How To Invest In Real Estate And Grow Your Wealth

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's podcast we have the renaissance man of real estate. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com learn anything about anything investor ninjas.com Scott Todd, how are you on this fine, fine day?

I'm great, Mark, how are you?

Pulse is still normal, respiration is fine. Let's talk to our guest, Jerome Maldonado. If you're not familiar with Jerome Maldonado, he's a self employed entrepreneur. He's done a lot of stuff. I can't wait to hear all about his story. But just very, very quickly. He started multiple businesses, he's invested in multiple areas of real estate. He's purchased multi use retail, commercial property, houses, businesses. He's the renaissance man of real estate and in business. Jerome Maldonado.

Welcome Mark, Scott. Thank you guys for having me here and thank you for the, for the humble introduction. Yeah, yeah.

So let's rewind the tape and tell us how you got started and what you're doing today.

Yeah, so I got started in traditional business. I never had really considered myself a real estate guy until recent years. I invested in real estate in 1998 for misfortunes that I had in business. Right. I just wanted an asset that would stabilize my life and have something that I could have as far as rental income. But I started off in network marketing, direct sales. I got really good at selling at.

A very young age.

I had a very good mentor and things kind of went south on US in 1997. And so from 1993 to 1997 I struggled for about three years. By the way, I like telling people that because I'm a dyslexic kid from the other side of the train tracks. Growing up was in pharmacy school and just trying to push through, to try to do anything I could to make a better life for myself. And my parents always instilled education and I wound up dropping out of college my senior year, a year from graduating and I landed up back home in 1990, in 1998 when things fell apart in 97 from Texas back down to Albuquerque and I opened up a construction company on accident. It was truly an accident. I never thought I'd land up in construction of all industries. My brother in law did drywall. He didn't show up to take his contractor's license.

I did it to support him.

I showed up, I passed my exam and I knew how to market, I knew how to sell. And I got into construction, selling projects. And, and the first year that we were in business, we did seven figures. We did like $1.2 million in sales. It was a great year. I was surprised. And I started buying little rental homes. And it's grown since then. Obviously, we'll get into that Mark through the podcast here, but it's been a great run.

Wow. You know what my takeaway is, Scott? Todd? What if you can market and you can sell, you can write your own ticket. Those are two invaluable skills in life. Would you agree?

I do agree. I think that one of the things that scares people about business and the word that you just mentioned, sales, is that they think in order to do something with sales, they have to come across this slimy, sleazy car salesman. Not trying to insult the car salesman out there, but there is this stereotype that says, okay, well, I mean, I ask a lot of people, when you think of car or when you think of sales, what do you think? And people always either tell me car salespeople or they tell me you. But that only happened once, by the way. Yeah, the thing is, is that, you know, I think that everybody. You're always selling, you're always selling something. You're selling a vision. If you're a CEO, you're selling a vision as a parent, you're selling your, your thought process to your kids, trying to sell them on a direction to take. So you're always selling, man. But you don't have to do it in a, in a bad type of way. Just be yourself. And I think that's the real, real secret to it.

Those who stick around for the long haul, that's exactly it. They, they sell the conviction, you know, and that's one of our sales scripts when we do them is it's seven. It's, it's just a few questions that we ask people. And 70% of it is just listening, you know, just hearing people, hearing people out and finding a solution, making whatever you're selling to them a solution to what they're doing and creating a genuine solution for people. And so that's what we've been doing. We've been creating solutions for people for over 20 plus years. And so, more so than sales, we run businesses that we solve problems for people, you know, and we give people a good quality product and service that has made us millions of Dollars and people are happy. You know, we, you know, we've been fortunate to be able to do so and have a great run with clients, customers and over the last 20 plus years.

