Success in Real Estate Isn't Just About Finding Better Deals

Ask most multifamily investors what's holding them back, and you'll hear answers like:

• "I need more capital."

• "I need better deals."

• "The market is too competitive."

• "Interest rates are too high."

While these are real challenges, they're often not the biggest obstacle.

The investors who consistently build successful portfolios understand something many others overlook:

Technical knowledge gets you started. Strategic thinking, personal alignment, and high performance determine how far you go.

Many investors already know how to analyze a deal, raise capital, or speak with brokers. Yet they remain stuck because they lack a clear vision, structured execution, and the personal systems required to sustain long-term growth.

The Biggest Mistake Investors Make: Chasing Opportunities Instead of Building a Vision

When you're new to multifamily investing, the biggest challenge is often finding opportunities.

But something interesting happens as you gain experience.

Instead of too few opportunities, you suddenly have too many.

• New partnerships.

• Joint ventures.

• Different asset classes.

• Business ideas.

• Side projects.

Every opportunity looks attractive.

The danger isn't a lack of options.

It's losing sight of your long-term vision.

Without a clearly defined destination, it's easy to sacrifice your future for short-term wins.

Every Great Business Starts with a Vision

History offers a consistent pattern.

Great organizations don't begin with detailed plans.

They begin with a compelling vision.

Only after defining that vision do they build strategies, systems, and execution plans to make it reality.

The same principle applies to multifamily investing.

Before asking:

• Which market should I invest in?

• How many units should I acquire?

• How much capital should I raise?

Ask yourself:

What kind of life am I actually trying to build?

Because your portfolio should support your life—not replace it.

Reverse Engineer Your Future

One of the most powerful ideas from the transcript is this:

Don't build your future one deal at a time.

Build it backwards.

Start by defining your ideal life five to ten years from now.

Then reverse engineer everything required to get there.

That process includes:

• Defining your long-term vision.

• Creating a strategy.

• Breaking the strategy into yearly goals.

• Translating those goals into quarterly priorities.

• Scheduling daily actions on your calendar.

A vision without execution remains a dream.

Execution without vision leads to burnout.

Your Portfolio and Your Personal Life Must Work Together

Many entrepreneurs separate business from personal life.

In reality, they're deeply connected.

One of the biggest reasons investors struggle isn't because of the market.

It's because the people closest to them don't understand—or support—the direction they're pursuing.

Whether it's your spouse, business partner, or family, misalignment creates unnecessary tension.

When everyone understands and supports the same vision, decision-making becomes much easier.

Don't Build Wealth Without Purpose

Money is an incredible tool.

But without purpose, it becomes easy to chase growth for growth's sake.

The transcript emphasizes that wealth should serve something larger than accumulation.

Ask yourself:

• Why do I want financial freedom?

• What experiences am I trying to create?

• How will my success improve the lives of others?

Purpose creates direction.

Direction creates discipline.

Discipline creates sustainable success.

Entrepreneurship Requires More Than Technical Skills

Many multifamily education programs focus almost entirely on:

• Underwriting.

• Asset management.

• Financing.

• Raising capital.

• Deal analysis.

These are essential.

But they're only part of the equation.

Once investors understand the technical side, most challenges become personal rather than technical.

They struggle with:

• Clarity.

• Focus.

• Consistency.

• Energy.

• Decision-making.

• Implementation.

Knowledge isn't usually the problem.

Execution is.

Structure Creates Freedom

Many entrepreneurs believe freedom means having no schedule.

Ironically, the opposite is often true.

Freedom comes from having systems.

Without structure:

• Priorities constantly change.

• Opportunities become distractions.

• Important work gets delayed.

• Stress increases.

With structure:

• Daily actions align with long-term goals.

• Decisions become easier.

• Progress becomes measurable.

Success isn't built through random bursts of motivation.

It's built through consistent systems.

Stop Building Your Business Alone

Entrepreneurship can be lonely.

Many investors spend years trying to solve every challenge by themselves.

The result?

They overthink.

Lose confidence.

Create unnecessary fears.

Remain stuck.

The transcript highlights the importance of surrounding yourself with people who can identify your blind spots and challenge your assumptions.

That may include:

• Coaches.

• Mastermind groups.

• Mentors.

• Accountability partners.

• Experienced investors.

Sometimes the breakthrough isn't new information.

It's someone helping you see what you've been missing all along.

Experience Isn't Enough—Reflection Matters

Even experienced investors develop blind spots.

The difference between those who continue growing and those who plateau is their willingness to examine their thinking.

Ask yourself regularly:

• What assumptions am I making?

• What opportunities am I pursuing out of fear rather than strategy?

• Is my daily calendar aligned with my long-term vision?

• What distractions are pulling me away from what matters most?

Growth begins with awareness.

High Performance Is the Missing Piece

Many investors believe success comes from mastering real estate.

In reality, success often comes from mastering yourself.

That means improving:

• Your mindset.

• Your energy.

• Your relationships.

• Your communication.

• Your resilience.

• Your strategic thinking.

Real estate is simply the vehicle.

You are the driver.

