Chapter XI: "Learning to Focus on What You Can Control" with Emma Powell

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This episode with Emma Powell is a republishing of an earlier episode which was entitled abundance through instability and loss with homeschooler and investment club creator Emma Powell. Emma is just a great all around person. I was also I was on her podcast as a guest, which was a fun time. She's a wife, a mother, a homeschooler of six. I'm already super stressed out.

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She's a commercial real estate investor in Utah and she's been on tons and tons of podcasts. This episode has a lot about big rocks versus little rocks and priorities, and also we discuss her son's autism and some other painful personal things. She's been through challenges with raising capital if you're a real estate investor or business owner and you've ever dealt with raising capital, this is a great, great, great episode for you. And how she pivoted to creating an investment club and why she did that and then just overall the importance of communication and how to get rid of the victim mentality and how that really just doesn't serve us. So there's so much more that I have not mentioned.

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Emma was a guest, special guest, who is also featured in my book from adversity to abundance, inspiring stories of mental, physical and financial transformation which you can grab off of Amazon. It's available via paperback or Kindle ebook version. Grab a copy for yourself or family member, anyone who needs inspiration. It is heavily real estate focused, but it's not only about real estate. There's some other awesome guests featured in the book, but but again, this episode with Emma you do not want to miss.

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Welcome to the from Adversity to Abundance podcast. Are you an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur? Then this show is for you. Each week we bring you impactful stories of real people who have overcome painful human adversity to create a life of abundance. Abundance.

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You are not alone in your struggle. Join us and you will experience the power of true stories and gain practical knowledge from founders who have turned poverty into prosperity and weakness into wealth. This podcast will encourage you, through your health, relationship and financial challenges so you can become the hero in your quest for freedom. Take ownership of the life you are destined to live. Turn your adversity into abundance.

00:02:49
Welcome everybody to another episode of the from Adversity to Abundance podcast. I am your host, Jamie Bateman, and today I'm really excited to have Emma Powell of the high rise group with us today. Emma, how are you doing? Doing great. Awesome.

00:03:04
Yeah, we were chatting beforehand a little bit and every, everything we covered, maybe more interested in your story. So I'm excited to dive in a little bit here. So, for the listeners who are unfamiliar with you, could you give us a little bit of context from today, you know, the last couple of years as far as who you are and what you've, what you're up to? Yeah, I have to put myself back together a little bit. It's like a little mini therapy session there in a pre show topic for your show you've got here.

00:03:36
So I think where I am today, really, like with most people, it's all mostly a result of the adversity that we've been through. And so if you wanna look back on, when we first relocated to Utah, it was from Austin, where we felt like we were gonna raise our kids and spend the rest of our lives there. And then through a series of layoffs from the tech industry. My husband worked in chip manufacturing and then in it for data science startups. And the tech industry is just notoriously unstable as far as jobs go.

00:04:07
They hire, they fire. And so we had been watching that for years, and I had to really never take in practice proper precautions on my own self or for my own responsibility to protect our family from that volatility. And so the last time he got laid off, we were just in a pretty tough position, and we relocated to Salt Lake City. And with me not having a job, my business was back in Austin. I didn't want to rebuild that.

00:04:33
And so, sitting here across the country, very short notice, I think he got laid off the week before thanksgiving of 2017, and we were in Utah, settled into our. Our rental house the first weekend of February of 2018. And so it was. It was pretty rapid, which we were lucky he found a job so fast. And so.

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But at the same time, it was. It was. It was so rapid, and I was just so lost. We got rid of everything we owned. We didn't have any debt, which is.

00:04:59
Was kind of an easy move from that standpoint. And I joked the house was spotless and the kids were getting a little bit older. My youngest was in kindergarten at that point, and I was just bored and didn't have a business, didn't have a point, didn't have a purpose. My kids were having so much fun just exploring the new house, exploring the new neighborhood, and I just didn't have anything going on. And so out of that adversity, I thought, well, this is an opportunity for me to invent myself in the way that I've always had a lot of excuses for why I have never done before.

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I didn't have time I didn't have money. I didn't because we'd sold that house in Texas. Suddenly I had a lot of time and I had money, and I just decided that it was time to stop looking at hard things that happened and all the reasons and the obstacles of why we couldn't do something and just went out and did it. So I built a real estate business, a commercial real estate investing business. So.

00:05:50
And how many kids do you have? Did you say, yeah, we have six. Kids, and we're just going to gloss over. You had nothing going on. Got it.

00:06:00
Okay. All right. But so talk about your. Your commercial real estate business, and then we'll jump back. So what does that look like today?

00:06:12
I'm actually in the process of scaling it down, and I think that was. That was, again, through. When you, when you grow to a certain point where you have to ask yourself that question, like, why am I. Why am I doing this? And getting the systems and processes in place where you have to ask yourself, am I going to scale this bigger and am I going to make a big business out of this?

00:06:34
Or when it got to the point where I could no longer handle it by myself because I was dropping balls, you know, you're juggling too many balls. And then had to ask myself, do I want to keep going with this? Or was the whole reason I got into this to have passive income and spend more time with my family? Now, the answer to that was passive income and more time with my family. But.

00:06:55
But at the beginning when in 2018, I remember specifically saying, I need a job. I need something to do. I need some active investing, because otherwise it's. It's me just collecting mailbox money and watching cat videos on YouTube. Yeah.

00:07:13
Okay, so 2018, you were looking to do something outside of the home and make some extra, extra income. And then where did things go from there? Yeah. So I had a real estate and wedding photography business in Austin, and I was doing it part time. I knew I didn't want to work more than part time because I do really enjoy spending time with my kids, and I do really enjoy homemaking activities.

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I have a lot of hobbies. I sew and I played piano and garden and like to play sports and just do all those kinds of things. But at the same time, I have this thing where I want to go outside and build something, build a business, build in my community. And so I really like the idea of part time homemaker and part time business person. And I realized when I was so bored after my husband laid off, and then he got his new job.

