So I got licensed when I was 21. That was when I got drafted as well and did that for a little bit, got tired of it really quickly because I just didn’t like being an agent. It just wasn’t my thing. And I kind of quit real estate for a little bit and started doing all kinds of hustles, mainly just selling couches and appliances, and anything I could find on Craigslist. That was cool for a little bit. I was making good money, but eventually I realized that wasn’t for me. And so that led me down the path of real estate investing. And I could get into, you know, the whole story of how that transpired. Long story short, I started investing in 2015. I didn’t have a lot of money and ended up just going for it, maxed out my credit cards, got some loans and bought my first flip, made some money, and the rest is history. Now, you know, almost five years later, we’re you know, flipping 100 plus homes a year and doing a lot of different things with the brokerage and education and all this other stuff. So it’s been a wild ride, man.

Robert Leonard 2:57
That’s fantastic growth in five years. You went from your first flip to over 100 flips in one year. That’s incredible. Now, I know you have an interesting story of how you went from flipping couches to flipping real estate. Talk to us a little bit more about how that evolved.

Ryan Pineda 3:13
I got tired of the real estate game as an agent, and then I still needed to make money somehow. And so my wife and I got married really young. She was 21 and I was 24. And we moved into our first apartment together and I bought a bunch of used furniture because we didn’t have money. And I remember sitting there thinking like, “Man, I bet you if I sold this stuff, I could make you know, at least twice of what I bought it for, maybe three times. And you know, if I could make 100 bucks a day, 200 bucks a day, like just selling one item. That’s a good living.” And so I tested my theory, I bought a couch that I thought was a good deal, put it in the house and sold it for $200 profit like a week later, and I was like, “I think I’m onto something.”

So I ended up buying a truck off Craigslist, like $1500 bucks. And that was how I started picking up furniture and different items like that. And I bought a storage unit, or at least one out, I should say. And that was kind of like my store front. And I just started buying couches and other things every single day. And I knew, like, in my mind, “Hey, if I buy one item, that makes me 200 bucks a day, you know, I’ll make six grand a month.” And it was true. I mean, that’s what I was doing. And I did that for a few years, obviously, you know, making six to eight grand a month, and it was a great living. But obviously, it’s not like super fulfilling doing that.

And eventually, I had hit my ceiling, like I pretty much was like doing it to the best of my abilities. And I was buying every good deal in Las Vegas. So it’s like, how do I…. I can’t even scale this, you know? And so that was like my first realization with business building and scaling. Like, at some point, you hit your limit, and you’ve got to decide, “How do I make this better than what it is?” Or have I like, “Is this it?” And for me, I decided this was it, but it allowed me to get into flipping and kind of take that same mindset of like, “Hey, all you gotta do is buy low and sell high.” You know, like with the couches, that was the same principle. I would buy a distressed couch, something really cheap.

And I would make it turnkey. I would you know, clean it up, make it nice, get some good photos, and then you know, people would want to buy them and I deliver it to them. So everything was turnkey. Same thing with house flipping, you’re buying a distressed house, you’re fixing it up, making it nice, give it to them turnkey. And so I realized, instead of making 200 bucks a couch, buy a house and do the same thing. I can make 100 times that. I can go make $20,000 on a house. So that was kind of the shift. And I enjoyed it a lot more obviously flipping houses versus flipping furniture every day.

Robert Leonard 5:42
Yeah, that’s definitely a business that’s tough to be sustainable and scalable.

Ryan Pineda 5:47
Scaling, it was definitely the hardest part.

Robert Leonard 5:49
Right? Right. And it’s interesting because Gary Vee if you follow him at all, he’s talking about that whole flipping lifestyle right now a lot and so it’s really interesting to hear that that’s how you got started and kind of scaled that into houses because essentially, like you said, it’s the same process, you’re just doing it with something more valuable and bigger.

Ryan Pineda 6:04
It’s true, man. I mean, I’ve been flipping things my whole life. I used to buy and sell Pokemon cards, furniture, all this crap. I did iPhones, you know, new release stuff where people, you know, pay twice as much because they missed out, like I was doing all that stuff before houses. So it’s all the same concepts. It’s just a matter of can you identify value? Can you make it turnkey? And can you raise the capital to buy all these items?