Questions Every Multifamily Investor Should Ask

Before pursuing your next acquisition, pause and consider:

What kind of life do I want five to ten years from now?

Does my current business support that vision?

Am I building systems—or simply staying busy?

Who challenges my assumptions?

Am I investing only in properties, or am I investing in becoming a better leader?

The answers to these questions often determine the quality of both your portfolio and your life.

Final Thoughts

The most successful multifamily investors don't just acquire apartments.

They intentionally design the life those apartments are meant to support.

They understand that:

• Vision comes before strategy.

• Strategy comes before execution.

• Execution requires systems.

• Systems require discipline.

• And sustainable success requires continuous personal growth.

Technical knowledge may help you close your first deal.

But long-term success in multifamily investing comes from becoming the kind of person who can consistently build, lead, adapt, and execute.

Build your vision first. Then build the portfolio that supports it.

TRANSCRIPT

So hey, tell me about you.Let's, uh, let's go through your background a little bit. And, you know, I, I know you're from a war-torn country.

I don't think you specified exactly where from, but you've obviously been a US resident for the most of your life now, right? I'm actually a Canadian resident. Oh, you're a Canadian resident.
Okay. Yes.
So I, I do-- We're at this point, though, our plan is half the time we're in US, half the time we're in Canada.

Most of my clients happen to be in the US, and my business, a lot of it is in US, so I get to travel a lot, and that's part of the decision of traveling, being more in States as well, because I'm starting to do a lot of, uh, in-person events as well, and speaking at events too, so that, that helps with the journeys.

In terms of my background, I was born in Afghanistan- Oh which a lot of people know about at this point. Yep. It's been in the news often.
Um, uh, I mean, we left there a while ago when I was very, uh, young, about three and a half years old, and I lived about a good portion of my life in Pakistan, neighboring country, different cultures, similar in some degree, some degree.
But then when I was 17, we migrated to, to Canada.
That's where a lot of the fun stuff happened for me.

Yeah.

And, and fun being, 1, there was a huge culture shock when I came over to this side of the world.
Being a teenager is a, a shock in itself, but, but coming to this side, I couldn't make sense of a lot of the things, and I didn't know what was going on.
But at the time, just having the kind of mind that I had and the, the kind of environment I was in, I couldn't make sense of anything, and I didn't know how to seek for support.
And what that led me to is a lot of, um, uh, the negative path that I went on around alcohol addiction, dr- drug addiction, depression for a number of years. 4 or 5 years I was on that journey until there was a moment that, that hit.

I described a lot of times where I was just at the rock bottom and where I was sitting in front of a subway station, uh, had thrown up on the floor. There was blood there.

I knew I had been abusing my body.

I wasn't really surprised by that. But that moment, I mean, at the time, I didn't know what was going on, but I, I did feel a lot in that moment.

I felt emotional, physical, and even spiritual pain. But in the same t- at the same time, I actually felt a lot of peace for the first time, a lot of, a sense of connection, which I didn't know what that meant. But what it did do was it opened-- It got me to think to step back, and I did step back because I didn't have a lot of willpower at that time.

The only thing I could muster was, "Let me get a job on the weekend," so I couldn't go out, and I couldn't associate with anybody. So I worked Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it was like, uh And I would have to start in the middle of the night, so I couldn't go anywhere. And then I en- enrolled back in college.

At the time, I was studying engineering. And but it opened me up to a different world. I had to put a pause on a lot of my beliefs and started to question, and that gave me the space to study a lot too. So I started studying anything from psychology to philosophy, spirituality, history, sciences related to human behavior and trying to understand what went wrong. I mean, I came from a good family.

We had great values. We came from a religious family. We had principles. We have ideals. But all of them broke down from beginning to the end. And in the journey, I realized that there were a lot of things to work through.

A lot of it was, I mean, we went through a very tough bit.

Like, when you're going through this process, when you come from a survival world, and when your parents had to leave a country, go to the next one, and they had to find a way to survive, you don't realize how much they are in survival, and you hold on to that within, within families. It affects you. We weren't unique.

Millions of people left in that sense, um, and everybody has a different effect on different people.

And I can tell you, most people coming from that region, they, they were traumatized to another level. A lot like when people in military go, veterans go, and they come back, they're not the same.

It has a very similar PTSD effect, not just on the people who left, but on the next generation and the next generation until that gets interrupted.

So I realized I had to deal with a lot of trauma that was left that I couldn't make sense of. I had to process a lot of that. I had to make sense of what I needed to do. I had to let go of certain things. A lot of it was guilt, shame. A lot of it was ideas that never worked, uh, from, that we carried forward in this world. And I had to become open to new, a new path. I had to find better ways to establish relationship. I had to deal with a lot of demons internally.

And that was a 10, 15-year journey, and then at some point, I met my mentor coach long after that, and then he took me through a process for about 6 months, and I felt like I, I, I grew as much in 6 months as I did in the last 15 years. And then my, the question I asked myself was, "Well, why wasn't that available to me at the time?"