00:07:59
Part of the reason that we weren't living the passive income lifestyle where my kids were homeschooled and I was home and he wasn't, and he didn't work that far away. I think it was like a five minute commute, but at the same time, it's like we couldn't go wander around and travel and do the things because he was still working. And at that time, I wasn't really thinking that I was going to retire. It was more like I was trying to protect us from the layoffs, protect us from the hardship. And when that mindset kind of shifted around to this business had the possibility to not only protect us from hardship, but also lead us into abundance, that was where it really changed.

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It wasn't like, now I need something to do to keep myself busy, because whether inside the home or outside the home, if I can free him from the need to be making money and to go into the office, then that's when I don't actually need to. A part time job inside, outside the home anymore. We can go do all of these things together. And so that was when I realized I don't really want to build this huge business. And I think he put it best when I was struggling with this, this thing, should I scale or should I not?

00:09:08
And he said, well, I don't want to just get to the point where I'm ready to quit my job. And we've just replaced my job with your job. He goes, then I'm the one on board. Right? We just traded problems, basically.

00:09:18
Gotcha. Okay. So we'll get, we'll get into that some more, but let's back up kind of into your, your story a little bit more. You know, historically, you can pick it up wherever you'd like. We touched on several things before we hit record the first time.

00:09:34
I'm just kidding. And I think a lot of the things you've dealt with, and this is not me trying to judge, it's just, I think a lot of people will be able to relate to several of the things you've gone through. Right. So pick it up where you'd like to. You mentioned a couple, you mentioned your parents before we hit record.

00:09:58
You mentioned your husband's, I guess, instability with his employment. And, I mean, just homeschooling six kids and that's enough adversity for me right there. Just that. But, yeah, pick it up where you'd like to, and we can dive into some of the challenges that you have faced personally and with your family and kind of your mindset and getting through those. Those obstacles and challenges.

00:10:24
Well, last fall, my sister's teenage son passed away from cancer, and he had been battling with it for about two years. And at the end, which is common with cancer, it was very, very sudden. It went from, he's. He's having a new round of chemo. He has this chance of survival to getting that phone call.

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He's going home. And it took probably three days at that point. Um.

00:11:00
Wow. Very, very sorry to hear that. Yeah. So that opened an opportunity for me to just take a closer look at my life and spend some time with some therapists, and it opened some doors that I didn't know needed to be looked at. And so sometimes that's the experiences we get from those.

00:11:30
And the year before, when my father passed away, that was difficult. That was obviously extremely difficult. But at the same time, he was 83, and we had the experience where he had had a heart attack a month or two months before he passed away, where we all gathered into Seattle. It was before the pandemic. It was the fall of 2019.

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And so we were in his hospital room. We were in the nursing home with him. We had wonderful experiences. We said what we needed to say, and even though we could have continued to enjoy great times together, we didn't feel like there was anything unsaid. And so it was a beautiful experience that I felt like was really bonding for my siblings and me.

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And we were able to say goodbye to him in a way that had dignity and celebrated his life. It was very different watching my nephew battle cancer during COVID and be isolated in the hospital, and then eventually, at age 17, lose that battle. And so afterwards, I was talking with my therapist, and she was just asking about trauma experiences, and I started talking about things that I never really let bother me before. And I would see her eyes widen, her eyebrows go up, and she would start scribbling notes. I have a brother who's quadriplegic from a cycling accident.

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He actually lives near me. We moved here four years ago, and he's been here a couple years before us. And so I. I hadn't had, like, up close and personal, his battle with. With, you know, his new life, basically, and more close and personal now, and realizing it's not just the fact that you can't walk, it's.

00:13:17
It affects every part of your physiology and your mental health. It's, um. Right, yeah, I. And this. This is in no way it's just me relating on some level.

00:13:29
Right. But, um, I guarantee some of the my friends are going to make fun of me for even bringing this up again, but I ruptured my achilles last year, and this is not a sympathy, it's not for me. But, but the point is, it affected. I couldn't drive for three months. Right.

00:13:47
And it affected our family in so many ways that I never even thought about. It was just like, oh, my leg is the problem. Right. Well, no, it's really. That was the start of all the problems.

00:13:59
Right. And so, point being, it, I mean, it created a lot of stress for our family. My wife had to drive the kids everywhere, and it's just a lot of things I couldn't do. And, I mean, just so that times ten or 100 is what, you know, what your brother has been dealing with. It's just so much more than just the physical ailment.

00:14:20
So, yeah, that's, that's, that's a lot. Um, and I think it sounds like you're. You're kind of like me and that we were talking beforehand that, you know, we don't. I at least I will speak for myself. I tend to, like, keep things at a distance, you know, emotionally, to which I think sometimes is the right move on some level.

00:14:42
But, um, and not if it's not front and center, then it's like, it's just easier to move forward, you know, without really facing someone else's adversity. And sounds like. It sounds like this is now, you've had some things kind of very much front and center, whether you like it or not. And so, I mean, that's a lot right there. And then again, with the instability from the employment side and then just homeschooling, to me, that's.

00:15:12
You may think that's no big deal, but I think that's a lot of adversity. Being from a big family myself, like you said you are, I can only imagine how much work that is in and of itself. And I know you mentioned some of the challenges with, I think, one of your, your sons as well, so. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to dive into as far as kind of challenges you've.

00:15:36
You've had to work through? Well, I think that, like I said, who we are and how we deal with. With these. With these things that happen to us in our lives really has. Really speaks a lot to who we are on the other side of it.

00:15:52
I think it's funny that you brought up the Achilles, because it's one of those little things. I have, actually, an Achilles disorder, too, if we want to name that. And it actually stems from, I mentioned earlier, back from when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I had a sudden appendix rupture, and it was just rapid onset. Nobody knew what was wrong. Got into the hospital, and I'm going to use the words almost died.

00:16:21
It was really, really bad emergency surgery. I was out. I was down for quite a while and had some pretty extensive antibiotic use afterwards, which that does a number on your joints. And so I've had, since that time, really a lot of problems with my joints. I've had some knee surgery.

