Scaling your business and building wealth outside of your business with Gino Barbaro

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 Barbara 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, Larry. 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, bringing them the 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 Gino 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 the. Listen to the show. Home service business owners, 1 to 10 million reven. 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 your family. The. For the majority, you know, that's what I hear. 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. Want to put 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 it? 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? And, 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 you 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 diligence. 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't close a deal. What I've notice 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 advantages 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. Eighteen 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 am 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 got to 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 if that. 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.