And I didn't even know there was help like that available or support like that available, so

And that opened me up to a whole different journey, and that's where my entrepreneurship journey began, uh, along with my wife.

And we set out to find a way to build a business that we didn't know how, how to build.

That was another challenge on its own, but it opened up us up to a life of freedom, a life of purpose, and to serving others in a better way, and to helping them understand who they are deep down.

Helping them deal with things that they don't even know exist that are impacting their life in negative ways. And so that's what I do day-to-day.

I'm a high performance coach, and I'm also a business coach at this point too. Uh, I have a couple communities for entrepreneurs, for coaches. I do run in-person events too.

Um, I have a couple online communities, and I work with people one-on-one in small group settings, uh, to help them make sense of what they're creating long term, what is the legacy they're leaving behind for their family, for those around them. It's not alway- always financial. A lot of times it's around their values, how they wanna show up, what kind of model they wanna leave And I essentially work with leaders to help them create better families, better organizations, and better communities.

Yeah, I saw that. You know, going back to your bout with depression and drugs and alcohol and all that, that seems to be something that I see. It's just very, very prevalent in our countries, in the US and in Canada, and I, I think there's many, many reasons for that. But I never realized that in the US and Canada, and I, I think probably some other, um, Western countries probably deal with it as well. But I never realized all that until I started traveling and going to countries where things are more relaxed and maybe even less is expected of you as a citizen than it is in our countries.

Um, I mean, I think there's more than, more than just that, that, that goes into it. But how are you dealing with that? I mean, I know the-- as an entrepreneur myself- You know, I, we, we deal with that every day, right? I mean, it's, um, you know, a, a lot of people want to get into entrepreneurship because they think, "Well, I get to set my own schedule and do what I want." Um, and if you do what you want and set your own sch- I mean, yeah, of course you can set your own schedule, but man, your phone's ringing on Christmas Day, on Christmas Eve, every single holiday if you own your own business.

And I think that takes a toll on people. And then I think you said it, the failures along the way that are inevitable for an entrepreneur. How are you dealing with helping people overcome all that? Yeah.

And I, I primarily work with entrepreneurs, uh, too, so I'm fairly familiar on, supporting, uh, entrepreneurs, but also my own journey in the past decade as well. I have a bit of a different philosophy around this, and I understand that there are pressures in entrepreneurship, and there are times where you need to work. You need to because there are things that don't work. There are, there are ups and downs in the economy. You need to change strategy.

You need to pivot.

And sometimes some offers work, sometimes they don't work.

Lots of things. There are problems in partnerships and your systems. Lots of things can show up at any time, and you're responsible if you're running this whole thing. So it requires a certain amount of resilience to be able to even be entrepreneurship. And to be honest, I don't think it's for everybody. I don't think everybody will be happy as an entrepreneur either, and I don't have this perspective that everybody should be an entrepreneur to create a life of freedom.

There are people who have really good jobs, and they've been able to, especially nowadays, create a really good path forward with some side hustle and their major thing that they're doing, and they're really with good companies where they are able to do that. But the move to entrepreneurship is, is a whole other process.

So for me personally, the way I look at it, I'll bring up, uh, Warren Buffett here, and I really learned this perspective, um, uh, from, from how he approached it. Uh, somebody asked him-- He had a third partner outside of Charlie Munger early on, and somebody asked him what happened to him, and he looked at him as being just as brilliant as Charlie Munger and himself.

And he's like, "He was in too much of a hurry to make money."

He ended up buying his shares, and nobody knows about him. A-actually, I don't even remember his name. Um, but people know about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

They stayed long-term. Their, their strategy was always long-term.

And at least every entrepreneur that I aspire to, that, that inspires me, they have thought through this long term. Not just long term in terms of business, but they look at the whole aspect of, "What am I really looking for? What's meaningful to me?"

Because after a while, it's-- In the beginning, it's exciting to be an entrepreneur. You jump in, you do lots of, you're learning a lot and everything, but, and you're always learning as an entrepreneur. But after a while, there are a lot of repetitive things- Yep that you do.

And that's when people get sidetracked. They go towards the next opportunity.

They lose focus, and then they add the next one. They add the next one.

Pretty soon, on average, anybody that comes to me, they're running like 4 or 5 businesses. And when the first question I'm asking is like, "Why are you running all these businesses?" They're like, "Well, I need multiple streams of income." Like, "Where did you learn that from?"

And again, people learn surface things, and then they implement it. I believe in dedication, focus, long-term thinking, and that's how I thought of it in terms of our lifestyle as well, is that it's gonna take a while to build up.

It took me about two and a half years to fully develop, um, my business. And again, even though I did jump in fully in the sense that I left my engineering career, I started driving Uber in the beginning because I needed the mental bandwidth for this. But I dedicated my time to learning this, and I learned pretty fast I need to be around other entrepreneurs. I need to actually dedicate to build a consistency, a schedule. My first order of business is, "I'm free. I'll do whatever I want." That never worked.