00:16:40
I've got an Achilles. They're just wearing out. I have a lot of pain, and so I wouldn't call it chronic pain, but it's nagging. And so one of my favorite hobbies is hiking. It's how I relax.

00:16:51
It's how I like to spend my time. And so I just spend a lot of time working on my joint issues. And it's just kind of funny because when you have a situation like my brother's situation and my sister has the same problem with her heel, so it's partially genetic and it's partially from the antibiotics. She also had cancer during COVID And so we're complaining about our heels, but I feel like I'm not even allowed to talk about it because she has cancer. So our heels and our achilles are just.

00:17:20
We just don't bring it up. And so I think that sometimes the denial that we're in, that something is going on. And that's why I think working with a therapist was actually helpful, because I don't. It's not like I'm at my brother's house helping him in the morning get transferred to his wheelchair. It's not like I'm over there.

00:17:38
We don't even see each other all that often when there's a crisis or a holiday or something, and there's a lot of guilt there that I'm not able to. You just kind of feel helpless. And so I think that dealing with these things, there's just a lot. And we have a tendency to just bury it and ignore it or on the flip side, to develop a victim mentality. And this is going to hold us back.

00:18:01
And here's why. I can't do all the things I want to do because of all these hard things that have happened. And sometimes I even feel like inspiring stories from people who have overcome adversity is, in a way, demotivating because what's wrong with me? Why can't I do this? And.

00:18:15
Yeah, no, absolutely. You're right. I mean, it's. It's just like anything else. It's like, either extreme is.

00:18:20
Is not good. Um, so pretending you don't have problems or pretending you don't have emotions is not healthy. Um, but staying there, stuck and wallowing and. Is not healthy either. Right.

00:18:33
And so. And again, I'm not preaching to anybody. This is. Applies to me just as much as anyone else, but. And so that's an individual thing.

00:18:43
I mean, as far as. Where's the, you know, the healthy zone for. For each person? I think so. I mean, that's.

00:18:51
That's a lot. I mean, yeah. And as far as, like. And this show, it just gets into, I mean, some of the things I didn't necessarily see coming where, uh, one was that it kind of sets us up to compare ourselves to other people based both, um, with the adversity level, you know, that people have been through or the types. And I guess, you know, probably bad choice of words, but quality and quantity of adversity and then quality and quantity of abundance.

00:19:21
It's like, how do I compare to this person? Well, I think it's inevitable we do that. And it's. I actually was listening to a podcast about. About this yesterday, um, that we do.

00:19:33
That's just in our nature to compare. And I don't always think that's a bad thing, because you can look at, like, you know, realize that your heel issue isn't really all that big of a deal compared. If you do compare your. That adversity to someone else. And I think that, to me, that's encouraging because, okay, someone else has been through this or something worse, so I can, too.

00:19:55
But you're absolutely right. You can look at someone else's, you know, major accomplishments or how. And just. And that can backfire as well. So, yeah, it's.

00:20:05
It's. These are complicated waters to navigate, I'd say. And certainly we're not trying to fix all the mental health issues in the world or address all these, solve all the problems in one podcast episode, but. So. So what would you say?

00:20:23
Kind of. Is there any kind of common theme as far as, um, either your mindset or. Or just one or two, maybe tactics? You may not have even thought about this before, but that have enabled you to get through those various issues? Yeah, I'm, um.

00:20:41
I'm definitely a big rocks kind of person. And that goes to the analogy when you're trying to put a bunch of rocks, big rocks, small rocks, and sand into a jar, if you focus on the sand first, then the big rocks won't fit. But if you put in the big rocks first, the sand will pour in and it'll fill in all of empty spaces and the. So, I mean, I've heard that analogy plenty of times, and it never really struck me as, you know, mind blowing when I heard it. But as time goes on, I recognize that that's just the way that I deal with life, and that's the way that I solve problems.

00:21:09
I like to find one solution that will. That will spread out or trickle down and solve a lot of other problems. And so I would say that there's a book that I read when I started homeschooling, especially when we really switched strategies to something called unschooling, where we're not doing a lot of formal education. And because, like you said, six kids homeschooling, it would be too much work. It would be unsustainable.

00:21:32
And so I'm trying to find a sustainable way to educate my children without making myself crazy. And so finding the big rock that's going to solve all these problems. There's this book in the unschooling community called Nonviolent Communication, and it was written by somebody who worked in the international community doing a lot of negotiations, political negotiations, like jewish and palestinian, you know, over the israeli borders kinds of situations. And his main premise in that book that. That really hit me hard was, you cannot control other people.

00:22:04
And he didn't really say it that overtly, but it's like, the only thing that you can hope to do is communicate. And you can't even make sure that they hear you. You can't even make sure that they understand you, because that's what we say. We all just want to be heard, but we can't even control whether or not heard. All we can do is communicate, and then that's it.

00:22:24
And the rest you need to let go. And so when I started recognizing that I could categorize my life by things that I can control and things that I can't control, that eliminated pretty much everything. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. So you take the situation.

00:22:40
Let's take my son that you mentioned. He has autism. We dealt with a lot of autism in my family, and, you know, people who have autism who don't believe autism is a thing, it's. It's, um. It's been.

00:22:54
It's been fun to learn to deal with emotions and socializing and deal with adversity and all the kind of things when. When you don't quite think about things the same way that other people do. And so it's like you recognize that you can't control that situation, and there's nothing you can do about it, and so you stop worrying about it. Because we used to think with my son when he was growing up, like, what did we do? How did we cause this?

00:23:18
Like, my husband would. Would obsess over the way that he would come in and see that he was loading the dishwasher the wrong way, and he'd say, no, the plates go this way and the bowls go that way. And then my son became very, very controlling and obsessive that certain things were the right way and you had to follow the rules, and this is not the way that it's done. And my husband really thought that it was because he had these very particular ways of having him do things as a kid. And your husband was blaming himself, blaming himself.

00:23:43
But then when you step back and realize, like, we cannot control the fact that our son has autism, we did not cause this. We did not create this. And once you let that go, then you just focusing on, okay, how do we. How do we cope? Obviously, he still has autism.

