The Achieve Podcast - Andrew LeBaron (AndrewLeBaron)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, a show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those individuals who are shaking up the industries and making an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and today excited to be joined by Andrew LeBaron, the founder of andrewlebaron.com and strategist, capital raising, and helping businesses in a lot of ways. So Andrew, You have a background where you can have a lot of businesses, but right now you're focusing on a niche. What got you into this space? And first, thanks for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Taylor Baker Baker. What got me here? Lots of ups and downs got me here. And I think we're obviously more refined the more problems we have and the more, I should say, solutions that we come up with. But about 15 years ago, I was working at JP Morgan, um, at the bank doing mortgage and HELOC customer service, then, um, some light asset management, some, um, deeper, um, bank note sell-off, so on and so forth. It was kind of an interesting time to work there at the bank and learned how capital moved, learned where, where it went, who managed it, who controlled it. And I thought, wow, this is— I'd like to do this. How do I do this? Um, and I jumped into real estate, um, did about 150+ acquisitions from single family, small multifamily, uh, short-term rentals, um, bought a few hotels, um, then I jumped into the hotel, the hotel world. That actually was my liaison to larger deals. I loved hospitality. I built a, a company called buymoretime.com, which is a short-term rental manager and really loved the high attention to detail, bespoke marketing kind of industry. I loved it, and I was really good at raising capital. All this took capital, whether it was debt or raising equity. Um, I had to raise the capital, and raising capital, storytelling. So I was great at storytelling, I was great at pushing a great idea. I was great at pushing not-so-great ideas. And I even found out real quick when obviously some savvy investors said, you know, I don't know about that deal. And I was humble enough to learn, you know, why it wasn't great. So really sharpened my skills in relationship building and building networks and raising capital. Jumped into the Hotel World bought 4 hotels. They were mostly conversions. We converted those to, um, apartments. I started with the Studio 6, Motel 6 build, um, sold half of my equity out of that deal. I bought 2 more, um, refinanced, and then from there bought 2 more. One of them was a complete disaster. I still have it for sale. I can't get it sold. I have some partners still in on it and doing what I can to get it sold. Um, but you know, a lot of mistakes made, a lot of lessons learned. And I started raising capital for other ventures that I have, other real estate ventures, and even for others that need, um, a capital raising system or machine. A lot of times people think about capital, they, they think, oh, I gotta just call a couple people. It's actually a machine, and it's almost like marketing. It doesn't never never quits, never dies. So got to iterate and adjust. But that was a long-winded answer that I hope that answers how we got here.

Oh, that's awesome. That's quite the story. I'm sure a lot of good lessons unpacked through that. Now, how big is the team in the organization right now?

Yeah, so it's myself and 5 others, um, 2 Americans and actually 6 others, I guess I should say, or 6 total. Anyways, uh, the rest are in the Philippines, and we keep it light, we keep it lean. Um, you know, it's— with AI, everything's so automated nowadays. I just don't need the massive team that I used to need before. Um, a lot of this is cloud code and, um, accountability, really just accountability. Sticking to your schedule, sticking to the calls that you have booked, sticking to the follow-ups, and ensuring that you perform and execute.

I love that, and we'll unpack that a little more, the, the use of AI. There's so much there. Now, what would you say at this stage is actually driving growth for you right now?

Right now I'm seeing a lot of groups, whether they be family offices— that's mostly my target— family offices or high net worth investors who want to raise additional capital. Maybe they were really good at building a business on the operations side and they need help raising money. Uh, raising money is, is a unique trait that every company needs to have and adopt or hire, uh, or learn as fast as you possibly can. Um, capital should be the lifeblood of your business. Eventually, uh, with your growth and scale and your multiplier, cap— more capital will be needed. Even if you're sustaining yourself with your existing client base, uh, you'll need additional capital even after bootstrapping. Um, I, I find right now there is so much dry powder hanging on the sidelines that a lot of these groups are asking, hey, how do we raise this money? We got great deals left and right. You know, real estate fell through the bottom a little bit in the last couple years, and now we're seeing some stability. We're seeing some loan maturities happen. The 1.8 trillion-dollar loan maturity wall, the commercial real estate wall. So we're seeing opportunities, and PE firms are acquiring more. But a lot of these boutique firms or smaller groups, they still need to raise that money. So that's where I come in, and I help either make the connections or I build the system for them to, to operate.