So I had to build some kind of structure in my life because most of my life I was given structure. I never built it myself, and most entrepreneurs struggle with that. So, um, when I started going on that path, I realized, "You know what? What are the things that are important to me? Well, um, why did I go into entrepreneurship?" Well, first I wanted a, a sense of freedom, and freedom to me was 2 things. One was external freedom, time freedom, location freedom, wanted to do the things that I wanted to do.

But the other one for me, which a lot of people don't think about, was I was also looking for internal freedom, which to me was a sense of peace, a sense of connection, a sense of meaning in my day-to-day life, fulfillment. If I didn't have that, what the hell is the point of doing something harder than what I was doing?

So a-and some of those came from, many of those things came from my family. They came from my children, my wife. So I wasn't willing to sacrifice that for the sake of the business, and so I took it a little bit slower initially. Now what most people do is they go really hard in the beginning, and they're taught like that by a lot of entrepreneurs who don't have their lifestyle or their vision or their sense of purpose, be like, "No, work 100 hours a week." You can, but in the meantime, what is truly important to you? What might be import-important for another entrepreneur who's building a $100 million empire billion dollar empire is not important to you.

And most people don't know what that is because they haven't done the deeper work.

So for me, I went slow in the beginning, but then I understood compound effect.

Eventually, it took over. I had built enough systems where I, I had my time freedom, but I can also run my business.

So I always look at it as a long-term process, and I slowly built the pieces in my personal life to where I can have location freedom.

I don't have to wait for retirement to be able to go travel and do all sorts of things that I, I wanted to do. So I-- as a starting point, that's how I look at it. And, and the day-to-day stressors, they're a part of You, you develop resilience as you do this, as you are open to it, and it's a part of it. But that doesn't mean you need to be miserable about it.

I have a phrase, one of my clients, he sends me a message once in a while. He's been my client for 4 years, and he has a couple of businesses, and he's like, he'll just send me a phrase, something like, "It's only business." And he'll say, "I hate you," because it's stuck in his head. Yeah.
You know, you know what stuck out with, with everything that you just said for me is the fact that you did Uber because you knew you could just do it whenever you needed to, to survive.

So you-- and I th- you know, so you could have the time to build your business on the side. I've done similar things in the past where I've taken, and even now I do a little bit of consulting work on the side where I try, I try to get little side gigs to where they just take up a couple hours a day. And I know that I could go get a heck of a lot more money, right? Work more, make more, get a gig that's probably more suited for my, uh, talent.

But I'd rather have the lesser thing that is easier to do and takes up less time so that I can have my time and my freedom back to build what I really want to build.

And I think that's, to your, to your point, most people don't understand that, right?

They're going, I guess going back to what Buffett said, they're just trying to get the money now. And when you study most of these entrepreneurs, like in the book "Think and Grow Rich" and several others, all of the guys that really did big things focused on one thing for the most part, and they went all in on one thing, and it took them forever.

It took them their lifetime, basically, right? And then, so I think having your hands in 10 different things, and I'm, I am the example of that. I've, I've had the same ideas.

I'm like, "Well, I need 7 different income streams." And, you know, I think it's a, it's a mistake. I think if you have that multiple income streams, 6 or 7 like some people say that you need, I think you're spreading yourself too thin.

You're not gonna be good at any of them. Yeah.

And entrepreneurship timing is very important, and a lot of people don't understand timing. And so when they hear a statistic like that, every, uh, most multimillionaires, they have at least 7 streams of income.

What they don't understand is that when they started out, that's not what they had. They had one focus area. They developed that for a long time.

Every coach, every mentor that has helped me who's built successful businesses, they are focused. Not only that, we're learning more and more as, um, there's a channel that interviews billionaires, and when you look at the deeper, like multi-billionaires, they have one focus.

Now, here's what people see. When they have enough money, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk's partner, in his book, "Zero to One," talks about it. He's like, he's like, "When rich people don't know what to do with their money, they say, 'I am diversifying my income.'" So they have so much, so many resources, they don't know what to do.

What do they do? They go hand it over to other organizations that know how to put it. So they're not actually doing business outside of what they're doing.

They are still focused on their main thing, except what their resources are overflowing, so they're going into different assets and different investments, and somebody else is managing it for the most part, if they're a more, more dedicated entrepreneur on

And, and again, most people look at the surface of what other people do, and they just copy it. So they will watch somebody who works 100 hours, like what is their lifestyle like? What are they looking for?

What they're looking for is probably much different than what you're looking for. And, and in terms of, uh, and most people don't know how to think about even, um, uh, income and what ef- it affects lifestyle. So I'll, I'll ask every-- Most of my clients are investors, multifamily investors/entrepreneurs, so they will come to me. A lot of times I'll ask them, "So what's, what does your ideal life look like?"

And they will describe it to me. I'm like, "Okay, what would be the price tag for a life like that in your

"I think 3 1000000, 10 1000000," something like They'll, they'll throw out a number like that. Okay, let's go through it, and we'll, we'll put down every aspect of it, and we'll put a price on it. We'll do a very educated guess. And we usually end up in around not more than 50,000 to 200,000. And then I'll ask them like, "What is the 9,999,000 thousand for?"