00:23:55
But when you stop the blame game and you stop the what if game, so when you stop the what if I could control this game, you only focus in on what you can control. And what we notice is most of it goes away. The other parts of it, you really can get focused in on what you can control. And then there are a few things that you cannot control that you're still really upset about. It's really bothersome.

00:24:19
It's really stressful. And that's the stuff that we found that we need to do some more inner work on how to not let that stuff bother you. And you have two options there. You can either expand your circle of control, or you can just learn how to stop letting it bother you. That's really interesting.

00:24:37
And my son is autistic as well. And we actually just this morning had a. Went on a school trip to try to find a better fit for him. So we've dealt with some of that as well. And, yeah, it's a couple things that came to mind.

00:24:52
One is that as you were talking, it's, you know, the fact that you can free yourself of worrying about things that you can't control. It's not only that, it helps you personally, you know, oh, that's great. You don't have to feel that stress. That that's. That is good, right?

00:25:09
But also it's. There's an opportunity cost there because you're not focused on the things you can control. So I don't know if I thought about it that way until you were explaining it, but, um, so I just. You were talking about focusing on things you can control. Well, I think because you're.

00:25:24
If you're obsessing over, did we cause this? You know, what do I do wrong? Well, you're not actually focused on things you can control, and therefore, you're not as effective in your impact. So. And then.

00:25:37
Oh, the other thing I was going to quickly mention was my son. In the last two weeks, he just made this, and this is, it will likely change tomorrow. So I'm not spiking the football, per se, but it's like we always had this huge battle of getting him out of bed and getting him to school because he doesn't like school at all. And, you know, and then magically, I guess he saw that the end of the school year is almost here. And for the last week, week and a half, he's been at my car in the morning waiting for me to go to school, you know, because.

00:26:08
And so major turnaround, 180 in his behavior. What did we. What had we done to. To change that or cause that? Nothing.

00:26:17
So a lot of it is you can't control it. This is the point. So, you know, and that goes both ways. So that I found that very helpful as well myself. Just when I actually had gone part time, we talked about, I recently quit my job.

00:26:35
I had gone part time in 2015, and around that time, it was a big mindset shift. And I've talked about this before, but it just a huge piece of it was just not worrying about the mainstream media and all these things that are, you know, these topics are important. Politics, war, certainly important, but I have very little impact on them, if any. And so it just didn't do me any good or my family any good for me to be focused on those things. So I really started focusing on the things I could control and my team around me and things like that.

00:27:09
But this episode isn't about me. But. So let's see. So, okay, so let's get back into the 2017 2018 shift, and then we'll talk more about kind of what you have going on today, and I'll fire off some other questions. So what did your 2018 to 2020 pre pandemic?

00:27:30
What happened with your real estate business? Well, we had that house that we had in Texas, and that was supposed to be the forever home. It was a little ranch, the homestead, and hit the sheepdogs and the chickens and the goats and the whole nine yards. And that just, of course, like any dream that you have, once you start living in it, it just, it wasn't what we thought it would be. It was more expensive than we thought it would be.

00:27:50
It just, and we were kind of watching that unravel a little bit. So when he got laid off, we decided when we moved to Utah that we were going to move back into a little neighborhood and give up on the whole farmstead thing. And so that was, that was kind of a tough, a tough mindset shift for us. And we thought, okay, well, we'll just rent really cheap for a few years while we sort ourselves out. We didn't have any other debt and that's one of those, another situation, like the whole Dave Ramsey thing.

00:28:14
Like he really blessed our lives in a lot of ways and he really harmed us in a lot of ways. That's interesting. So you went through like the, his programs or. Yeah, we live in Texas for so many years. He's really, really popular in the evangelical christian community and especially homeschooling in that area.

00:28:31
We spent a lot of time in some evangelical homeschool groups, and so my kids went through the high school program, listening to him on the radio. And like I said, we were from a very frugal family, very self sufficiency type of, type of preaching at family. And so that really resonated us with us in a lot of ways. But I think where it really falls down is on the investment advice. It's kind of like get some ETF's and mutual funds and pay cash for real estate.

00:28:59
And what happened at the end of ten or 15 years of doing that was we owned no real estate and our house still wasn't paid off because we had so many kids, we felt like we were constantly putting our lives off. Right. And we were never doing anything. And so we were living so frugally and we weren't making any progress in our goals because we weren't using leverage. And so, yeah, we did have to kind of bring ourselves around to more of the rich dad mindset we're trying to do dad with Dave Ramsey, and.

00:29:26
It just, it didn't. Yeah, and that's, I mean, it's partially entertainment like it is. I mean, I, I do think it's kind of like, I'll put it like almost like CrossFit. Like it. CrossFit can be great for lots of people.

00:29:42
And Dave Ramsey has done a lot of good and, you know, he doesn't care what I think. But, but it's not a matter of it's just a plug and play like this. This is for everybody. And it's like you're not even listening to what my situation is at all. You don't know what would work best for me.

00:29:57
And so the same thing. I did CrossFit for a while. It's like you show up and whatever's on the schedule, you do, and it's like. And I think in general, CrossFit's done a lot of good for people, but it's pretty harmful if you aren't careful.

00:30:11
So that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, you can't, I think for people who are in debt and for, you know, many people, Dave Ramsey has a lot of quality principles that should, you shouldn't, you should apply to your life. But, yeah, he's very anti leverage. He's very anti infinite banking, which is a whole different story, which has to do with leverage as well. But, yeah, so you pivoted your mindset and you were able, and then you moved more toward the rich dad kind of approach.

00:30:41
What does that mean for the listener out there? What does that mean? Leverage of other people's money, leverage of other people's time, which means partners. So Dave Ramsey is very anti partnership as well, and leverage of other people's knowledge and skills. So partnerships with people and partnerships with people for money.

00:31:04
So whether it's a loan or equity partners, and when you realize that you can leverage other people's money, skills, time, then you realize that there's no ceiling to that. And so the way that it was explained to me best was a local fund manager. They managed an institutional fund, and we were at a mastermind together. And I was really grappling with this idea of scaling my business, and he was trying to encourage me to get out of the multifamily syndication game and start a fund. And he said, you're already doing it.