Robert Leonard 6:28
So going back to your baseball career a little bit? Did your baseball experience teach you anything about business and entrepreneurship? And if so, what did it teach you?

Ryan Pineda 6:38
Baseball taught me so many things about entrepreneurship and just business in general. I would say the number one thing baseball taught me for sure is discipline and how to deal with failure. As far as discipline goes, right, like to play pro sports. You have got to be willing to put in the work. You’ve got to be willing to practice hours every single day to perfect your craft, you’ve got to be willing to eat right every day, you’ve got to be willing to work out. You’ve got to be able to perform in front of a crowd and in front of pressure, and you know, somebody else is trying to beat you bcause there is competition when it comes to this industry, right?

Everyone’s going after the same deals, everyone’s trying to do the same thing. So there’s competition when it comes to it. So like, baseball taught me all these things. Like if I want to excel and be one of the best, I’ve got to be willing to practice and get better at my craft every single day. And then I’ve got to be able to, you know, take care of myself. Am I willing to eat right every day so that I have energy and I’m able to do things that other guys can’t because they’re not in shape, and able to handle adversity and failure, right? In baseball, you fail all the time. The best hitters ever failed seven out of 10 times. And so dealing with that, dealing with striking out four times in a game in front of thousands of fans and being booed, or making errors and losing the game for your team in front of all the fans and whatever.

So like, failing on a very public stage taught me a lot of things with regards to this real estate thing in business where usually when you fail, no one really knows about it, you know, people can hide what’s going on. Whereas sports, it’s very public. And so now when I fail, I’m happy to share it because it’s like, “Hey, you know what, I lost money on this deal. It is what it is, you know, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes, even at the level I’m at.” So I like sharing my failures with people because I think too many people in this industry have this persona of, “Hey, like, everything is great. You know, how are you doing? Everything’s good, blah, blah, blah.” And it’s just not the truth of this business. So discipline and failure are two of the big things that I picked up.

Robert Leonard 8:41
I think what’s really interesting about your baseball career, and its relation to business is really two things. First, the failure, but also this idea of instant gratification, right? You played in the minors for eight years. And you stayed because you believe you can make it to the bigs. If you had wanted instant gratification, you would have given up after one year, maybe even two years. And it seems these days, everybody wants instant gratification. And if they don’t get instant gratification, they give up. And if you had done that you wouldn’t have made it to eight years in the minors. And I think that played into your business career and building all of your businesses because you weren’t looking for instant gratification. You knew to work on things for the long term, just like you did in baseball in the minors. And the other piece of it is about the failure.

Like you said, If you hit 300, so if you hit three out of 10 times, you’re going to be a fantastic ballplayer, you’re going to be an all-star. But in real estate, if you were to get three out of 10 deals, you would be an absolute rock star and that would be almost unheard of. So by being able to fail in baseball all those times, I think that helped you build your business and fail in real estate and grow from that rather than taking it and being discouraged. Now, a common misconception, one that I actually fell victim to for a while is that you must have a lot of money to become a real estate investor. You’ve proven that isn’t the case. You’ve purchased over 100 houses across seven different states on your way to becoming a millionaire, after starting with only $10,000. What is the best way for a millennial without a lot of money to get into real estate investing?

Ryan Pineda 10:18
With real estate investing, there’s so many ways to do it without using your own money, right? The number one way I’m seeing a lot of millennials and people start is through wholesaling. And so wholesaling is essentially flipping, but without actually buying the property. So break it down into the simplest term, let’s just say, you know, your neighbor will sell the house for $100,000, right? And so you get a contract.

And then you know, me, the actual investor is willing to pay $120,000 for that house, and I’ll still make my profit, you know, I’m going to fix it up and sell it for 200,000. So, all you do, instead of you buying the house, you sell me the contract for $20,000. You’re selling me the right to buy the house and so that’s what wholesaling is in a nutshell, you’re just getting a contract, a very good deal and selling the contract to the person who’s actually going to buy the house. And so for the millennial who doesn’t have money, that’s a great way to star, like just find good deals. And that’s hard, it is hard to find good deals. But if you have a good deal, finding a guy like me is super easy. There will be somebody like me in every city who will buy a good deal, and you know, your profit and your spread is just going to be dictated on how good of a deal you got. So that literally cost you no money. So that’s a great way to start.