Yeah, I mean, speaking of solutions, you're a minority owner in some companies that we all know of. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so I'm a minority owner. We own a lot of our own traditional companies and through the means of our traditional companies, we've been able to buy and invest in other companies. And so I partnered with Tai Lopez and Alex Mir back in like 2017, 2018, and they were big E commerce guys and started buying distressed brands. Pier 1 Imports, which 90 plus percent of the population is probably familiar with. Radio Shack. You know, we don't own the Middle Eastern portion, but the rest of the intellectual properties of Radio Shack we purchased out of bankruptcy this past year. Dress Barn, Modell Sporting Goods. We have linen and things most people think that went by the wayside. And we actually have ownership of that and the Franklin Mint. So you remember the little gold mints that they used to sell on television? Sure, Yep. So that company as well. And so we have a great little run and I have a minority interest in all of them. And so it's been a real interesting two years getting these companies out of bankruptcy and just watching the CEOs go to work rebuilding and taking these companies online. And so they're 100% online. There's no retail establishments as of yet. We're talking about maybe doing some kiosk options and some other stuff down the road. But right now all those companies are still viable, alive, and they're all converted to 100% online brands.

I love that turnaround strategy. Just cut the overhead to nothing but keep the brand asset and that brand loyalty. I mean, you say Radio Shack and people like, oh, I used to love going to Radio Shack and now you just go online and order some transistor you didn't think you could get anymore. You can do it.

Yes. Little Radio Shack batteries that everybody also remembers putting in their little stomper trucks and all their, you know, fidget toys and whatever they were back when we were kids, still viable and alive and they're still for sale.

So what would you say is the biggest lesson, your biggest takeaway from. From buying a distressed asset and trying to rebuild it.

So I don't deal with any of the logistics in that regards. I deal with all the real estate end of it. Of the companies. And so they, I led Dr. Alex Meer. Alex is a Genius. And Ty always brings in his marketing strategies. That's what Ty's specialty is. But I'll tell you, Alex built Zeus, one of the largest dating websites, sold it for $300 million and was down at the New York Stock Exchange selling that about a year and a half ago. And he knows how to build online brands. And through the means of Ty and Alex, I let them do what they're great at and I just intervene and do what I'm great at. And I've gotten really good at real estate development and construction. And so we created a company called esr, which is E commerce supporting real estate. And so I deal with all of the real estate end of. Supported by all the E commerce brands. And then we have all our other companies, but that's our partnership and that's how I've been involved with all of the brands. Although I do have ownership of them. I don't run them, thank God. You don't want me running them. I'm not an E commerce guy. I get by. And so I let the pros do what they do and I just specialize in what I do best and that's real estate.

I love it. Scott.

Todd, I mean, I think it's a great strategy to take distressed companies and turn them around and do it in a more modern way. It always amazes me. I think the pandemic kind of shows us this too is all these companies, they all have this office space, yet the world still operated. So I'm not sure that office space is a good strategy. But yet all the companies are bringing their employees back.

What?

Why? Why are they doing that? Save some money, cut out the office space and like let everybody work from home. That's what they want to do anyway.

Yeah, the only problem with that, Scott, is I'll give you a perfect example. City and state employees. If you're a city and state employee watching this, I'm sorry, I'm going to apologize in advance, but I'm going to beat up on you guys a little bit because we're trying to get zoning stuff done in different cities and we're trying to buy a hotel and this has happened in more than one city. And we'll send out emails and can't get phone. We call them and they get phone messages. The best way to get a hold of us is via email.

And so we'll hit them up on email. We'll say, hey, we'd really like to get you on the phone because I have like specific questions on this specific property that I need to do. And they'll send back an email and say, do you not know we're in a pandemic?

Okay, well, it's.

It's April going, it's May now of 2021, the pandemic. You know, we have. We went full circle here, and people are living again. And they. And I sent an email back, said, yes, I understand that, but can we get a phone call? We're dealing with COVID And I said, well, I didn't realize that Covid can be transmuted over a telephone call. Can you please pick up the damn phone and let us talk? You know? And so my office calls me the next day, and she goes, jerome, did you irritate some lady? We had a lady from the city call, upset, like she was mad. And. And I go, I don't think I got anybody upset. And she goes, you may want to call her back. So I call her back, and sure enough, she was upset. She was so upset because I made her take a phone call and she had to go. And I sat back and said. And I told her, I said, look, we're working. The world's moving. The problem is you guys don't want to go back to work at home, at the office, or anywhere. So, Scott, to your point, I just think people should get back to the office because they need to get off their ass and get back to work. So that's just one of multiple examples, and that was just in the last seven days. And so for city, state employees, look.

We need you guys back at work.