00:31:35
You already do the sec reg d funds for when hating for these multifamily deals, you already know the laws. You already know how to raise capital. You already know how to do this. He said, if you just go and you just shift your focus from asset management and finding these deals, just go raise money, and then you can place them with skilled operators. He said, how much did you raise your potential to earn income when you went from being a stay at home mom to a photographer?

00:32:01
I said, oh, I raised it quite a bit. He said, well, what about when you went from being a photographer to a real estate investor? I said, quite a bit again. I mean, that was a big mindset. Shift right there.

00:32:09
He said, what about when you decided that you weren't going to do just residential fix and flips wholesales, that you were going to do commercial real estate, big stuff, not just duplexes and twelve plexes, that you were going to go for the big stuff, the hundred plus units? I said, oh, wow, that just, that just blew the lid off. That just blew my abundance mindset all to pieces. And he's kind of doing this with his hands, then I'm blowing it off. And then he said, if you became a multifamily syndicator and you became a fund manager and the hand just went off the scale.

00:32:37
He said, that's the difference between what you can earn as a multifamily syndicator and a fund manager. He said, so if you're going to be working, you might as well put your effort to the place where it is going to be the most valuable, where it will have the most leverage. And so that mindset shift of how to leverage was really what changed, what changed between being able to think about things from I want a couple of rentals paid off rentals, Dave Ramsey style, to I'm going to be a fund manager and go blow the load off this. So explain the difference between a, you know, so you're saying with a syndication, you go find a multifamily deal and then you go raise some money to fund it. Right?

00:33:20
Is that with one property usually, right? Yeah. Whereas a fund, you're focused on the raising of the capital first and then you're going out and placing that capital with operators who actually are managing individual deals. Is that correct? Yeah.

00:33:38
So you can have a single offering fund or a multi offering fund. So single offering is what I was doing, where there's one property and the fund is very, very specific to that property is this address. We're going to do exactly these things and we're going to expecting these kinds of returns. And that's what you basically go sell to your investors. I hate to use the word sell because there are opportunities that you're giving them and all of that, but that's what you disclose to your investors, what you have going on.

00:34:04
And with a multi offering fund, it's like, these are the kinds of properties that we're going to be doing. This is the kind of investment we're going to be in. You can get pretty specific, like we're going to do these three properties, right? Or we're going to do this type of asset. And so funds can really be the sky is the limit.

00:34:19
You can design them however you want. The question is, can you sell that fund? So a blind pool, because if they don't know what they're investing in, it could be like, I don't know what I'm going to invest in, but I'm amazing. So you should just put some money with me and I'm sure I'll find a good place for it. And people might invest in that if you're grant, but most people would not.

00:34:38
And so the more specific that you can get, the better, but the more general you can get, the better. Right. And so finding that balance between those two things is really the difference between a fund and raising money for a single offering. Got it. Okay.

00:34:53
Yeah. Because we have a note fund and it's more, you know, it's, we raise capital. We have a general idea of what asset type we're going to be buying, but I have no idea which assets I'm buying yet. So that's more like the fund model that you're talking about. But so and so where does it stand today?

00:35:14
Are you running a fund right now, or what's your business look like right now? Well, I came at it from a little bit of a different angle than a regulation defund, because the main problem that I have in my business is I'm really, actually not good at raising money from limited partners. What you really need to be good at if you're going to raise money from limited partners. And so I'm figuring most of your listeners know something about how the SEC governs the legalities, the regulations around raising money. So if people are going to put money in and they're not going to do any work, they have no say they're limited partner.

00:35:48
Whether they're putting it in as equity or whether they're putting in as debt. There are rules that where you have to follow about how you raise money. I'm actually okay from raising money from debt partners. Debt limited partners. I really just have not had success from equity limited equity side.

00:36:03
Gotcha. Because most of the people that I attract tend to be other entrepreneurs who have the money of a limited partner. Maybe 100 grand, 250 grand somewhere around there, and they'll contact me and they'll say, hey, I want to do a deal because I'm good at joint ventures, but I was doing small enough deals, like maybe I only needed two or $300,000 and we could go buy a crappy class d property in a smaller town. And so I was raising that. But then when I started doing much larger stuff and we're doing six $7 million raises.

00:36:32
I can't have 2030 joint venture partners in there. It's illegal. And first of all, like, who wants to juggle that many, that many people? And so we had a deal. This is probably the biggest professional adversity I've ever had.

00:36:47
We had a deal that we were buying. It was a 200 plus unit in Texas, and we couldn't raise money for it because it's just raising money from limited partners is. It's a specialized skill. And our team that we put together, we were just not getting the job done. And I remember we let that deal go, and we lost all of our due diligence money.

00:37:07
We lost a bunch of earnest money. I paid back the earnest money partners, and I paid for one partner who didn't have the cash to pay his portion of it. I just. I lost a lot of money in that deal. And what I learned from that was, do I want to keep doing this?

00:37:20
Do I want to keep scaling? Do I want to keep raising money on a clock? And I'm obviously really struggling with raising money from limited partners. And I kept having people reach out. I thought I had the money for that.

00:37:31
I thought I could do it, because so many people reach out and say that, hey, I want to put money in a deal. But when I went to go do the raises, they all wanted to be COGP. They didn't want to be partners. And so I was kind of whining about this to one of my joint venture partners, who also happens to be a securities attorney and whose dad runs an institutional fund, and just saying, like, that raising LP is so much harder than I thought it was going to be. And I said, I have millions of dollars here with co gps, small co GPS.

00:38:02
I can't use it. There's nothing I can do with it because I can't form gigantic joint ventures. And he said, well, it sounds like what you're describing is an investment club. I was like, okay, now this. It wasn't just that.

00:38:14
Oh, yeah, that's hard. You better learn how to raise money from limited partners. He had that background and that knowledge, and he was in my network, and he sent me home with a research project, and there's nothing I love better than a good research project. So I went home and I. And I took this, basically this massive failure of this deal that fell through, where I lost.