That makes sense. And what part of that is feeling harder than it should, and what part's working smoothly?

Yeah, uh, great question. So if it— if I run into a client, or, um, if I'm working with either a partner who doesn't have a track record or hasn't had full-cycle exits yet, it is a little harder. It's not impossible though. Um, most investors right now are pretty skittish. They're very careful. They want real assets. Yeah, they're still investing in all the crazy stuff like crypto and, you know, um, just you know, futures or, you know, stuff that is not so tangible. But right now it's so important to have social proof, to show your work, to collect the referral, to make introductions, to network every single week, to build a team around that network. That works really well. What doesn't work well is spray and pray, try it one time and walk away. And a lot of these groups do that. They, they hire these agencies for, you know, a couple months and then they don't maintain, uh, the, the marketing muscle. And you probably know this as, you know, you're a marketer at heart. Um, you, if you stop, it all stops. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You keep that funnel going, has to keep going. Now, looking back for you, what turning points have had the greatest impact or changed the way you think about running the organization?

Oh man, um, getting help. Uh, one of the biggest issues that most startups— or, uh, and these startups can be ran by a family office or by a small boutique PE firm or by even just high net worth individuals or those who are bootstrapping and they're broke, it doesn't matter— but one of the biggest issues, it's across the board, is they don't start with an advisory board. Like, I don't know why you'd go out on a basketball court without a team unless you're playing one-on-one. And so all these groups want to play one-on-one, but they find out that their competition is playing with teammates. So they're the lone man on the court dribbling the ball, and they're up against 5 guys, and they don't need to play that way. They can literally get the help they need without expending tremendous amounts of capital. I mean, I've seen groups literally create advisory term sheets with no upfront payments to these advisors, but slivers of equity or revenue share. And but one of their advisory members is a capital raiser, another advisory member is a distribution expert, you know, another advisory member is an operations guy. So, so many groups, startup founders, they, they struggle with the mental roadblock of I can't afford I need to raise money so I can grow this. No, you, you need to sell your vision to the right people who are qualified and get them on your team.

I love that. That is a great analogy. I've never heard it put that way, but it's like one-on-one versus one-on-five.

That's right.

That's beautiful. So when you think about your business right now and the marketing, the messaging, what do you feel like is getting the word out for your business and it's working well to get customers and retain them.

Getting customers and retaining them is going to have a lot to do with your ability to stay consistent in your marketing. When you drop in consistency for your clients or for those who follow you, subscribe to you, you're going to lose potential clients down the road. They notice that, they could sniff it, they smell it, they go, okay, Taylor Baker's not as consistent. Consistent. How is he going to be consistent helping me? Andrew's not consistent. How's he going to help me? And then iterating, um, continually continue to iterate with clients, with, with those I work with, with partners. Hey, this didn't work. You know, we, we had this goal, we had this vision. Your particular vertical doesn't work when we, uh, cold call. It doesn't work when we do direct mail. Perhaps we need to try something different. Here are some solutions. And if you're not changing, iterating, testing, um, you're, you're going to get burnt out quick because you're not going to see the results you want. You're going to want to change, shift, or quit. And anyways, that's, that's what's helped us in maintaining clients, maintaining, um, I would say growth and momentum.

I like that. Now, what do you feel like— where do you see there's still opportunity on the table and more potential?