We're trying to pull permits, we're trying to make the world continue going round, and we just want them back at their place where we can make things move.

Not a bad message.

So whatever that's worth, I just want people back to work in their office.

So that I can get a hold.

Of them and I can continue moving. Because. Because we haven't slowed down during the recession, we've continued to move. And I think a lot of successful people, we find ways to continue moving. We pivot, you know, and we're still here because I think we've made good pivots over the course of the last 25 years. I've been in business, and I think successful people do that. I never really think about the problem. I always think about a solution, and we continue moving. And so, you know, a lot of people don't think like that. I wish more people did. I wish we could train it and instill it into more people. And we try, you know, tell people you Know we've got to be solution based. Let's just continue moving forward. So I'd like, I'd like to see people go back to work. I'd like to see office open back up. As much as people are working from home, I think that if there's a place and a need for office use and getting for a lot of people, I think they need to have that commodity of office and being back in there.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I'm on your site now. I see you've got a bunch of coaching courses, real estate coaching program to help aspiring and existing real estate professionals reach greater success in a highly competitive industry. You've got investment opportunities, flipping houses, commercial realtor properties, how to make money in real estate, how to develop real estate. Franchising, Franchising real estate. Tell me a little bit about franchising real estate.

It's not really franchise real estate. It's kind of like the Ray Kroc model. So when 2008 hit, I had a ton of retail, new stuff, class A retail that I was building, it was mine, we were leveraged on it. I had a class A office complexes that were going up, we were conduing them and I had subdivisions going on and we were losing tenants and I was in denial. The market was being so stimulated before 2008 that I thought that I was like the king of all kings, right. That Jerome was the omni of real estate and construction and that it was all because of me. Well, God had a different plan that I felt very vulnerable in 2008 because tenants started calling in. We started losing large national tenants in our commercial real estate. The banks started calling concerns, worrying about the stability of the developments that we were building. And the carpet was kind of pulled out from underneath us and they started halting our financing, our construction loans. And so we had to fund those out of our own pocket. And I thank God every day that I had multiple streams of income and I had other companies, although those weren't.

Doing that well at that time either.

It was very temperature taking. We were tapping into a lot of savings. And so I had to get creative, Mark, very creative in multiple ways. And I was doing everything from getting my dealer's license and selling cars, buying cars from auctions, selling them to make extra money to service debt, just trying to push out. I went back to bidding stuff. I kind of taken my foot off the pedal and stepped out of the day to day operations. The construction company wasn't really bidding stuff anymore. And I put my work hat back on And I became a residential and commercial bidder again. I was literally bidding projects. I was on that computer 24 7. I was getting just a few hours of sleep. I was bidding commercial projects all night long. And then I was going out and hitting the streets like if it was day one. Building my business again in the 90s. And I was just bidding things. And I had to figure out a way to service the debt on these buildings. And so I read Ray Kroc's book, I'd watched the movie. And so one of the things that Ray Kroc teaches is he said, you know, he owns the McDonald's corporation. Not the McDonald's, the hamburger stand. Right? The McDonald's brothers were the ones that founded McDonald's, the hamburger stand. Ray Kroc founded the McDonald's corporation. Most people don't know is that Ray Kroc didn't make his money selling french fries and hamburgers. He has the largest real estate holdings in the world today. Even greater than the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the number one real estate holding entity in the world until just a few years ago. The McDonald's corporation has more real estate and prime real estate worldwide than any other entity in the world. And what most people don't realize is that he just found a means to pay for his real estate through the means of franchising the McDonald's corporation. Selling French fries and hamburgers was just happen to be the franchises that did that. And so through the means of selling hamburgers and french fries, he sold these franchises to pay for his real estate. And these franchisees leased that land from him. And so I did the same model. In 2008 I started, I got into the subway business. By 2011 we started, but we were a multi unit owner of Subway. And I used Subway stores merely to service the debt on my properties. I started building Subway stores in my real estate just to service the debt on them. And I started buying multiple ones because I needed to create an infrastructure of management that I didn't have to run them every day. So I needed a hierarchy that would allow me to be able to step away from the day to day operations of the franchisee and allow the corporate hierarchy to run itself through the management process that we put together. So literally, I became one of the largest Subway franchises in the Southwest that time. And we were killing it in the subway business. Fred DeLuca, who's the founder of Subway, he came down to meet me, wanted to know how we were taking broken down $4,000 a week stores and getting them to $9,000 in two months. And it was through the means of marketing. We also opened up beauty salons. We were in aveda certified beauty salon. I didn't know anything about beauty salons, but I knew how to run a business. And I just needed life in my buildings. And I was like, what's better than putting a subway store and a beauty salon in every building that I had empty? And so I started doing that. We created multiple locations. It was called trends with a z Hudson salon. And we started putting franchise. We started putting beauty salons. And then what I landed up doing, Mark, is I didn't want to be in the subway business. I didn't want to be in the salon business. As things started to unfold into, like, 2014, 15, 16, I started selling the beauty salons off to girls that worked in our salons, and I just wanted the leases.