They don't know. They just guessed it, and they put in this pressure to create that. They don't have a purpose around it. They don't know what to do with it, but they think that that's what it takes. So one of 2 things happens.

they feel relieved. "Holy shit, I don't have to make that much." second, now they start to think that there's, there needs to be purpose behind wealth too. So no problem with creating 100 1000000, 200 1000000, a billion, but have a purpose because this is where the corruption sets in. When you don't have a sense of purpose with something that you're gaining Then that can lead you towards all sorts of weird places because, well, at least in the past decade that I've been in business, in the beginning, I used to think that there wasn't enough op- opportunities, and I was always trying to find leads and customers and all that stuff. After about 5, 6 years, I realized there were too many opportunities.

Mm-hmm. And it was so easy to get sidetracked by this opportunity, that opportunity. This person wants to collaborate with you, that person wants to partner with you, and it's-- looks so good. Like, and then you've gained some skill sets as well. You're like, "Okay, I can make this happen." But the problem is you're gonna spread yourself thin. You're gonna go for a short-term opportunity at the cost of the long, long-term vision. And, and one that's very tempting, uh, and it ba- takes us back to those fairytale stories, uh, where like, let's take Aladdin and, uh, he goes to the cave.

The-- what is the-- the actual thing that he's looking for is whatever his vision is, but then there are other temptations. Like these, these kind of stories or whatever the religious stories that we- we've heard, like they have meaning and most people forget it.

It's like r- history repeats itself not just in a bigger themes, but in people's day-to-day lives. People fall for these things and then don't know what they're falling for.

Again, so my take is that do the deeper work. Understand what your life is gonna be about.

Life is really short. Paradoxically, it's also very long, but it, it goes-- can go by very fast. So what is your life gonna be about? What are the things that are truly important to you?

Because what might be important to you versus somebody else are completely different things. Um, and then once you figure that out, then it becomes a little bit easier to stay on track and stay focused on the things that matter, and that's not always a lot of money. Sometimes it, it-- There are certain amount of resources everybody needs to, to, to have a certain amount of freedom. But you have to decide what that is.

What's the lifestyle? What are the important things, uh, elements? And that what is, what is it on the person- personal side? What is it on the relationship side? What is it on the bigger meaning and purpose or faith side? If we haven't done that work, it's very hard to gauge what opportunities you jump in and what partnerships you go into. And, and I also look at it on the other side.

I, I just talked to a business owner today that, that I'm, I'm gonna be working with, and he is already in a partnership.

He picked up the wrong partner 7 years ago. Now, he made a lot of money, but he's miserable. Why? Because he never did the due diligence. He never figured out what his life was gonna be about. Now he feels stuck, and he's like, "If I leave, it's gonna break down a bunch of stuff, and that's a harder decision. If I stay, I'm just gonna be more and more miserable." And, and miserable is not just, "Okay, I'm just unhappy," but it's like he, he can't focus. He can't do the things that he used to.

He doesn't have the energy anymore. He doesn't even wanna, wanna talk about the future. He doesn't wanna be involved in other things with this partner. So why are you in it, and what do you really want? And when we went through the process, like this is the kind of partner I'm looking for, this is the kind of life I'm looking for, this is the kind of opportunity I But, um, then I asked him, like, "Did you think about that before?"

He's like, "No, I jumped into an opportunity." So, so how do you, I think, I think most people do that. They jump into an opportunity without knowing what their real passion or their real vision is.

But how do you know? I, you know, is it just what I wanna do? I mean, I don't know. I don't know how you come up with w- why am I on this earth, right? I mean, a, a lot of people battle that question, including myself. You know, we, we go forth with something like this podcast I've been wanting to do for 10 years, and- Mm-hmm I've been wanting to do it. And now that I'm doing it, I realize I really like it. I enjoy it.

I think I'm really natural at having the conversations and, and, uh, getting great information out of people. But at the same time, you-- I, I still kind of battle. Well, you know, am I gonna do this for 2, 3 years and then, you know, realize that it wasn't a passion or wasn't for me? I mean, I, I just don't-- Right now, I'm passionate about it. I really enjoy it. Right. I don't know.

I mean, is, is this what my life passion is? I don't know. And I think 80 or 90% of the people that I talk to are battling that same thing.

So how do you come up with that? Yeah, um, and, and I'll share what happened.

So, uh, in the early stages, the, uh, when we-- So early on, about a decade ago, my wife and I, we both realized we work- we had jobs, and we were just starting our life together.

We had just gotten married, and, uh, I found myself becoming more and more miserable.

And not because the-- Like I was fairly successful in out- what I was doing.

I was getting promotions multiple times and in, just in the first year. And but I found myself feeling more and more restricted. I found myself that, you know what? you know, uh, even if I get paid a lot more, which I was working towards, I got the promotions, then I don't, I don't know if I want this. But I didn't actually know what I wanted. And, and that took a difficult decision. And, and my wife watched that. I still remember we used to-- I used to come home on Friday. We had, especially summers, like, let's-- we would go camping. And the reason why I would go camping, uh, would, would be that, that would be the only space I would have. Like, I remember we would both go there and, and, uh, do a bunch of stuff, go for walks, hikes, and everything, then I'd sit in front of the fire.