Oh man, awesome question. So there are so many baby boomers right now, so many of them that are handing over the keys to their plumbing business, to their, um, and PE firms, private equity firms, are buying up these. But what I'm— I guess what I should say is there's so many of these baby boomers that are handing over the keys to their— to the Gen X or to the millennials and and they're selling their businesses and they, they really struggle at selling these businesses. So the way that someone can come in and find major opportunity is to be a, be that liaison between selling their business and the new buyer. And that could be improve their ops, just, just improve some operations, add AI to, to a struggle or an old mom-and-pop plumbing outfit who's got great Google reviews, who's got great clout in the community that everybody knows about. Literally, you can go into any of these mom-and-pop shops that are ran by maybe older folks and say, hey, can I help optimize your business? Don't ask for equity right up front. Say, can I help optimize your business? I don't need you to pay me either. I, I want to talk about potential rev share opportunities. If I bring you leads, can we, can we work together on some sort of rev share or partnership? That could turn into equity. You could literally take a sliver, and I know groups that take sliver of 50 other groups out there of, of service companies because mom and pops are, they're leaving, they're, they're selling, they want out. And it's hard to sell a business unless you're really profitable. So if you increase profitability by literally doing the bonehead things like adding Claude Code to the ops, you know, adding Gemini, um, figuring out how to streamline marketing, streamline operations.

You—

I mean, it could take you literally a month to streamline someone's business, help them cut down on costs. You're probably going to help them fire some people, and then suddenly you're a partner. Um, that's probably the biggest opportunity I've seen because it's this— they have, they have actually the most cash too. Um, it's actually Gen X and, and baby boomers combined have the most cash sitting on the sidelines. So they can actually fund you. They can fund your entry into their business and, and seller finance it. And that, that could be a complex structure and we could, we could talk about that another day, but that's my opinion on the largest opportunity right now.

Yes, so true. And that baby boomer organization, that, that, that group is in that process. Now, as you talk about AI and automation, where are some ways you have found internally to utilize it?

Oh man, uh, everything, uh, short of, uh, going to the bathroom, you know, and maybe we'll figure that one out too. Maybe, maybe we'll have like some sort of computer chair or something that— no, I'm kidding. Um, oh gosh. Uh, from lead acquisition to lead scoring to— I, I've set it up to create financial models or calculators. Like you can create a calculator for clients or for potential clients or leads, um, by prompting AI to make a calculator for you. Like if you sell a product, let's say you sell hats and you want to wholesale sell hats. And you sell them in tranches of 100 units per, you know, per sale. You could go door— not door-to-door, but you could, you could prospect potential buyers and say, hey, let's get on a Zoom, check out, check out my model, or check out my calculator I created to make this easy for you. And all you did was tell Claude Code, hey, can you build a calculator that will help my clients, uh, evaluate their return on investment. Um, they can set the price of each hat, they can set the, um, the marketplace, they can add fees and expense lists. You know, you, you can do that right now. Um, AI can do that. Oh man, what have I used AI for? What have I not used it for? Reading emails, sifting emails, insurance. Like, you— everybody should have Claude Code downloaded on their computer, connected to your Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Outlook or Google or Business Workspace and then prompt it to go in and read all your emails in the past and evaluate who is your closest client right now, who is your potential client right now. And then there you go, it just gave you the cheat sheet. Just reach out. Oh, that's right, Regina did say she wanted to learn more. I totally forgot about that. Or, you know, um Gosh, there's so many use cases, man.

Yeah.

Wow.

There's so many valuable gems you just dropped. Just a whole bunch of them. Like anybody listening, right there, school of hard knocks and expertise coming together.

It's just trial and error, man.

Well, I appreciate that. Now, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days that would change the trajectory of your business the most, what would it be?

Changed the trajectory of my business.

Yes.

Oh man. If I was to focus on one constraint, it would be lead volume and, and qualifying lead qualifying. When you, when you have like I have a large list, I have a 23,000 strong newsletter and it's a high open rate. And you know, when I, when I put out offers or opportunities, I get a lot of inbox and I struggle with qualifying leads well. Um, and, and, and, and, you know, if you don't do that, you're going to waste a lot of time. You're going to talk to the wrong people. Um, so lead qualifying on mass volume is a major constraint that I think I can fix if I, if I put some time and effort into working on it. I think developing the right filters. That's right.

