Today we have Wendy Sweet, who has been lending money to investors since 2001 as both a conventional lender and a Hard Money lender. In 2008, she completely switched over to growing Carolina Hard Money to offer funds to investors, builders, landlords, and developers who could navigate the changing world of real estate. Her goal is to assist people to build their revenue and impact their lives through a proven lending model in Carolina while providing solid returns for real estate investors.

Get in touch with her – https://calendly.com/wendysweet/wednesdays-with-wendy

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Itunes – www.TonyJavier.com/itunes 

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Show Transcription:

Tony (00:01):

All right. Welcome to today’s show. We have a special guest with you as always Ms. Wendy Sweet. She is a money lender, so we’re going to talk a lot about money and we talked a little bit before we started recording about giving back and some other great topics, and I’ll look forward to great conversations today and bringing you guys value. Wendy, how is it today in South Carolina?

Wendy (01:02):

Well, right now it is rainy and starting to get cold.

Tony (01:06):

From Wichita, Kansas. Right now it’s 10 degrees with a negative two windshield, but luckily I live in San Diego. So that’s my –

Wendy (01:15):

Goodness. Well, I can’t complain. I didn’t have to wear a coat today. So that’s a good thing. I did have to have an umbrella, but no coat. It’s been really, really nice.

Tony (01:23):

We’ve been lucky. We’re recording this in February right now. So we’re having some crazy weather but it’s great connecting. We spent 30 plus minutes before this call. Usually I start recording. We talk, but you and I just had such great conversation. We just talked and I realized that we needed hit record and give this value to other people. So I guess tell us your backstory. You started in 2000. Tell us how you started and kind of where you got today. You’re managing a large fund. You’re doing a lot of loans for real estate investors, mostly on the east coast. So I’ll kind of let you give your story and how you started and what kind of, uh, we’ll get into some value that I think will be great for our listeners.

Wendy (02:02):

Sure, absolutely. I think I have one of those stories where if you’re watching somebody trip into a bunch of luck, which is kind of funny, I started out as a recovering mortgage broker. I worked for my brother, Bill Fairman, he’s my partner in this business. He had a net branch,a lending company that he worked with, and I started working with him. I was 40 years old. I had just had my first child. Yes. I had my first child at the age of 40, somebody had to. Yeah. But it’s harder on the chick. Believe me, I thought I was going to be a stay at home mom after that, but that lasted about three months. And, you know, I went berserk. So I started working with my brother as a sales rep for his company and they specialized in investor loans.

Wendy (02:58):

So I learned how to do investor loans and my job was to go and call on different mortgage companies and get them to send their investor loans to our company, to do the funding on it. And while I was doing that, I used to call on this company called financial health services that was owned by Larry Goins. And I don’t know if you know Larry, but he’s a national speaker. He’s been in the business forever. One of the smartest guys I know. And but at the time he was just Larry Goins, he wasn’t speaking yet or teaching yet. And I walked in his office one day and I said, Larry. I know that there’s an investor group in this town. I’ve heard of it. It’s called Metro Lynna Rhea. And if I can get my foot in the door, I guarantee you, I can pick up a whole bunch of investor loans.

Wendy (03:47):

And I said, have you heard of it? And he said, well, I just happened to be the president. Well that worked out really well. So he ended up asking me to come and work with him. I went to the first meeting with him the first meeting that I had been to, and in 30 days we had 30 loans. Wow. And so he fired his other mortgage brokers. He made me his partner. So he gave me an incredible opportunity. And for eight years we were rocking and rolling until 2008 hit. And then you could not get a loan closed to save your life, which was kind of crazy. But while I was doing you know, in 2002, 2003, I’d started noticing that there were a lot of investors who had money in the bank, in their self-directed IRAs, but there were terrible at finding houses.

