just didn't like the way the country was going. And I could sit back and be a victim and complain, but what does that do to you? About a year ago, we sat down the family I have, my older kids, they're all. They're phenomenal. My kids are phenomenal. I said, what can we do? I think in the world, the root cause of all these issues is the lack of family, is the lack of focusing on it. They've destroyed the family. They've confused people with this consumerism and with not being home and both spouses working. It's really cut down on. On family and the focus. And I said, let's start a company that's based in faith. Let's say that we are faith, that we're Christians. Let's say that we want to focus on the family, but also wellness and nutrition, because that's what two of my daughters are. They're massage therapists. And also the financial aspect of it. How do we help a family? They may have different needs. Every family may have a different need. I think most arguments in the family stem from money, whereas two different parents come from two different backgrounds. I was a saver. My wife was, you know, spend money, don't think about it. Because I've gotten from a single mom, she doesn't have any idea what money is. So you get together, and for 10 or 15 years, what you do is you argue about money. And to me, that could have been destructive. It could have been like the root cause. Then we finally understood and started talking about our differences and started talking about our relationships. And that's why Barbara360 was really. Was really created, really to start focusing on the family, helping these families have these conversations, helping families get together and be open, honest, transparent. What does a dad look like? What does a mom look like? What does a healthy family look like? And listen, no family's perfect. That's. That's the reality. But what are some of the things that you can do to help connect and get closer to your family? And that's what we're truly trying to focus on.

Yeah, I think that that's much needed at the family side. And I think as business owners, it can be. You can be present without being present and not being mindful of your family, your wife, your kids, and how you're showing up and being with them. And I think it's so crucial. I want to ask you one question about this, because I think a lot of people struggle with this, which is like. I mean, usually it's the guy, but the husband maybe is like, has all these ideas. You know, I'm going for 30 million. I'm buying these 30 million apartment buildings. And the wife's like, whoa, whoa. Like I just want to make sure we're good. And like the, the, the safety, you know, that kind of. I don't know if you've experienced that in your family or like you talk about this stuff, like, what do you. How do you communicate with your wife? You know, to build this like, like kind of what you're saying. There's this money issues and the strife. Just curious to get your thoughts on that.

Here's where the pitch comes and maybe you want to work with me or you want to work with somebody else. This is the truth because I had to work through this. I'm going through it right now. I created a money bio for myself. I went all the way back to five years of age, and I learned about all of the quote, unquote experiences that I had with money or the memories that I had. I was five years old. I remember going to the grocery store with my grandma. She's Italian. We went there. There was a bag of toy soldiers. She couldn't afford them. I remember not being able to buy those toy soldiers. There's no credit cards back then. I remember going home and that feeling of not being able to buy them. I don't even remember if my mom took me back because grandma would say, hey, you know, we're going to go back, we're going to buy them. But I remember that longing, not having it right. And then all of a sudden, eight years old, my dad, like I said, pay me the $2, lock in hard work, lock in money, and I'm a good saver. Good saver. Understanding what your bio is and going through all of the experiences and seeing the traumas that you had with money, some of them, maybe it may have been good, but some of us, our parents never talk about money. Some of us grew up and thought that, hey, money is evil. So if your spouse thinks that, but you're trying to make 30 million, you can see the big differences. What you need to do is. And what I love about money coaching is it's not just pure life coaching where you're trying to go forward. And I love life coaching. That's what life coaching is about, trying to set a plan. Maybe looking back a little bit, I think therapy, the problem is that you sit in the past forever and trying to figure that out. What you need to do, in my opinion, is let's look at the past. Let's look and see what happened with your relationships with money, with your relationships with every. Whatever you're trying to solve. Why do you get angry? Why do you get Triggered about money. I get triggered right now about money. You know, about money with this Doge thing. I think it's the best thing on the planet. Who would be against saving billions of dollars in my mind, because I grew up saving, not wasting. I've been making payroll for over 30 years. I'm the last person in my company that gets paid. I don't waste a nickel. And now you have these morons that are wasting billions and adding a trillion dollars every 90 days to the debt. And people are trying to stop that. You see how I'm getting triggered? But I understood that's my relationship. I need to say, well, what do I need to do? I need to calm myself down. Try to think clearly. Because what happens is when you get into that emotional state, the amygdala gets triggered, my frontal lobe, my neocortex. There's no rational thought. It's all gone. So that's what happens with relationships. We get emotional, we get angry. We can't have a rational conversation. And people keep blaming themselves. They don't know why. It's all in the past. Try to dig that up. Try to have conversations with somebody who's really good at that, and then figure out the problem. Let's go to the present. Maybe your husband, who wants to build a $30 million business, is doing it because his dad thought he was a piece of crap. And I'm going to show my dad now, there's nothing wrong with building a $30 million business, but do it for the right reasons. Because then when you. When you ultimately do build that $30 million business, you'll be like, okay, now what? You did it for the wrong reasons. I think people need to understand why they're doing the things they're doing. Going back, understanding that. And then let's bring it to the present and let's have a conversation now and see if those are the right goals. Goals should be based upon your values and your objectives. And if you don't know what happened to you back then and you're trying to work on something unconsciously, that's going to be detriment to the. To the. To the relationship.