The second way is kind of how I started and which is a very difficult way to start and I don’t recommend anyone to start how I started but you know, I had $10,000 which is still a lot of money, like it took me a lot of time to save up that 10 grand. I flipped a lot of couches to do it. But I ended up you know, maxing out my credit cards, like I got a hard money lender who was willing to fund the deal and like so hard money lender doesn’t really care about your credit or your job or anything. All they care about is how good is the deal? And so the deal was good. And I had a guy who was like, “Yo, I will fund this deal, you just need to come up with 20%.” And so I needed like $30,000. And I’m like, well, “All I’ve got is 10.” But luckily, you know, unlike most millennials, I was debt free. So I didn’t have any college debt or car payment or anything, credit cards, nothing.

And so I had like 50,000 in credit that I could tap into. So I just cash advanced all my credit cards. And you know, that gave me another 50,000 in capital to work with. So you know, I said, “I’ll buy it, you know, I’ll put the 30 grand down and let’s do this.” And so that was how I bought my first deal. It was a mix of my own cash, a lender, and credit cards. And that was I bought it and eventually, you know, my first deal, I made $25,000 and my second deal I made about 15. I bought them pretty close together.

So, you know, I turned that $10,000 a capital into 50,000 in like four months. So it goes to show if you can get creative, there are ways to buy real estate with literally no money or tapping into other money sources that you know you have access to. If I was looking back at it now, I may have done it different. I may have tried to find somebody who had $50,000 or $40,000. I would have been like, “Hey, I can get us alone for 80% of this. I need you to give me the remaining 20% down payment and enough to make interest payments and all that stuff, and we will partner on the deal and we will go 50-50, whatever happens.” You know, that’s another way to get into a deal with no money because it’s a lot easier to find somebody with $40-50,000 than it is for somebody with $150,000.

Robert Leonard 13:35
Assuming somebody was able to find the 20% down payment that they need from an investor, how would they go to a bank and get the remaining 80%? How does that work?

Ryan Pineda 13:43
One of the ways to fund deals is a hard money lender. And so that’s what I did my very first time and so I guess that a hard money lender is strictly just somebody who’s focused on the deal. They don’t necessarily care too much about you the borrower because they know the deal is so good that if you default and mess up, they’re still going to have equity and be able to sell the deal and make money. So all you gotta do is just Google, you know, your hard money lenders. So if I’m in Las Vegas, and this is all I did, I just googled Las Vegas hard money lender, and I got like the top five results on Google. And so I just called him on. I said, “Hey, new investor, I’m looking to buy some flips, kind of what are your terms?” And so they would just tell me, “Oh, you know, we’re at 9-10 percent interest, couple of points. And you know, you need 20% down.” And everybody was pretty similar.

Robert Leonard 14:30
And those hard money lenders don’t care where that 20% comes from because when you get a conventional mortgage, you wouldn’t be able to do that same thing.

Ryan Pineda 14:38
No. And that’s what makes hard money so great is that like I said, they don’t care about you as the borrower. It’s way less strict than a normal loan. So like a normal loan, right? They’re saying, “Where are you sourcing? You know, your down payment from let’s get two years tax returns? Let’s get all your bank statements.” Like it’s very difficult to get a conventional loan. Whereas hard money, they don’t care about that. Like I said, they’re so focused on the deal. It’s like, all right, he’s getting such a good deal like he’s buying this house for 100,000. And it’s worth 200. We don’t care that he’s a millennial out of college and makes no money. That’s okay. Because we know if this fool defaults, we’re going to take the property anyway. And it’s probably a better situation for us than him actually performing, because now we get a great asset. So that’s usually not an issue if you have a good deal.

Robert Leonard 15:20
Of course, they make up for that by charging you higher interest rates. But what are other downfalls to hard money?