Wendy (04:41):

And then I had other investors who could find plenty of houses, but they could not qualify for a loan. So I started saying, Hey, you know what? I can take that money. You’ve gotten your self directed IRA and I can lend it to this guy over here. And they were like, yeah, we can do that. And then I learned later that was called hard money. I didn’t even know what it was. And, and I really started doing more of the hard money than we did conventional loan. So when the crash hit, I got out of the conventional business. That’s why I call myself a recovering mortgage broker because I no longer lend in the conventional side and just stick with the hard money side. So about 2012, it just, you know, things were coming back and it was getting really busy. And then I asked my brother who I was working for previously.

Wendy (05:28):

I asked him to come and work with me. So he has that commercial background side. And, so in 2012, we started working together and 2014, we started a fund because we could no longer handle all of the money from the individual investors. We were blending other people’s money. We got up to $23 million of other people’s money, putting all those puzzles together. You know, that this guy had 30,000, this one had 50,000 and this one had 40,000. We had to put them all together on one loan to do a loan. So that puzzle got tough which is what made us start our fund. And that was a really good move to go there. Now we still do the one-off stuff, but we figured out a way to do it where it’s not so difficult anymore. And we just sell them notes after we close in the fund, we just sell them notes out of it. So it makes it a lot easier now, but that’s really how I got started in the business.

Tony (06:27):

Very nice. Very nice. So you have a $50 million fund now. So I talked to a lot of real estate investors. I hope you don’t mind me saying that number, but

Wendy (06:36):

Not at all. That’s our limit.

Tony (06:39):

So, so we, so, you know, I run a virtual mastermind group. We talk about, you know, raising money for properties and funds and all that kind of stuff. So tell us about that. A lot of people want to raise money for deals. So obviously one-off deals. Those are fairly simple, right? If someone wants to do a one-off deal, it’s a mortgage. It’s a note, it’s easy. When someone’s doing a big commercial property or a syndication. They want to raise money for multiple investors, or if they want to do a fund, like you have, they can have a full fund of money that they can put into individual deals or, or maybe just one deal or a couple of deals. So tell us how hard that is. Tell us, you know, how you did that in looking back. Would you still do it the same way?

Wendy (07:19):

Well, we do a lot of things differently, but we would do a fund again. I can tell you that. And actually we’re working on another one now, but funds opening up a fund is, is just like choosing, you know, if you’re going for a loan, there’s a bunch of different products out there for a loan, right? Well, there’s a bunch of different ways to set up a fund and, you know, what you really need to do is figure out what it is you’re going to do within that fund, because you can’t do everything. You have to kind of be focused on one certain product that might be, you know, just an apartment complex that you’re going to develop, or maybe you’re just going to lend to apartment complexes or in our case, we only do first position loans out of, out of ours.

Wendy (08:04):

And we all also only do short term loans out of ours. So, so you, first of all, you got to figure out what it is you’re going to – what’s that product going to look like? And then is there a life on the product, you know, in a developing apartment complex, you’ve got, you know, what is that going to be a five-year deal maybe? And that’s how long the fund is going to be. So, so there are things like that that you need to really figure out how you’re going to do that. And then you need to decide, do you want to be able to advertise the fund? Is it going to be for accredited investors only? Are you going to set it up like a crowdfunding platform? There’s so many different options out there to get them done that you really have to talk to number one, other people that have done funds and number two at least two to three good fund attorneys that can tell you the ins and outs, the things that the things you need to have in that paperwork that, that will make it more attractive to the person that you’re trying to bring into the fund.

Wendy (09:03):

So you know, you can tie your hands by putting too much detail in it, and you can also keep people from wanting to invest in the fund if it’s too broad. So, so you really need to understand what your avatar is, what it is that you’re going for. And when I say avatar, we have an avatar for what, the type of project we’re investing in and lending on. And we also have an avatar of who it is we want to invest in that fund. Like, like for us, where I told you a little earlier, our funds are vanilla is how I call it. You know, we’re not sexy. There’s nothing going on that’s crazy. We’re not chasing double digits. We’re not, we’re a place where people who have earned money can park their money and know that they’re going to get a consistent return and can compound their interest every, every quarter, that’s really who we are.