So I would sell them the salon.

At a very nominal price. It was very lucrative for them. And then I just signed the lease over to them. They started paying rent back to my buildings into my entities, and I was able to service the debt. And then I was no longer in the salon business. And then in 2016, I started doing the exact same thing with subway, and I started selling them off to other franchisees, keeping the leases, moving myself out of the subway business. By 2018, I was 100% out of the subway business. So that's how we use franchising to pay for real estate.

Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

I love it, man. I think that that's a strategy a lot of people miss. Right. You go out and you buy something. Well, how do you get it to cash flow? What can you do to get it to cash flow? And I do like the whole concept of don't just do one. Put in the corporate infrastructure so that other people can go do it and you're not doing it. And then you have a purpose for your properties.

Yeah. I mean, before we get to the tip of the week, Jerome, I got one more question for you. Because you're so diverse. What is the best advice your parents ever gave you?

My mom and dad are good working people. I love them. Yeah. They instilled education, and I think that's the best. You know, I'll tell you the best advice my dad ever gave me. I was a wild horse of a kid just by listening, if you guys could tell, I have a very creative mind. I'm resilient, I feel like, you know, you ever see those? You ever see the stray dogs in Mexico? You ever Go down to Mexico.

Yeah, yeah.

They never get hit by cars. They always find a way to eat. You know, that's me. I just like that stray dog in Mexico that you see that you drive on you go, how did I think that dog not get hit by a car? Right.

You're the multi million dollar stray dog in Mexico.

So I'm like that stray dog. And I was edgy as a kid, and, you know, so much so that I made bad decisions like every young, dumb kid does. And when you're as assertive and aggressive and competitive as I was growing up, I had a lot of cousins. You're edgy. And my dad always told me. My dad was always very analytical, just very structured, very honest, very, you know, he rode the straight and narrow, you know, and I always rode the tide. And my dad. The best advice probably came from my dad. And he said, you know, Jerome, he was an accountant, and so he started doing my books. When I moved back to Albuquerque and opened up my construction company, he said, I'm going to help you because I don't want you to get yourself into financial trouble. I'm going to run your books for you. He did. He ran my books for 20 years, until just a few years ago. And he goes, you know, Jerome, be.

Honest and never tell a lie and always do what you say you're going to do. And you never have a story to tell. And so through all my years of business, the way I've always kept my businesses in line is I sit back and I go, okay, well, if my dad was over my shoulder right now, how would he feel about the decision that I'm making or what I'm telling somebody right now? And so I think the best advice, my dad always told me, was that was be honest. Do things right. And if you never tell a lie, you never have a story to tell, and you never have to pattern your story, because once you tell a lie, you're always trying to back it up and trying to figure out things. And that's how we interview. And people do cross examinations, you know, police officers, federal investigators, everybody. And so I've always remembered that mark. And it's been a huge asset through lawsuits, litigations that we've had. No one's exempt from that stuff.

Honest or not honest.

You're in business. You got liabilities. You're going to have them. I've had them. And the best feeling is to be able to tell the girls in my office when they're packaging paperwork for chronology and for litigations, they call me and say, hey, what should we give them? I tell them, give them everything and give them all of it, you know, and lay it on the table. Because when we go to the courthouse steps and it's our day in court, we want the judge to understand that we did our homework, we did our due diligence, and anything that we did, if there was something that we did wrong, it was an accident. And 99% of the time, it wasn't even that. And we can go wholeheartedly and run our businesses with integrity and honesty. And that's probably one of the best advice my dad ever gave me, and my mom feels the same way about it. But that wholeheartedly is probably one of the best pieces of advice that I've.