Ryan Pineda 15:27
Yeah, so like you mentioned, you know, you’re going to pay probably 10% right around there. Whereas a normal loan right now, I mean, interest rates are so crazy. You’re in the threes and fours, and you’re going to pay really high interest rate. Now the thing is the points, like I said, a point is 1% of the total loan amount. So if they give me $100,000, one point would be 1%, which is 1000 bucks. And so they’re going to say, “Hey, we want three points on top of this.” So you’re going to pay them a $3,000 fee right off the bat, plus high interest, plus the loan is typically only six months to a year. So you see, there’s a lot of risk with hard money versus your 30-year conventional loan where, “Hey, I got low interest, I’m not getting charged points, and I got 30 years to pay this thing off.” Well, they both come with trade off, right? The 30-year loan takes 30 to 45 days to close, they’re super paperwork heavy, you may or may not get approved. It doesn’t matter how good the deal is. All they’re concerned about is you the borrower, you know, how stable are you? They don’t care if you’re getting a smoking deal. The hard money guy is the exact opposite. They’re not so much concerned about you, the borrower, because they know, “Hey, you’ve got a smoking deal. And we’re going to make a lot of money off of this because we’re going to charge you a lot of points, high interest, and we know we’re going to get it back in six to 12 months because you’re either getting foreclosed on or you’re selling the property, one of the two will happen.”

Robert Leonard 16:47
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was gonna say is the high interest rate is definitely much higher than conventional lending. But usually the terms are only six to 12 months, just like you said. So usually that’s not a huge deal, as long as the numbers still make sense because you’re out of it quick enough that it’s not detrimental. You can hold the loan at 10% these days. But can you talk about that process of how to get out of that loan? You know, how would somebody get out of a hard money loan in six to 12 months? What if they can’t sell or what if it wasn’t a flip? Is hard money still an option?

Ryan Pineda 17:13
Typically, you’re only going to use hard money for a flip. And the other benefit of hard money that I forgot to mention is that they can close in, you know, 10 days to 14 days. So that’s kind of what separates it from a conventional loan, you know, that takes 30 to 45. When you go to the seller, and you’re like, “Look, we’re going to close in 10 days,” that makes you get the deal compared to the other guy. But you really have like, three exit strategies, you’re either going to sell the property within six to 12 months, which is, you know, the flip hopefully doesn’t take that long. You’re either going to refinance it, because maybe you want to keep it and I do that too.

You know I buy deals where I know I plan on keeping it so I’ll buy it with hard money, fix it up, rent it, refinance it, and then do it again. So I’ve accumulated a big rental portfolio doing just that. That’s one option. The other option is if you’ve got the cash and you can pay it off, you’re going to pay it off with cash, you could get an extension. So if you hit that 12 month mark, typically a lot of loans will have an extension fee. And I’ve gone over 12 months on flips. I mean, there are some that have sucked and you know, I lost money on those. But you know, if you go over 12 months, typically, they’ll charge you another point, or some type of agreement to extend the loan and keep it going. So I mean, there’s a lot of different exit strategies. It’s very rarely that it results in foreclosure unless you just stop paying.

Robert Leonard 18:29
My biggest concern with hard money right now is where we are in the market cycle. What can real estate investors do who have hard money, if the real estate market crashes? What if they can’t refinance or sell the property? How can they get out of that hard money loan?

Ryan Pineda 18:42
I think with real estate, you know, I saw a funny little graph the other day, and it said, “Here’s what happened to real estate in the last five recessions.” And three out of the last five, real estate actually went up. And the fourth one, it went down like slightly like 1%. So essentially a broke even. And then the very last recession, you know, it went down like 20%. So if you look at real estate in a vacuum during the recession, it’s like, well, yeah, we think it’s going to drop dramatically, because that’s what happened last time, because real estate was the culprit for the recession. I don’t necessarily believe that real estate is going to be the culprit this time around. I think, if anything, it’s going to end up being a trade war.

It’s going to end up being student loan debt, it’s going to be something different. I highly doubt it will be real estate. I could be wrong, but that’s just my opinion. So if something else is the cause of it, I’m not so concerned that it’s going to impact real estate, because if there’s a recession, people have got to put their money somewhere. Smart people and rich people don’t put their money in the bank. It just doesn’t make any money. But if stocks are so volatile, where are they going to put it? I mean, yeah, they can go put it in gold.