Wendy (09:59):

We like people to understand real estate, but if you want to be active in your lending, we’re not the company for you. We are a set it and forget it kind of company. We’re doing all the work and we don’t want your input. You know, it’s let us do our job. And there are other other ways, if you’re more of an active investor and you want to, you want to play that game, then there are other options out there for you to do that. But you’re probably not the best fit for us. So there’s a, there’s just a lot of different ways to get into it. The cost of a fund can be from you know, you might spend five or $6,000 on the low end, all the way up to, you know, I’ve seen people spend 50 grand and much more to get funds up and running. So there’s a lot of different options out there. You just need to really do your homework and talk to other people who have been through it.

Tony (10:54):

Yeah. Someone told me recently that this it’s almost like a full-time job, I’m sure it kind of depends. It kind of depends too. Right. If you already have a lot of investors, it’s, it’s easier. You don’t have a lot of investors and obviously you gotta find new investors. So I guess tell us about how you found those that, how you found those investors, how you put all that together and what kind of work it it took because obviously a fund sound sexy. I’m going to put a plan together and I’m going to have people invest in it, and I’m going to be able to do all these deals, but obviously it’s not as easy as it sounds. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Wendy (11:25):

Well, we set ours up as an accredited fund so that we could advertise, we wanted to be able to do that. And you know, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot when we raised the 20 million, $23 million of other people’s money. You know, individually doing loans that way, because we were paying them at the time we were paying them a point on everything we closed and we were charging 15% interest and they were getting every bit of it. So when we started to do the fund, you know, our returns are certainly not going to be sitting at 15% and we’re not going to be able to give people points on that. And so our returns at that time, we were shooting for between 10 and 13%. So it was really difficult for us to take the accredited people that were in that $23 million range and get them to move over to the fund.

Wendy (12:18):

So, so then we realized, gosh, we’ve got, we’ve got to cut this other one down and, you know, drop the rate that they’re being paid and all of that kind of thing to get them to move on over to the fund. So, so we scraped as much as we could out of that to get them over there. And then, then we’ve really realized that it’s, it’s two different people. The people that are our one-off lenders are completely different avatar. I keep going back to that word, then the people who were putting money in, into an accredited fund like that and, and, you know, we’re still making changes. We’re still changing, you know, who it is that, that we’re really would be a good fit for our fund. It constantly upgrading that, you know, for us, we love doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs and, you know highly paid professionals that have been working all their lives, saved a lot of money.

Wendy (13:15):

They like real estate, but, and they want to know about it, but they’re not interested in actually doing it. So that’s, that’s a perfect person for our fund. And now the way we got started raising, raising that money in the beginning is I went to every single real estate investor association group in north and South Carolina went to every meeting throughout the month. I was, I was, I was gone at least 15 nights a week. And you know, when they go out, it’s a lot of nights in a week. Plus I was working during the day full-time, so it was really killing me, but you know, they all give you an opportunity to stand up in front of the group and tell them what you do if you have a booth.

Wendy (14:04):

So we’d pay our little $50 for our table. And I’d stand up at the front and say, if, if you have a self-directed IRA or money in the bank, and you’re not earning 15%, you need to come talk to me. And I’d have a row of people following me out the door. So it was really easy, you know, in the beginning it was really, really easy to do that. So, and it’s still easy to do that if you, you know, if you’re, if you’re trying to learn how to raise money, the easiest way to do it is through those groups. Because there’s plenty of people that have money saved in self-directed funds and they just, they don’t know where to put it or how to do it. And it’s just a really, really great way to get started.

Wendy (14:53):

I always tell people that if you understand self-directed money, whether it’s an HSA, an ESA or any kind of set plan or IRA, 401k, whatever, if you really understand those, the more you know about it, the more you can raise money through it because you’re helping people put their money to work. Right now, it’s just sitting there, there’s millions and millions of dollars sitting in self-directed accounts that people don’t put the work. They’re just paying fees every year because they don’t know what to do with it. So, so my elevator speech, when I, you know, oh, what do you do for a living? Say, I help people build wealth. And then I shut my mouth and I let them ask me questions. Silence can be a really good thing because they’ll either say, oh, that’s interesting. And then they won’t say another thing, or they’ll say really, how do you do that? And then it just opens up the door for me to talk about what it is that we do.