Ever gotten from my parents.

I love that I say that to my kids all the time. Always tell the truth. It's the easiest thing to remember.

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we're at that point on the podcast where we're going to ask you for your tip of the week, and your mentorship has been great. But we're going to ask one more nugget of wisdom. Either a website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. Jerome Maldonado, what do you got?

You know, one of my favorite books is by Scott Alexander. It's called Rhino Success. It was a book I read over 25 years ago. And what I like about Scott Alexander is he's very straightforward, intuitive, to the point, real blunt. And he talks about the difference about being a rhino or going down the herd of cattle and being a cow. And he compares it to that. He uses that as an analogy. But then he also talks a lot about faith and stuff in there. And I think the biggest takeaway from everything, when people sit back, they listen. I think they just think that we got here somehow, right? And Scott and I were talking about some history that we had together of some old direct sales and network marketing days. And I'll tell you that without faith, you can't get anything done in life if you don't believe in higher being. I don't know. I just know that in all the hard times that I've went through in life, and I went through a lot of them, especially early years, it was through the means of faith that really kept me going. And so I love that book by Scott Alexander because it fits my personality really good. I think that people can relate to that because it's real raw, real honest. But then he does Full circle and talks about how without faith, he couldn't get to where you can't get to a level of success that you want to get to without it. So that's a great book. It's a book that I was rereading for probably the fourth time. There was a lot of takeaways in that book when I read it the first time. And about every five years or so, I kind of peel it back and every time it excites me to read it. And there's new stuff that I catch out of it every time I read that book. So great tip of the day. Hopefully. It's a short book. Read it. It's an awesome. It's an awesome short little golden nugget book for life in general.

You know, I've never even heard of it. I'll check it out. Interesting. Dave Ramsey is the one that publishes it. The Dave Ramsey Ramsey Press, that.

He endorsed it. That's great.

Yeah. Publisher Ramsey Press. So before we get to Scott Todd's tip of the week, I have to mention our sponsor, flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life and go up the mountain of land investing with Scott Todd as your Sherpa who's done it thousands of times. He will take you up that mountain quickly, safely, efficiently. Oh, and the tuition for flight school. That's right. We guarantee you're going to make it back 180 days or less. Just show us your work so it ain't going to cost you nothing. Learn more. Schedule a call. Go to thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training Just do it today. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark? Check out this book. This is especially great for people who are overthinkers and they just want to make it happen. It's dream first, details later. How to quit overthinking and make it happen.

Whoa.

This just got released.

When you look Also when you go down. Look at the editorial reviews on the link I just gave you. Great. People have endorsed this thing. Seth Godin, Angela Duckworth, your favorite book. Great, great. She says she loves this book multiple times. Love, love, love, love this book. So, yeah, check it out.

Wow.

Okay. Ellen Bennett, the founder and CEO of Headley and Bennett in apron and kitchen gear brand. So she works with chefs. Interesting, huh? All right, well, look good tips, look fine books, whatever. You know what my tip of the week is going to do? Change your life. Go to Jerome Maldonado.com learn more. Check out the courses. Check out the coaching Check out the speaking. As you can tell, you just get smarter. You'll get more tenacious, you'll be a better salesperson, be a better marketer. I already feel smarter just hanging out with Jerome for a little bit. So we'll have a link there. Jerome maldonado.com Jerome, are we good?

Yeah, we are, Mark.

Scott, thank you guys. Really appreciate you guys having me on the show.

Scott, Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

I want to thank the listeners and remind them the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Jerome Maldonado from Jerome Odlenato.com is if you do us three little inconsequential favors. Follow us. Rate, Review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review. Supporthelangic.com, we're going to send you for free the $97 wholetailing course how to Double youe Money. 30 days or less. All right, let's do this. 1, 2, 3, let's freedom ring. There you go. Jerome's like, oh, they're gonna end like that.

I don't know. I love it. I love it.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Start your journey at www.thelandgate.com and www.scotttod.net.

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