Some people are going to put in cryptocurrency, maybe. But the tried and true method for putting your money away safely is real estate, even if you had put your money away back in 2007 when everything hits the fan, if you held it all the way to today, you’d be okay. I’ve met many people who bought a home *inaudible, they stayed with it, kept making their payments, and now they’ve paid off 12 years of principal and they’re good, their house, they’ve got equity now. And so I don’t necessarily believe that we’re going to have a huge issue. I think for the house flipper, there will be some type of it. And that includes me. So I think if real estate starts going down a couple percentage points, I don’t see it falling off a cliff, but let’s just say it’s starting to go down 1% a month, which would mean 12% for the year, which is a big, big drop. If I’m in and out of a property in six months, it’s like, okay, 1% over six months might end up being you know, $10,000 on a $200,000 house.

So, it’s not that bad, right? If you were planning on making 20,000 and, you know, make 10,000 or less, you should still be okay, you should still break even on flips, you should still you know, maybe slightly lose. So I’m not super concerned about it. But I might be eating my words. You don’t know. I mean, you really just don’t know. But just looking at it from the mathematical point of view and the historical point of view, there’s not a lot of reason to be concerned about it.

Robert Leonard 21:14
Yeah, there’s definitely some recency bias that’s built into the whole concern about real estate going into the next recession. What do you think is the most common misconception about real estate that holds people back from getting started?

Ryan Pineda 21:27
I think it’s the money thing, man. That was my biggest misconception too and I talked about that in my book, like, you know, my number one limiting belief was I needed a bunch of money. And it just wasn’t true. I didn’t start investing for years because I had just assumed, “Hey, I need somebody with some money to partner up with me and we’ll go buy some houses together.” And I didn’t realize I have all the tools the whole time. I just never seek them. And nobody had ever told me how to do it. I take it all myself. I didn’t try and read any books on how to do it. I didn’t try and do anything but 10 years ago, social media wasn’t what it is today. You know, you go on Instagram or whatever, you could go follow these guys day to day, watch their story, see firsthand how they’re doing it. Like we have such a huge amount of information today than we did 10 years ago. It’s insane.

Robert Leonard 22:17
Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think that is probably the largest misconception. You know, like I said, I fell victim to that misconception myself for a long time. My whole investing career I was always invested in the stock market, not only because I was passionate about it, but because you can buy a few shares of different companies without a lot of money or different ETFs without having 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars. You just need a couple hundred to start investing in the stock market. So when it comes to real estate, I had the misconception that I had to have a lot of money. But then I started to read BiggerPockets books, and I actually read your book. And then I realized that that was just a misconception I had and over the last two years I’ve done six deals. So what is the best piece of advice about real estate investing you’ve ever received? And on the flip side, what is the worst?

Ryan Pineda 23:03
I think probably the worst piece of advice would be another limiting belief I had. And I don’t even know that somebody had told me this, it was just the way that I thought and that was like, never paying for education. And I think a lot of that stems from BiggerPockets where they promote everything for free, which is great. That’s how I learned right, I learned from podcasts and free sources.

But once I started paying for education, and like just seeking out the top guys doing it and paying thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, I realized like this guy’s got like the fast track you know, it’s going to take me years to figure it out with this guy already knows, and I only got to pay five grand to learn it today. So once I split the script on that, like even the Mastermind with Brandon, right? I paid a good chunk of change to be a part of it. Like I’m all about that now, you know. Now granted, I don’t believe that, “Hey, if you have no money at all, you should go spend 5 to 10 grand on Mastermind.” You’re not there yet.

You need to go absorb all the free ways to learn. But once you do get some income going, I think it is highly beneficial to go seek out somebody who maybe you’ve been following for a while that you really trust and go learn from them. Because it took me years to really do that. Even once I had money, I was still so anti-guru. I should say that I didn’t spend any money on my education.

I kind of took pride in that, you know, I’m like, “Oh, I’m self-learned and this and that.” And man, my income just went through the roof once I started learning some of these tricks that took other guys five to 10 years to learn. And they just told me that weekend I spent with them. So I think there’s so much value paying for education. And the other part of paying for education is it forces you to take action because I see so many people who have no skin in the game. And so they’ll read books.