Tony (15:55):

Yeah. That’s a couple of good points I want to emphasize there. One is, there are so many people that have money sitting that are doing nothing. Like I’ve got one, one of my private lenders that invested with me a few years ago, he ended up taking the money. He was investing with me and putting into his business. And then he made a bunch of money. Now has half a million dollars sitting. And he called me and he’s like, I’ve had this half a million dollar sitting for a few months. I know invested with you on some deals before you were getting me X amount of my money. And now you opened up another $500,000 line. He gave to me to be able to do more projects. That’s pretty much the way it’s been with most investors that, that I’ve gotten in touch with and the way you put it with perfect is that when you’re talking to someone and you don’t ever sell your, you don’t ever sell what you’re doing, right.

Tony (16:41):

You, right. Yeah. You always put that nugget out there. What do you do? Oh, I invest in real estate and I help other people invest their money in real estate and get big returns. Oh, really? That’s interesting. And then it just starts the conversation, you know, I’ve been on a hiking trip in Switzerland where we did a group hike. And I said that exact same thing, right there. You know, he’s like, what do you do for a living? Oh, I invest in real estate and I help other real estate investors invest their money passively and give them pretty good returns in real estate. Oh. And then you can just totally see his eyes light up. Oh, tell me about that. Cause he’d done some other real estate deals. And then all of a sudden, you know, within, within a year he had at least half a million dollars invested with me. And then he’s, he’s done up to a million dollars with me at one time. So it’s not as hard as you think to raise money. You just have to ask the right questions, be at the right place at the right time. And just let people know what you do.

Wendy (17:34):

That’s, that’s key letting people know what you do. And don’t be afraid to ask for the money. You know, when, I’m amazed at the people who will take you right up to the edge, but they won’t say, you know, why don’t you give it a shot? You let’s, let’s try a hundred thousand dollars and see how that works. You’ll get comfortable with that. And, and then if you want to increase it, you can, it’s, I’m amazed at the amount of people that are raising money that won’t ask for the money. I’m not scared. It doesn’t, it doesn’t bother me a bit to ask somebody how much money they have in the bank. I mean, it’s, and I think it’s because of the mortgage background, you know, when I’m qualifying people for a loan for the loan, it’s easy for me to say, okay, well, how much money you have in the bank? That don’t answer me. They all answer me. So it doesn’t matter if there’s somebody wanting to borrow money, or if there’s someone wanting to lend money you, you gotta be bold and ask

Tony (18:33):

Once you get that investor. So if you’re going for your first investor, some of you guys listening are probably wanting to raise money for deals. Once you get your first investor, you treat them right. And it may not even be the first investor, but at some point you’re going to start treating your investors so well that they’re going to invest more money with you. And they’re going to start telling their friends, because if you find someone that has money, chances are, they run around with people that have money. In fact, that investor I was telling you about that came back to me and has half a million dollars. He’s like, I’ve got another buddy that has at least half a million dollars sitting in an account that he wants something to do with. He’s like, once we use my money, let’s go to him. And we’ll you know, we’ll, we’ll do some deals with him too. And honestly, I don’t even need his money. Like I don’t need the 500,000 right now. I’m trying to figure out how to put it to work, but it’s, but it’s always nice to have that money because you know, the more money you have, the better you can negotiate your rates and the more opportunities that opens up, because if you don’t need it, now you may need it six months, 12 months down the road. If you find that a really good deal that that needs cash quickly.

Wendy (19:31):

That’s exactly right. And I love that you brought that up because really, you know, there’s no better business than referrals, and we are getting better at it. We’re not great at it, but we’re getting better at it with all the business that we do and asking for referrals from, from other people who, who else do you know, that has that has money. And, and truly once they’re in and out of one deal, that’s really the magic. That’s really the magic. So, so we’re only doing short-term loans. We’re at six months to 18, all the way up to 18 months for a commercial line on what we do. But I always think it’s so funny when I do alone with somebody, I put their money to work. They get paid off early, like in three months. And they’re like, oh, yay.