00:38:35
I lost almost as much money that year as my husband makes in a year. It was devastating, Jeff. Yeah, that's, that's. And then, not only that, I mean, it's just a pile on while we're at it. Right.

00:38:46
Um, but just the. I mean, it's probably, you know, your pride and just. I don't know. I mean, I can't. That's.

00:38:56
I'm not saying I'm immune to that. It just, uh. That. That sounds very challenging because you kind of walk away with your tail between your legs and then lose all this money and pay people back. And.

00:39:08
Yeah, that goes against the whole, like, oh, well, if you find a good deal, all the money just shows up magically. It's just. I don't think that's always the case. So at the same time, that experience is what gave birth to the pivot to, and it's gave birth to the investment club. And so we're working on our third and fourth deal right now that we closed the first two in.

00:39:32
In quarter one and quarter two. And now we have more than almost two dozen people who now, through the club, have done their first COGP deal. And then we've also got some small fund managers in there who are just looking for places to put their capital that they're good at raising LP Capital and they're looking for good deals to put it. And what we're really good at in the club is meeting good operators and finding good deals and screening good deals. So I have way more deals than I have money.

00:40:00
And, I mean, people want to go in as limited partners, we've got great opportunities for them, but if people want to get their toes wet as a co GP, there has never been an easier way to do it. And it took us. We've been in operation for about a year, and it took us a while to get all of the legal jump through and also getting all the cats it in the right direction. But I'm really excited about what we're building because for the first time, you're not paying $30,000 to a guru and learn all about it. Three years later, still haven't done a deal.

00:40:29
The club is completely free because I don't want to deal with the. And what's the. What's the name of the club? We're doing that right now. We're actually reorganizing and rebranding everything.

00:40:39
Find out more about it on my website.

00:40:43
And what's your. What's your website? I mean, we'll. Sorry. It's www.

00:40:49
Dot hirise. Dot group. It's highrise. And basically, after we did our first couple of deals, we realized we had something pretty cool here and it was able to fulfill a lot of holes in the industry for people who were really struggling to build this business and were really frustrated. And we recently just got to the point where I can't run it by myself anymore.

00:41:14
Rather than starting to charge money for it and create all this, I said, you know what? Just gonna. I'm just gonna run it like I run my home school and you don't have to run it. So we basically formed committees and created people with jobs, and I basically get to function inside of my area of expertise and control what I'm good at controlling. And the rest of it, I got to delegate, and I'm really, really enjoying what the club is turning into and how people are building what they need to make their business successful.

00:41:44
And that's what I was proud of. And it came out of, like you said, just reflecting on a failure. I mean, whatever. You don't want to call it a learning lesson. People have different names for it, but it's not something you, you know, you had something professional go sideways, not the way you wanted it to, and you.

00:42:01
But you didn't just quit. I mean, you were talking to someone who's plugged in in the industry, and that speaks to networking and just, you know, being a part of something, a mastermind or something bigger than yourself, because I don't. I don't know everything. You don't know everything. So, so that's really cool.

00:42:23
And now you feel like you're moving, you're able to focus more on using your strengths and your skill set from your previous experience, and, and then let other people who are really good at raising capital or whatever else, underwriting run with that. Underwriting. Yeah. Um, that's really cool. I'm really curious.

00:42:46
I know there's some other, uh, groups like that out there, but, um, I feel like those are. It's only going to grow because as people get, I mean, just, you know, people are lots of people looking for alternative investments just for, um, numerous reasons. Uh, and, but, but they don't, most people don't have the time to, you know, I've found with notes we were talking about this before is, at the end of the day, most people end up deciding whether they want to be an active or passive investor. They might be both. I'm both.

00:43:19
Right. But, but, and there certainly is a middle ground there. But, but you don't always know. And that's what you were talking about before, is you don't, you know, the push is to scale, right? Oh, you got a scale.

00:43:32
Scale, scale. Well, maybe there's an in between there. And it sounds like that's what your investment club can offer as well, right? Yeah. For people like me, who I'm.

00:43:43
I just realized I wasn't cut out to be a principal sponsor because to do. To do that, you have to be really great asset manager, and you have to be building a business and put people and keep key players in place to be running a business. And I just didn't want to build a business again, like you said, trading out the same problem where now I have a job, even though I retired, and it just, it wasn't a good fit for our lifestyle. And so in order to scale back and stop being a principal sponsor, but not just go straight to being a limited partner and really operating a fund would have just been the same thing. It's running a fund business instead of a syndication business.

00:44:17
That wasn't a good fit for me either. I actually took my partner's dad out to lunch and just grilled him for a couple of hours and just said, like, tell me the life of an institutional fund manager CEO and just tell me what this is like. And at the end of the meeting, he just sat back and he said, you know, maybe. Maybe this isn't for you. I was like, good.

00:44:33
That's all I need to do. I think that's. That's very good advice right there, because we just, we just follow sometimes and we don't take the, we don't create the space to think about where do I want to be? What do I want my life to look like in five or ten years or even next year? So, okay, go talk to someone who's doing it and see if you want to do it.

00:44:50
And chances are the answer might be no. Um, you know, so that's really good. All right, I'm going to. I'm going to rapid fire go through some questions and then we'll wrap it up. What's one thing that people misunderstand about you?

00:45:09
People assume that because I talk a lot and I'm actually not a very good conversationalist, that I'm not a good listener, but I'm actually a really good listener. It's just I do better if I'm in a situation where I can listen to you on a podcast or I can watch your YouTube channel, or I can read your stuff on social media face to face. I tend to take over and dominate a conversation, and so people will laugh a lot about how my husband must be a really good listener to, but I guarantee I know the names of your kids and your dogs and this type of thing. I know a lot. I'm always watching, I'm always observing, I'm always listening, but it doesn't always come out that way.

00:45:49
Got it. If you could have coffee with any historical figure, who would it be and why? I don't know if I want to admit this one. Probably Elon Musk. Honestly, he is.