I get a ton of people who tell me they’ve read my book, and I’m like, great, “Did you do anything?” And they’re like, “No, not yet. I’m working on it.” So the fact that you’ve done six already, man, that’s exciting, but they just don’t have skin in the game like it cost them 10 bucks, 15 bucks to go buy my book. They don’t take any action. They’re like, whatever, they listen to a podcast, and they won’t do anything about it like, “Yeah, whatever.” But you don’t pay 1000 bucks for a course or something like that. You’re going to be like, all right, I need to get a return on what I’m doing. And so you know, it puts more skin in the game. And I think you are more likely to take action when you pay versus getting it for free.

Robert Leonard 25:21
How can somebody avoid those paid resources that are… might be somewhat scammy or, you know, they’re quoted as get rich quick schemes. I see advertisements for them all across the internet all of the time. How can somebody avoid something like that that’s not going to be worth their money?

Ryan Pineda 25:37
So I guess, really, it’s kind of what you attract. And so believe me, I see all these guys too. And in fact, I know a lot of them and so it’s like, if you’re going to go sign up for a course where a guy’s got his Lambo or his Ferrari or whatever, is throwing checks and this and that… What do you think? I mean, you’re getting a snake oil salesman type guy, and they might be legit, but just know that this is who they present themselves to be, right? And so if you go to their event, realize that, “Hey, it’s about to be all about the materials and the upsell and this and that.” Like they’re playing to the typical dumb consumer. And there’s a lot of guys in the industry like myself who, you know, don’t really do that.

Robert Leonard 26:15
Whether it be about real estate investing or building your businesses, what has been your biggest mistake? How can others avoid making the same mistake?

Ryan Pineda 26:24
My biggest mistake was starting too late. Like I said, I got in this business when I was 21 years old. And I didn’t have success as an agent. I didn’t start investing until 2015. You know, you don’t think I’ve thought about investing from 2010 to 2015. I thought about it all the time. And I, you know, knew I could find good deals, but I just never pursued it. I was like, “Ah, you know, I don’t have the money. Like, I’m not going to do it.” If I knew how to do what I do now, back in 2010… Oh my gosh, I don’t even want to know what would happen.

I think just starting late is my biggest mistake. Thinking I needed all this money, like, you know, for those of you who think that you can’t do it because of one reason or another, that reason is definitely false. You can for sure do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have enough time. If you think you don’t have enough time, there’s ways around that. Okay, you can go get a partner, you can work twice as hard as a normal person, work two jobs work during the day, do your real estate at night, or early in the morning, you know. There’s a way to make it happen. It’s just a matter of if you’re willing to do it.

Robert Leonard 27:28
You’ve mentioned a few times that you didn’t have great success as a real estate agent. But now you own your own real estate brokerage. How did that come to be?

Ryan Pineda 27:36
Once I retired from baseball, that kind of freed up a lot of my time. I was like, “Well, what do I do with myself?” Like I’m used to leaving the city for six months out of the year. I’m used to training hours every day and all this stuff. So like, I got a fresh slate. What do I do? And I just kind of sat there and you know what, we might as well just go all in on this whole thing and be legit from all aspects. And so I started the brokerage, you know, we were already flipping. So even if I never got an agent, I knew that running all my flips through the brokerage would save me money in the long run, even if all we did was our stuff. So I started that and then I started, you know my education company Future Flipper.

I’m like, you know what, if somebody wants to work with us, we are going to have something for them, whether they’re an agent and investor, a wholesaler, like will buy from them. If they want to learn to flip, we’ll teach them. We’re going to capitalize, and so I just started the brokerage. I mean, we did it two years ago, we’re coming up on our two-year anniversary I think next month. And you know, we went from zero, we didn’t know what we were doing. And now we’ve got over 50 agents. And we’ve done that without advertising. We’ve done it without recruiting agents or anything, like all 50 have come to us and it’s strictly from just putting stuff out on social media, giving value and all these other things. So I hated being an agent, but I really enjoy helping realtors. I really enjoy that aspect of it, teaching them how to get better at their business and create leads that treat their clients right. I just don’t want to be the one handling clients.