At the time, we just had a tent. She would go to sleep. I would sit until, like, 4:00 in the morning just staring at the fire. And later on, my wife told me she, she hated those trips because it was very uncomfortable, but she knew she had to do it because I was in a bad state too. But then what happened was I had to make a decision, and, and, and the decision was this. I was like, "You know, I need to figure out what that thing is." Um, and I agree that we can't figure out all pieces of it initially, but here's what happened. So we took a-- I mean, again, I'm not suggesting for anybody to do this, but this is what happened with us. Uh, we took a 3week, uh, vacation.

We were in debt at the time. Uh, we shouldn't have taken a vacation, but I also looked at it as a business investment 'cause I, I wanted to figure out. So I had been following Brendon Burchard at the time, and I saw that, uh, he was teaching, uh, something about, um, uh, following your passion and doing teaching or training or coaching with something that you're passionate about, and you can make it a, a, a part of, uh, your business.

And I'd been following him for a while, and I'm like, "What's there to lose? I'm miserable to begin with.

Like, what am-- Like, I'm gonna lose a little bit more money. Okay, great. Uh, and maybe I'll learn something along the way." So, um, we took this 3week vacation, went to California. We took a cruise down to Mexico, and we went to a couple conferences at the time. And, um, so I went to this conference. It was, um, it was about 700 people from 47 different countries. It was a business conference around how can you turn what you know into a revenue stream and what you care about. And that's when I got exposed to a whole different world.

And I remember being around a group of people during a group work, and they were sharing some things about the things that they wanted to. And I-- 2 things stood out.

1, that these people were actually passionate about something that matters to them, and I, I didn't rarely heard that in, in my own environment. And they also were working towards freedom. They were also working towards intentional things to serve and support and do all sorts of things. And my first response was, were, "Where the hell have you guys been all my life, right?" And then but what happened in those 3 weeks, we literally And this was the, the beginning of our journey to entrepreneurship journey and our path forward, my wife and I Uh, af- within that conference, in the next 2 weeks, we went for walks. We talked about what are we creating, what matters to us.

We didn't even have kids at the time, but, like, this is the kind of family we want. This is the kind of path we want. What are the, the possible obstacles? It was a vision d- beginning to develop in the process. And, and I-- that was the foundation. It was a joint vision that we created together. We came back and got to work. And we didn't know the exact path forward. We had some idea, some map of it, but that vision carried me forward.

I knew, and, and I was seeking this life. It's very close to what we wanted to create at the time. In fact, it's much better than what we wanted. There were things that we weren't experienced enough to even know, so we had to experiment with a few things. But we had to actually-- One, I had to think about this stuff and, and, and take the time to step back from my life and go through it, and second, I had to align my vision with my wife.

If that wasn't there, then that would create a problem too. And I, I run into a lot of my clients who have, uh, an idea for a different life, but then they cannot communicate that with their spouse, and then there's tension. And that tension, people don't realize how much it affects you. That lack of support from the person closest to you will hold you back in ways that you don't know.

But that-- And, and again, I'm not trying to portray this as an easy path. That was not an easy path 'cause we had to come back and do the work. It took about two and a half hours. Half hours. Two and a half years.

Two and a half years for us to put the foundations of it, and then we started going on that Along the way, we've made adjustments, but the vision has been very close to what we thought on that, uh, point, and we have kept reviving that. So it took you two and a half years to, to figure out what that vision was, and then you kind of reversed- No, no, it took us a few we- a couple of weeks to figure out what the vision was. It took, took us two and a half years to implement the foundations- Oh to create the foundations to be able to build that. So that's the work that most people don't do, and that requi- sometimes that work requires, uh, s-some know-how, a process, and that's one of the things I take my clients through.

Every entrepreneur that comes into my program, I'll take them through, uh, at least a five, um, 5day program in the beginning, uh, end of the year and one in the middle of the year. So what that looks like, they will start with their vision, their long-term 5 to 10-year vision of what they're creating.Then we, uh, break that vision down into a strategy.

I, I come from an engineering background. I, I don't believe that just because you have this vision and you're attracting things energetically, however people put it, it's just gonna randomly happen. Yes, that inspires you. That gets you to be motivated towards it. But you need to sort of build a structure, a system to go towards it.

So I help them build a, five to 10-year strategy for that. And then we take that strategy.

It has to go down to your calendar day to day, week to day, and it's a process for that.

And then I take them through a process how you're gonna communicate that to the people closest to you and how you're gonna get supporters on that path. That's an influence process. And then the rest of the year, we work on refining their, um, their process and, and dealing with the things that hold them back, helping them refine their process, helping them build better data in their day-to-day life, whether they manage their time, whether they need to manage their finances, their relationships, everything they need to keep an eye on, the most important things.

Not everything, the most important things. And within that process, and usually I get my clients s-sign up at least a one-year commitment. Within that year, they're different people because what, what happens? They become much more long-term thinkers.
They become much more strategic. They become much more intentional in their day-to-day life.