00:46:02
He is a conflicted human. When I first was exposed to him years ago, I was watching a video, and they were talking about some of the things that he was working on that were going to change the world. And they actually referred to him as our lord and savior, Elon Musk. And I was like, who is this guy? And the stuff he was doing was just off the wall.

00:46:22
Fascinating. But as time goes through, especially when they were looking at removing him from the Tesla, and he was having to say, like, I have a problem with time, and I have a problem with admitting timelines for things, and he started looking at his own shortcomings, and then he goes and just spews it all out on Twitter and his relationship issues with his. And you're just watching him be this incredibly complex and conflicted kind of person. But he's the kind of person that I could just sit down with and talk for hours about. He's.

00:46:48
He's kind of an unschooler. He knows a lot about human behavior and relationships. We could talk about business all day long. Obviously, he turned my head in circles, but science, data, like, all of things that I'm a dilettante, he could just really fill my. Fill my.

00:47:06
No, that's a good one. He's. Absolutely. No, and I love it because it's whether you talk.

00:47:27
Sorry, my mic cut out there. Is going to get paid a good. He's going to earn his money on this one. So, yeah, I mean, that. That's a really good one.

00:47:36
I like that he's. I mean, he's. Elon's brilliant, and, I mean, yeah, I'm curious to see where the Twitter thing goes.

00:47:45
No, that's a good one. And, yeah, I know he's had a lot of relationship failures, I guess we would say. Right. But Amber heard, like you said, he's. He's.

00:47:56
He's a human, right? A brilliant, complicated human. Um, what's your favorite meal? Or one of your favorite meals doesn't have to be your favorite meal. Oh, I'm not allowed to talk about food?

00:48:09
No. Why not? Um. Okay, we can fast forward. Yeah, that's another adversity right there.

00:48:19
Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. So that's a loaded. That's a loaded question.

00:48:26
Got it. All right. How about, in your opinion, what's one of the most important personality traits for someone to be successful in entrepreneurship or real estate? What's. It doesn't have to be the number one thing.

00:48:39
There's obviously multiple things, but I guess it's kind of like the bigger pockets question. What separates people from, you know, the successful from those who give up or fail?

00:48:52
I will tell this one in a story. I know we were talking about how people learn best stories. I'll try and keep it short. It's not exactly my forte, but we were talking one time about how I'm not very detail oriented, and I don't like to dive deep into the numbers and the nitty gritty on this. I know a lot about a lot, but in a particular deal, am I really going to read all the fine print answers is no.

00:49:12
And I. I really want to make sure that my partners are aware of this upfront and that they understand that. That their roles are their roles, and my role is my role. And my partner was laughing one time, and he said, he said, do you know so and so? And he was describing this guy's business in an uber successful, huge income, just.

00:49:30
And he said, he's so scatterbrained ADHD. He's all over the place. And that's one of the reasons he's so successful, is because he's a huge thinker and he can really zoom out and look at all of these weird problem solving, dreaming type of things. And my partner turned to me and he said, you know, he makes you look like a CEO. I mean, sorry, I didn't even say the right thing.

00:49:53
He said, he makes you look like an accountant. And I just. Sorry. Edit that part, too. He said, he makes you look like an accountant.

00:50:02
And I stopped, and I thought to myself, like somebody who's so much more successful than me, that I try that zoom out, big picture problem solver. And there's this guy over there that makes me look like an accountant. I'm obviously embarrassed about how little I'm involved in the details, but that comment made me realize I need to be less involved in the details. I need to stop even more. And so I've been working on.

00:50:26
I've been working on that.

00:50:30
My wife just started a new job about a month ago, and it's been challenging for her, and there's a ton of detail and a lot of moving parts and all these, um, things she's struggling with, frankly. But, um, I was trying to relay the point that, uh, tons of successful people would be awful at that job. Like, she's already way better than, like, probably Elon Musk or, you know, would be at that job. Um, because that. It's really not about.

00:50:58
About that. So everyone's different. We all have different skill sets, and so you're not really a details person, but way more than that's not holding you back. And you need to be more big picture focus is what you're, what you're saying. Right.

00:51:12
Creative problem solving. How can you solve problems that have market value? That's basically a successful entrepreneur right there. And you can't be a creative problem solver if you've got your head down all the time. Now, on certain things, I can be very detail oriented because I'm the one in charge.

00:51:28
I'm the only one doing it. I know all the kids and the schedules and we're not supposed to be and all that, because there's no one else in charge of it. But if I can delegate and put somebody else in charge of that so I can continue to zoom out more and more and more and be more of a creative problem solver, then that's really where you want to spend most of your time as an entrepreneur. Sure. Makes a lot of sense.

00:51:47
What's a book or two that you'd recommend? Well, that nonviolent communication. One, Marshall Rosenberg. Excellent, excellent. And I think the ones that are most life changing are the ones that you're probably the worst at.

00:51:58
And so somebody might read that and. Be like, duh, I've been doing this for ten years. Exactly. But for me, not knowing how to communicate effectively, that was that really tough one. And then there.

00:52:10
There are two more, again, along the lines of communication, because that's something I pride myself about being good at, but because I've spent a lot of time working on it, and so now I feel good at it. And I think that if you work at something, you can start out at something that you're naturally maybe not that talented at, but when you recognize that and really start to focus on it, you can become good at it. So there's that, I think. Chris Voss, another difference. Told story.

00:52:35
Yeah. Never, never split the difference how he. Became a great negotiator, even though the guy he learned from had no idea what he was doing. And Chris became the great one. And that guy was still like a b cop because he never really identified what he was doing, did, and went on to become great at it.

00:52:51
So, communication books like that tend to really get me excited. I always think they're amazing because it's something I've had to put a lot of effort into. Yeah. And it's a critical skill. There's so much.

00:53:03
We all have a lot of room for growth with that, with communication. Um, that's really good. So. All right, well, two more questions. How do you like to serve others?

00:53:13
That's the first one. Um, this has been a struggle for me over the years because I have so many kids that I've had to kind of come to terms with the fact that I'm serving by serving my children and making responsible young adults. And so at first, I want to go out and change the world, and I want to be feeding all the hungry, and I want to be. But that's. That is actually a form of narcissism.