Robert Leonard 29:04
Your last point there, that’s exactly what I was going to say is there’s a difference between being the broker and helping agents build their business than actually being an agent and practicing every day.

Ryan Pineda 29:14
Absolutely.

Robert Leonard 29:15
Other than your own, what are the best resources that you would recommend to someone who is interested in getting started in real estate investing?

Ryan Pineda 29:23
I would say BiggerPockets. Man, I don’t think there’s anything better than BiggerPockets right now. I mean, I taught myself through them. I would just go watch every single podcast from zero to whatever they’re at now. And that’s what I did. I mean, I literally watched every single podcast until I was on the podcast. I would just say, listen to all their podcasts, buy every single book that they’ve put out, but you know, you don’t need to know it all. I mean, at the end of the day, don’t feel like, “All right, once I’ve read every book, and I’ve listened to every podcast, then I’ll be ready to start.” That’s not true. Like at the end of the day, but not to count my book, but like if you read my book, like you should literally be able to start right after reading my book. Now granted, you can still listen to the podcast and do all that stuff and continually learn but don’t think you need like the full picture before you start.

Robert Leonard 30:11
I think that’s great advice. That’s exactly how I started. Listen to all the BiggerPockets podcast, I interacted in the forums, I bought all their books. If you look up on my bookshelf, I have about nine or 10 of them, I’ve read them all. That’s exactly how I got started. That’s actually how I heard about you and learned of you from the podcast and then obviously got into your books and everything else you got going on. So yeah, definitely great advice. If you were to summarize everything you’ve learned over the years from being a professional athlete, being a successful real estate investor and an entrepreneur, what is the number one piece of advice you’d give a millennial listening to the show today?

Ryan Pineda 30:45
A common theme you’ll hear me say is like discipline, because I think in sports, that’s just the only way to succeed. You gotta have extreme amounts of discipline with working out, with eating right, training, all that stuff. And the same applies to real estate like, are you willing to go call for hours every single day, knowing that it’s not going to result in a deal that day?

Like you might not get a deal that month, but continue to hang with it, that takes an extreme amount of discipline. And are you willing to you know, as you start out, read all these books that you read and listen to all these podcasts for hours every day? Are you willing to put in that time? Are you willing to go door knock? And you know, get the door slammed in your face? And you know, get cussed out? And all this stuff? Like, are you willing to take all the failure associated with it because this business is way more failure rate than baseball, you know. If you get a hit three out of 10 times, you’re an all-star.

Here, we get a deal less than 1% of the people we talked to. So that means we’re talking to a lot of people and getting a ton of no’s. And that is the only way to really scale this business, is just to talk to so many people because we know that most of them are going to say no, and we’re okay with that. We just know how the numbers play out. So I would just say like discipline, dealing with adversity and dealing with fear. So many people are so scared of losing money. They’re so scared of failure. They’re so scared of not knowing what to do when a situation arises. I can tell you, every single day, I face a new situation that I just have not encountered before. And you know, I’m not like trying to prepare for it, there’s no way to prepare for it. It just happens, and that you got to deal with it. And hopefully next time, you’ll be prepared for it. So don’t think you’ve got to be fully prepared and be willing to deal with the failure. Be willing to put in the work and do it every single day consistently.

Robert Leonard 32:33
The only thing I would add to that there is I would highly recommend a book called Rejection Proof for anyone that’s listening to the show today. It’s an amazing book. I read it, it really changed how I approach rejection, and I would really recommend that you go check that out. Thank you so much for your time, Ryan. Where can the audience go to learn more about you and all the things you have going on?

Ryan Pineda 32:54
Best way to interact with me is social media. I’m pretty active on Instagram. So you follow me at @allstarinvestor, if you want to find out more about my companies and education, stuff like that. You can just go to https://ryanpineda.com/ and you’re going to find all that stuff and everything associated with me. So those are the best ways to get ahold of me.

Robert Leonard 33:12
Awesome, awesome. Thank you, Ryan. I’ll be sure to put links to all of that in the show notes. Thanks again for your time.

Ryan Pineda 33:18
I appreciate you having me.

Robert Leonard 33:20
Alright, guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro 33:25
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