Yeah.

I hope that makes sense.

It makes sense. I think a lot of times people just think. They don't look back at how they've experienced things, and they don't think through, okay, this shaped me into this, but that doesn't mean that I have to go forward this way. And I think with your spouse, and even more so because now you're two people trying to make a decision. And you both have traumas, and you have to kind of bring them to the forefront and say, okay, this is where we're at, but where are we going to go and how we're going to work through that?

Yes. And, Phil, I'm going to be honest. Me and my wife agreed on very little when we got married. We've married 26 years. We got six kids. She wanted to homeschool. I'm like, Bro, 20, 20 years ago, homeschooling was not the cool thing. My wife gave birth to four kids at home. I'm like, what's the matter? You don't like hospitals? But I trusted her. That's what she wanted to do. And two of the best decisions we ever made. So I'm just saying you have to have empathy and sympathy and see where they're coming from. Her family homeschooled. My family didn't homeschool her family. You know, there were a lot of midwives, a lot of people who were holistic and natural. We're on the organic wagon years before anybody even talked about it. Her dad's a really big applied kinesiologist. Doctor. Understanding that and saying, okay, let me look at her side. And it's not only with money. So we're focusing on money here. But this comes back to every argument and every decision that you're making. You need to look at the other side. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. What we do as spouses is, you have to hear me, and then I'll hear you. No, listen to this. And this is hard, I know that. But this is, like, the crux of life. This is why people are successful. Whether you're a business leader, whether you're a father, whether you're a spouse. You need to hear the other side first. Let that soak in. Let them see why they're afraid. Maybe they grew up homeless, and to them, money is a security blanket. And if you're starting to go out and scale, well, we don't have money in the bank. I need money to pay bills. I don't want to go back to that state. That's a really big piece of information that you need to know and go, wow, okay, honey, you know what we're gonna do? I'll put some money aside. I'll make sure that doesn't happen. But let's talk about money, and let's understand that. I think that's the thing that we need to do. Seek first to understand, as Stephen Covey says, then to be understood.

Yeah, I completely agree And I, I want to ask you this since I got you, I have a two year old daughter and I think a lot of business owners, you say you have six kids.

Yeah.

And we're talking about like, you know, not just raising them to trade their time for money. And I think as business owners, we kind of get that. How, what are some strategies that you would recommend to people that are raising kids so that way they don't fall into some of these, these mindsets that might be limiting beliefs of some sort.