They become m- very aware of their own energy and the stressors they bring into their home and outside.

They become aware of the skillsets they need to build because when I started out, I barely had any skillsets. I had to develop them.

They had to b- develop-- They have to develop beliefs that support them to move forward.

They have to build a community around

All that stuff takes a little bit of work to do, and most people kind of learn along the way, and they make a lot of mistakes.

And mistakes are normal, but the problem is that people make mistakes that they don't have to.

They can learn, uh, some, some they can learn from other people's mistakes.

And because they're not part of a community, they haven't done the deeper work, they, they haven't been challenged with their assumptions and beliefs and path forward, so they just kind of go along and try to copy the next person, and where does it take them?

Uh, they-- Even if they're successful on their path, 10 years later, they're like, "Why the hell did I do this?"

5 years later, when-- and they end up with a regret. Again, I'm not saying this will take you towards a perfect path. I have my challenges. I have my struggles.

What I'm saying is this mitigates much of the problems if you do the deeper work ahead. Now, how do you know this works?

Well, if you study history, if you study every empire, if you study every major corporation, if you study, uh, every kind of major government system, you will find that initially they started out with a vision. They didn't start with some kind of goal-setting system. They started with a vision.

Th-think about the founders of, of US. They started with a vision of a better world, a different va-value system, some principles, and then they built a strategy around that.

And then they, they kind of passed that on as a l-legacy to the new, uh, founders of the, the country, and then they move forward. Every community, every government, every empire, every organization does that.

But when people start, individuals, they suck at because they think that if they just wing it, they'll get there. And they will, but it'll take them 10, 20 years longer.

Mm-hmm. And they will sacrifice a bunch of stuff along the way. So it's just this big system and process of reverse engineering, essentially.

Yeah, it i-it is. But again, it took me-- One, I was trained to think like that, and, and I had a lot of stuff, so I had-- But I had to build pieces of it myself.

So the person who trained me, they didn't have this whole strategic process.

They had an initial vision they went through.

I'm like, "Holy shit, where do I find that?" I went-- For example, I looked for him, like, 'cause I was inspired by Brendon Burchard.

He did one video. I had all of his programs. He did 01 video, and it had a battle board.

He's like, "What I do is I have a battle board for the next ten years."

Now I'm like, "Well, I want to build a business like his." Like, he didn't care to build a two hundred million dollar business that he had at the time, but I wanted to build a system and a life like that. So I'm like, "Okay, that might be important.

So let me look at, like, what else he has." He never built it. He had it only for himself.

I'm like, "Okay, let me reverse engineer that process." So I started building and testing it out, and then I started get- taking my clients through it, and at this point, hundreds of clients have gone through the process, and they've kind of helped me develop it further as I've experimented with it. And then all of a sudden, what they see is it completely changes their life. And again, I'm not saying I'm the only one who built this, but you need some kind of system and process to move forward.

If you don't have it, you're gonna struggle long term and short term.

And, and again, struggle is not a problem, but you're gonna unnecessarily struggle, especially if you're on-- Entrepreneurship is already hard, but most people make it a hundred times harder with extra stressors, lack of structure, lack of thinking, lack of strategy. And what ends up happening, they'll end up in a point where it's like, what happened?

And they don't even know what happened.

And a lot of it is because they have so many blind spots, they don't even see it.

And the other side of it is I'm always around other people.

Like, I'm always around other business owners and masterminds.

I have my coaches, mentors.

I have a community. I get-- People are giving me constant feedback. I'm open to that feedback from my own, uh, life partner, some of my friends that I trust. I don't operate in a vacuum.

A lot of people operate very alone, and I did that for the first year. It didn't work. We get in our head, and then we lose confidence. We make up a bunch of crap.

Our mind takes us towards all sorts of fears that are not real, and then you break down something. But if you are open to a community that nurtures you, supports you to move forward, it completely changes, uh, your process.

So having at least one person that can see your blind spots and challenges you and directs you, and that could be a coach, an official coach, which I am, but that could also be a trusted person that you mentor, that you know. Find somebody that, that challenges your assumptions, and most people are operating on assumptions that don't work.

Find somebody that can see things that you're not able to see. Now, think about it, and most of us are in problems, even for me. When I'm in a problem, it's hard for me to see the, the solution because I'm within the forest, but somebody who looks at it from 10,000 feet above, it's very different, right? Yeah.

And they've gone on that journey already. Yeah. It's easier to see from the outside when you're not emotionally tied to it, I think. You have a multifamily, uh, mastermind too, right? So I have 2 communities.

Uh, I have, uh, a community for, uh, multifamily investors/entrepreneurs, but n- here's the difference. So most mentorship programs are focused on multifamily mentoring, so it's the technical pieces of how to invest in multifamily, uh, real estate in US, and they have about 95% of their program is that.

I, I work, worked with many of these prog- programs. I brought the high performance coaching as part of their program. I implemented it. I worked with their clients, and after a while I realized m- once, once these investors figure out the technical pieces, most of their challenge is actually, uh, the things that I described. They don't have a vision. They're not clear on, uh, their strategy.