00:53:34
It's called the community narcissist who goes out and they're. They're just talking about all the great things that they do and sharing it. And so I think that my need to go out and change the world actually points out a little bit of ego. And I've had to dial that ego back to say, I created these little humans, and I'm going to make them the best contributors to society that I can possibly, possibly do. And that has definitely been a big step back in ego for me.

00:53:58
So that's. That's the way that I like to serve. But now that they're older, because they get a discount on their car insurance if they are young volunteers and volunteer regularly, I've been able to use that as a little bit of leverage to go out and do some of those volunteer things that I never really do when they were younger. My daughter turned 15 today, so I'll have to look into that one. It's not that much.

00:54:24
It's only, like, maybe 5%. But, you know, they're at the humane Society, and we're volunteering at the charity garden, and, you know, it feels just really great to have something that's been nagging at you for so many years. We did a little bit, but almost never. And now we're finally, finally getting into it, and it just feels great to volunteer. You're talking about.

00:54:43
Yeah, no, I can relate to that. It's. I always feel like I should be volunteering somewhere, and I'm not usually. All right, and then last but not least, where can our listeners find you online? If you go to highrise group slash contact, you can use whatever way you want to contact me on there.

00:55:01
Whatever's easiest. I've got links to all the socials that I use. There's a calendar link that you can book a phone call with me. Don't hesitate. I love, I love those 30 minutes calls.

00:55:11
One of my favorite things to do, like podcast interviews and those 30 minutes calls, if I could just only do that in my business, that is what I would do and delegate everything else. So you've been on a bunch of podcasts and you were on bigger pockets, right? Yeah, I just. How did, how did you pull that one off? I always joke it's like, you need to be a woman because they're looking for a little bit more diversity.

00:55:32
So I just started listening to episodes when they would say, like, the type of guest they wanted on. And I just, I do remember Brandon specifically saying that I kind of stopped listening, to be honest with you. But once he. Not when he said that, but once Brandon left, and then. I don't know.

00:55:51
But no, it is true. Listen, because David's taking it in a very different direction lately. First, I was a little disappointed, too, but David's definitely doing some new stuff and I'm actually really liking it because it's definitely some new content and forcing me to think about some things a little bit. Thanks. I'll have to try again.

00:56:12
I was enjoying the Sunday ones when they were doing more of the mindset, less, you know, granular real estate mechanics, I guess. But I'll have to give it another go. So I cut you off, though. So contact you however they want through your website. And if you want, if anyone's looking for a awesome podcast guest, you're open to that as well, right?

00:56:35
Yeah, would love it. Come and join the club. Learn how to invest in commercial real estate. We meet every Monday night at 630 and we've got a slack channel. And the reason we do that instead of like a more public Facebook group is we do discuss 506 b deals in there and we like to keep it nice and private.

00:56:50
So we don't want operators deals getting out there in the public, even though we're not offering them. We just, we just want to word of mouth. And I know I said last question like three questions ago, but how do you define commercial real estate, you know, for your, for your group anyway? Because that is sometimes a nebulous term. Like, what is commercial real estate?

00:57:11
We use the lender definition. So any property that is for non residential use, or if it is for residential use, it has to be five units or above. Right now, we specialize in multifamily because that's what I know best. And, you know, I was the one running the club. But now that we're branching out into more committees, we would like to diversify into, especially mobile home parks.

00:57:33
Stealth storage are the two that people seem to be most interested in. But I also multifamily development, some ground up. So we're looking at some pretty exciting ground up projects right now. So if there's something that you know about, like we've got a. An RV park investor in the group, and so we are able to look at a wider variety of deals because we have experts in those deal types who can inform us if somebody brings us a deal.

00:57:57
And I don't know anything about it, I'm like, hey, Joe, is this a good deal or not? So it's actually really nice to have to leverage one another that way. Well, and also this, nobody knows really what's going to happen with the economy here. So it's nice to have experts across many different asset classes and strategies. So that's good.

00:58:15
And the group is free, you said, right? It's free. And there are two reasons I do it. One, I don't want to start another business for reasons we already discussed. And two, if I charge for it, I might have to get into some sec stuff where I'm running an investment company or I'm a registered investment advisor.

00:58:30
Yeah, that's not it at all. We are a club. We all make our own investment decisions. We all put our own knowledge in there, and we're not asserting anything or charging money for anything. And that's.

00:58:41
That's what I need out of it. And that's what attracts other people. We create it to be what we want it to be. That's awesome. I'm going to have to check it out.

00:58:50
So definitely we meet live once a. Month for people who live in Salt Lake city. Team. Okay. Live once a month.

00:58:56
Nice. All right. Well, Emma, thank you so much for joining me. This has been really good. I know we had some couple technical issues, but we'll work through that.

00:59:07
That's no big deal. But thank you so much. I know people are really going to be able to relate to several things that you said. You definitely have dealt with a lot of adversity, and it's not, look, the episode I just released today, you know, he was raised with. Without running water, Lewis, no running water, no electricity, and dealt with all kinds of, you know, abuse and, I mean, just really just bouncing around from different home to home.

00:59:38
And like, it's almost like, okay, we got that. It's like we don't. We can stop comparing. Right. But you've dealt with really quite a bit, and so it's really impressive how you've been able to.

00:59:51
You don't have a victim mentality at all. You just figure out. Figure out a way. Way to. To get through it or around it and, um, you know, and deal with that adversity and get to that abundance mindset.

01:00:02
And you're definitely, um, living proof that it's not always all about scaling either. It's also, um, focusing on quality versus quantity. Um, and I think, uh, I'm gonna have to go back and relisten to this one because you have dropped a lot of knowledge. So we appreciate it. So thanks a lot, Emma.

01:00:20
Hey, it was a pleasure being on Jamie, and I think you're the first interviewer who's ever made me cry. I don't know if I'm proud of that, but I guess it was an eventful interview then. Pleasure to our listeners out there. Thank you so much for spending your most valuable resource with us. We appreciate it.

01:00:37
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01:00:48
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