Biggest mistake that I made, Phil, honestly, from raising my children was I pushed a lot of things on them. A 6 year old, a 10 year old, they're not ready for these financial questions. They're not, but they will see you. So if they see you and your spouse fighting, they're going to mirror that. If there's stress or you're avoiding talking about money, they're going to see that as well. Be open, honest and transparent. If you have a business, great, let them come. All of my kids worked at the restaurant with me. All of my kids worked at Jake and Gino. They came to the events. I actually have my son who's 23 years old. We have a podcast called the Happy Money Podcast. He's on a podcast with me. Let, let them experience it, let it grow organically. Right? Make it fun for them. I mean, I used to try to have my kids read the Richest man in Babylon when they're 10 years old. Most adults don't want to read that. I'm trying to push it on them. One thing I will say about saving money, what I did was I had the old jar system and my kids were talking about the other day, my 26 year old is like, yeah, I know dad, profit first. I know you need to set money aside in personal accounts and whatever's left over, you save. Very simple. They have to see it. And that's the problem with money nowadays. Whether it's bitcoin or credit cards, they don't see the money. Bring your kid to the store with a hundred bucks, let them go out and shop. You only have a hundred dollars and. And then they'll figure out what money is, right? Because all of a sudden they're like, can we afford that? Can we afford that? Can we afford that? There's a need, there's a want. That's what you need to understand. There's price versus value and there's delaying gratification. If I could share one quick story with you about my son, this to me was life changing. As far as for him, and as far as what parents can be doing, he's 16 years old and he wants to buy an amplifier. It's like 1500 bucks. I said, Mike, you have other two other amps. He goes, yeah, but I like this one. I said, you have 5,000 bucks in the bank. You're going to spend 30% of your net worth on this. So right away, I'm using words. I'm, you know, the financial language, because your language becomes your experience. And I had to be the adult at the time. I'm like, bro, you are not buying this amp. And for six months, he wore me down. He wore me down. And then all of a sudden, we bought a deal. I said, mike, let's take the $5,000, put it into the deal. This is seven or eight years ago. Well, in the next seven years, through refinances, through sales, he's generated a seven figure net worth almost close to $2 million. He's generating between five and $6,000 a month in cash flow. And the great thing about it was all of a sudden on our third deal, he's like, dad, he's talking about economic occupancy. He's talking about owner draws, he's talking about seller financing. He's not worrying about going out and buying a gun because he's got his federal firearms license at the age of 21, he got his FFL license. He's not talking about, oh, I want to buy this Tommy gun. He's like, I'm going to wait till this deal refinances, put most of the money in the deal and then take some of that money out. I think that was the biggest lesson that I could have taught my son. And for any of you out there, sometimes we need to be the adults. Sometimes we need to make those decisions that are going to upset them. But in the long run, when they look back, they're like, oh, dad, thanks. It's hard because you're 16 years old, you want the thing, it is your money. But that's the. That. That does not make any difference. He just ended up buying another amp about three months ago because he had a big refi. $75,000 check. He's like, okay, that's your money. But he put 74 away because we just invested into another deal. So understanding that delaying that gratification, once you become an adult and you can control your emotions and make rational decisions on how to invest, you are light years ahead of most other adults if you can do that.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing that story. I think a lot of people, they want to be that. They want to show up. Me, I want to show up as that parent for my daughter. And it's good to see real life examples of people that, that recognize, hey, when I did this, this was the result. So thank you. Where should people go to reach out to you? I know we talked about a couple different things, but like, what's the best place to say, hey, Gino, I really like what you're saying. I need help with this or I want to learn more. What should they do?

Just go to barbaro360.com that's B A R B A R O360.com you can check out our resources there. You can also go to jake and gino.com that's where we've got a bunch of our podcasts on there as well. I mean, the resources are there. I mean, happy money. If you go on the website, you can get a free download of Happy Money. And to me, really, it starts out with the relationship with money. And I wish I had known this years ago. I never would have done a lot of the deals that I did. I never would have partnered with a lot of people that I did. And I would have scaled certain industries or certain businesses that I bought if I understood my relationship with money. Yeah.

Well, thanks so much for being a guest and really appreciate all the candid stories and look forward to continue the relationship.

Thanks, Phil.

You got it.