They, they get stuck in the day-to-day, and then they don't move forward. They have all the knowledge needed to move forward, but they, they have the information, but they don't know how to implement Even though they have a community, they will-- a lot of people will get stuck in it. The only people who seem to move forward have, who have prior experience in building other businesses, and they have, uh, other resources and knowledge that they don't have, and the majority of them don't have it. So when I built my community, I thought of it from that point of view. So my community is reverse of that.

So about 10% of it is some mentoring, and I don't run that because I'm not an expert in that area. I've hired another coach. I've collaborated with them to run that 90% of it is on performance, growth, developing all aspects of your life and, uh, being more effective, dealing with your energy, uh, making sure your relationships are aligned, your vision is clear, your strategy is clear.

I work with them on that side to help move forward. A lot of my clients, they actually are part of other mentoring programs, but when they get stuck, they will come to me, and then they will move ahead after 3 years of being stuck within like 3 months or 6 months.

Why? Because the process works. And then the other community I have is for coaches who are also wanting to be entrepreneurs. I've been in this industry for a while, so I-- in- initially we ran it as a volunteer organization for the p- first 4 years, um, because a lot of coaches were getting value from it.

Eventually it became more complex, and then the members voted that we make it a paid membership. So we turned that into a business model, which is essentially the same business with 2 different offers. Mm-hmm. 2 different communities.

For me, I don't look at them as separate business even though legally they are. It's in the coaching world.

Uh, so we also train and mentor other coaches to develop their skill sets and their business and lifestyle as they Got it.

And so how do people reach out to you on that to become part of your programs Everything with me you can just see, probably see my name there, faisalinsan.com. You can go there. There'll be some gifts there.

You can download a PDF. I usually run completely free workshops every 6 weeks. There's one coming up if this gets released by January 10th.

Um, but I do these workshops every 6 weeks. They're completely free.They're 2hour workshops. They're more like coaching sessions. They're not webinars. Mm-hmm. I walk you through a process on certain key topics.

This one is on relationships and influence, and then you'll get, actually with this one if you sign up, you get my course for vision building, strategic goal setting as a bonus, which I se- sell separately, and you also get another PDF. So you get lots of bonuses.

Just drop into my website and you can start your journey there.

Perfect.

And so what's one piece of advice that you wish you had known early on in your journey if you had it to do over? Early on, so it was interesting. So when I saw a lot of these influencers and people who were, who I was, I was inspired by, they always stood on stage alone, and my brain never connected the dots in the first year. Like, I should be able to do that.

But in the background, they were working with a lot of people. They had a whole community. They had partners. They had collaborators. They had coaches, mentors, so many people in the background, but they always appeared alone on stage, right? So to me it was like, well, if they can do it alone, I can do it alone. But the reality was that y- most, especially if you're doing some kind of online thing, you will feel alone.

You will be in your corner. You will get in your head. So try not to do it alone.

Find a group of people who are doing something similar and move for-- This is part of the reason why I built 2 communities, because even if you do one-on-one work with somebody, people usually get stuck when they go back to their own environment because they get reinforced with all kinds of thoughts that doesn't support them, all kinds of beliefs. They will-- They already have doubt, and that doubt gets amplified in their environment because other people don't know what they're doing.

But then when you have feedback in a community that helps you move forward, 1, you will borrow their confidence 2, you will get a lot of feedback 3, you will see that this is actually possible, and you will get stuck, and who's gonna help you get unstuck?

Usually, when people get stuck, they get stuck for months and years in their head, not because they don't have the solution, but they're not able to it, see it because they get stuck in their own head. Uh, so don't do it alone.

Find a group of people, community, whether that's in my community or somebody else's. I'm not attached to that process. Don't do this stuff alone. Even if you have brick and mortar, find other business owners. Are those communities also visible on your website where people can join? Uh, so the way my program works, um, um, my community is very small.

The way I operate is I-- Most people that come into any of my program, they've had about 2 to 4 hours of conversations with me. That might look like they might come to my workshop, or it might be one-on-one call, depending on where it goes. I don't have any of my offers outside. Part of it is because I'm, I'm not looking for everybody in my programs. I need to pre-qualify people, but they'll have to be in, in one of the settings with me.

And the good news is that I do a lot of that stuff for free.

They can go through any of the journey, and then if it feels aligned that they can be part of my, my community, great. Uh, we can talk about it after you see the value of it.

If it doesn't, at least I can give you some recommendations around I'm Fairly Connected and the mentorship coaching programs.

I can at least connect you with the right people.

Again, my programs are not for everybody, but if it feels aligned with you and it's gonna give you results, it, it's probably gonna be one of the best things you're gonna do. But at the least, explore some kind of support.

Uh, try not to do it alone. It's not worth I tried. No, I agree.

I've done the same. So I really appreciate you coming on.

I think it was incredible information for everyone and, um- Thank you sincerely appreciate it.

I, I appreciate you having me on here, and, and I hope your viewers got a lot of value here, and I'm happy to promote this wherever you want me to. Absolutely.