Yep. And so, yeah, both ways of doing that. Now, as you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

Oh man, um, I am really excited about where— couple things. First of all, I'm a real estate guy, so I'm really excited about where real estate's headed. Um, I'm excited about where AI is going to close the gap for marketing, advisory, and deal or opportunity sourcing. Um, pretty soon we're going to become a world where you have to quickly wire money. And that might be— that might be— and I sound crazy saying this, but you guys call me back in the next 5 to 10 years. But if AI will close the gap on speed and speed up company and real estate and whatever it is, valuations or evaluations, I should say, that it will be a marketplace. You'll have a marketplace and hundreds and hundreds of hungry buyers. And what used to take weeks to do, you know, evaluate a company's profitability, will literally take minutes. And, and like in 5 minutes you'll know. We'll, we'll do a deep crawl, you know, however that works, on the value of a business, and it will fly off the shelf. Everybody will want a piece of it, and they'll They'll pay for that risk because there's going to be a lot of cash on the sidelines that just want to swallow businesses. So I'm really excited about that. I'm excited about robotics. I'm excited how that's going to change the roofing industry, the plumbing industry. Um, there's, there's a group out there building robots to literally demo roofs, like take the shingles off roofs. Like, we will— we won't, we won't need, you know, I know it sounds bad, it also sounds un-American, but literally roofing companies are going to have leased robots that you— they lease, they throw them on the roof, and they'll demo all the shingles off the roof. You know, if a robot falls off the roof, so what? They'll build them to where they don't break down as easy. No liability. Um, service industries are going to be in trouble. I think they're the last that will be in trouble, but they are in trouble. Um, no one's safe.

Wow, that's crazy. The potential, and, and if you don't take action, the fear if you don't take action.

And so, gotta move.

Absolutely. Either direct your life or be directed by others.

That's right.

Now, when you look, Andrew, at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you, and which ones do you think took longer to learn than they should have?

Um, you know, when, when things weren't going well in a particular raise for one of those hotels that I mentioned prior. Um, one thing that I learned is always communicate, even the bad news. Tell the bad news. Don't be afraid of the bad news. So easy to be afraid of the bad news and not disclose it and keep it to yourself, but it doesn't do anybody good, doesn't do your investors good, and they'll respect you and trust you more. Your investment, you know, for those listening that raise money or that do real estate deals or buy businesses, Your investors will already understand that there are headwinds. They already know that. They know that there's problems. They know that it's hard. That's why they're investing with you, because they know it's hard, or else they'd be doing it. So they expect it. What they don't expect is silence and, you know, radio silence when something is going wrong. So, um, I've been on the— I've been on the side where I've had to tell the bad news, and it's not fun. It hurts, but when you get over that, you'll find out, okay, well, there are solutions still that you just didn't know about them. So that makes sense.

And that's so true in personal life and business life.

It's like big time in your marriage, man, with your kids, with— oh man, in anything, communicating bad news is a skill. I think it's a skill. Some great people are great at it. I, I, I I don't think I'm that great at it. I, I just kind of lay it out there, um, no polish. Some— I think there is an art to polishing bad news. I think you could tell the bad news as bleak as it is, not polish that part, but you could transition the beginning of it and then, you know, and be solutions-minded. Don't just share bad news and not share a solution. That's also— that's a big problem. Some people don't even have— why? I've got no ideas, but You know, this is where we're at.

So true. I love that. That is so true because you get that bad news and you use tact, like be kind, be direct, like the sugarcoating is all right. You don't need to sugarcoat it, be direct, but you don't have to have the brutal honesty. It's like, just be honest, it doesn't have to be brutal. So find that tact in the middle.

That's exactly right.

So man, I love that. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing so many gems, so much wisdom. And so any final words or thoughts for our listeners?

Ah, man. Uh, if you're listening to this and you are either starting or you're in the middle of your growth phase and you're just not seeing the growth that you're looking for, just know that you are most likely 10 to 20 conversations away from your next chapter. Most of the time we don't talk enough to enough people. And talking to more people who are qualified will get you to that next stage. So, so many times we're stuck in our echo chamber. If you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know how to advance, I don't know how to get to the next level, I don't know how to start, it's because you, you don't know. And YouTube ain't going to teach you everything. You need someone with experience, and you just need to open your mouth and have more conversations.

I love that. 10 to 20 conversations away.

Yeah, that's it.

Count it down instead of like, ah, I've had 10, they're terrible. It's like, all right, that means you're 10 away. You're that much closer. Yeah.

Here's the best prompt. What you do is you go to LinkedIn, you search your particular ICP, ideal client profile, or, or the individual who's done it, been there, done that. Look for that guy, type it in, been there, done that. Um, you know, if you're in plumbing, if you're in roofing, if you're, you know, if you're a registered investment advisor, whatever you are, Type it in, source 20 people who obviously are successful. Okay. Send them this message. Don't send them an InMail, just send them a message, connect with them on LinkedIn, or, you know, just send them an email. If you see their email address on their site, send them this message. Hi, I'm Andrew. And I eventually want to be as successful as you are. I'm right now at this point in my career. I really wish I was here and I'm not sure how to close the gap, but I would love to see how I could share with you, share what I have with you and make it fruitful and benefit you, um, even more than this would benefit me. Cause I know you've been there, done that. Do you have time for a call this week? You know, something like that. I've used that and they're like, oh my gosh, guess what? Guess what people want to talk about themselves. I've been talking the whole time because guess what? I'm a prideful person. All I want to do is talk about myself. So when you, when you push that out there and say, hey, will you help me? Guess what? Business owners, they're solution engineers. They want to help you. They're like, oh yeah, I want to help this guy. This is cool. He could be my little mentee. You'll get some that don't care, but when you get on the phone with them, when you get on a Zoom with them, let them know. Be honest. Don't hide anything. Like say, hey, look, we're we're negative, you know, $200,000 in the bank, heaven forbid, but we're, you know, we're, we're really struggling right now. Or, hey, you know, we're doing great, but we're not here. We want to be here. How can we do that? And how can we work with you? You know, they, they want, they want that interaction. And then when you do that, everything changes.

That was gold. Anybody listening, right there, like Thank you, Andrew. Those who wanna learn more, who wanna reach out, andrewlebaron.com, LinkedIn, anywhere else you wanna send them.

Yeah. Uh, just find me literally on my site, andrewlebaron.com. Um, you can also check out my YouTube channel, just The Andrew LeBaron. Um, that's new, starting that. So not, not a ton of subs yet. Um, but yeah, I just feel like I can, probably better illustrate thoughts, feelings, concerns, excitements in video format. Trying to follow your footsteps, Taylor, uh, if I can. I mean, you're a mentor to many, I'm sure, um, but love what you're doing, honor what you're doing.

I appreciate that. I try to be a river, not a reservoir.

Love that, that's great.

So it's not, not mine, John Maxwell.

So Great guy.

So do you have other projects coming up, other things you want to let people know about at all?

Yeah, yeah. And this is something that is up on the horizon. It'll be released here in the next month. It's called thepropstack.com. Um, it's thepropstack.com, and it's prop tech and capital stack kind of mixed together, and it gives you a daily business idea that you can actionably execute every single day.

Wow.

Um, right into your inbox. Um, it is AI-built but is human and peer-reviewed. Um, it gives— it gives— it massages the brain. Every morning you see a new idea. Oh, I could build that. Oh wait, I'm, I'm in IT, I could build that. Oh wait, I have a delivery service, I could do that, you know. So one new idea in real estate every single day.

And when, when, so in the next 30 days they can sign up? Are you taking pre-orders?

Yeah, yeah. In fact, uh, right now you can actually sign up as a subscriber today by going to thepropstack.com, entering your data, and you'll start seeing emails come in here in the next 30 days.

That's awesome, Andrew. Thank you again so much for your time and your wisdom and the insight. I love it.

Taylor Baker, thanks for your generosity and thanks for the opportunity.

And thank you. And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure where to go, again, listen to what Andrew gave you. So many tools. Wherever you're at, reach out to a mentor. Like, people are there to help. Like, believe in humanity. So thank you again, and we'll see you all in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.

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