Wendy (20:20):

That’s great. And I’m thinking, no, it’s not. We want the money to keep working. That’s not what’s great, but they’ve gone through it. They’ve seen the start, the middle and the finish, and now they get it. And now they’re much more willing to, to give you more money to use. The other thing I think is really important. If you’re looking for money to borrow, if you’re a borrower, you need to name the terms. Like when I put out, like, it’s, you know, my side gig is the short term rentals. We talked a little bit about that. So I’m buying houses, fixing them and turning them into short term rentals getting them refinanced through a bank. But I’ll put it out there and say, Hey, you know who, whoever I’m talking to, I’m paying two points and 8%. Cause I do hard money myself to get it done, get it finished.

Wendy (21:14):

And then I’ll refinance it real quick. So, you know, cause I’ve got four projects I’m working on right now and I’ve got two more under contract. So I’m always using the look, the short-term money. If I’m only paying it for three months cares, you know, it’s not that it’s really not that much interest, but I can get in there and get it done. But I named my price. I don’t let them tell me what they want. I tell them what I’m paying and I never get a question about it. And as a lender, even if you’re doing, if you’re the lender to, you need to name your price, here’s what I’m paying. Here’s what I’m charging, take it or leave it. You’ll weed out the people who aren’t interested and you’ll attract the people who are.

Tony (22:00):

You know, what’s interesting is sometimes when you ask the question of how much they’re earning now, and they’re saying, I earn half a percent that, you know, depending on what they’re getting now can also depend on what you’re going to offer them. So can you, go for – you’re a straight shooter you know, 2.8%. Let’s just do it or not. For me, I like to ask the question, like, what are you earning? What are you getting now? Well, I’m getting half a percent or 1% or whatever. If I know they’re getting 15%, that I’m probably not the best candidate for them, because I’m going to give them a lower rate. But you know, someone says 1%, I know that if I give them an eight, nine, eight, or 9% you know, interest rate, their eyes light up, like, wait a second. I can get an eight times my, my money for the, for the same investment.

Tony (22:41):

That’s right. And you mentioned something also what was the other thing I was just thinking of? Totally lost my train of thought, but anyway, so yeah, it’s you know, it’s interesting the money game because a lot of people are looking for money. A lot of people are looking for deals, right? So it’s really hard to find deals right now, but I get so many people that come to me because I do get funding. So I do second mortgage lending. You do first mortgage lending. But there’s so many people that just don’t know how to find money. And it’s really not as hard as you think, you just like for you, you hustle, you go to real estate investor meetings. If you go to a real estate investor meeting, chances are, you’re going to find at least one person in there that has money sitting that is itching to put money into a deal. 

Wendy (23:33):

That’s exactly right. Now, I will say I don’t do it anymore, but I did it for years. And that’s what got us to where we are to where we are really. Yeah. But it it’s, it, anybody can do it. Anybody can do it. Now as a borrower the way you find the money too, is you look for the people that are sitting at the back of the room not saying anything. I know there was one group I used to go to and there was a man that stood at the back never said much to anybody. He had overalls on. He looked like he just came out of duck dynasty. He, you know, the beard, hay hanging out of his mouth and, and that guy had more money than everybody putting the room together. And, and he never said a word.

Wendy (24:23):

All he was doing was sitting back, looking to see who was doing business and who was successful. And then he would mention to him, Hey, I’ve got some money if you want to borrow it. Um so that’s a great way to to see who’s out there moving and shaking, and also to see who has the money in the room. Like those subgroups that are smaller groups of the bigger meeting room for your Metro liner, for your REI group, there’s your real estate investor group. They always do subgroups where they’re doing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, different parts of the day, different times of the day, different parts of town. And, and you might have five, 10 people that show up for those smaller meetings. Well, that’s the meeting, the one that you break bread together. That’s the one where you get to know the people, you know, what that wholesaler is doing.

Wendy (25:15):

You know what that rehabber is doing. You, you, you share contacts of, of, of who a good contractor would be. You meet your lenders. That’s where you really get to know people and that’s who you really can do business with. You know, there are wholesalers who will find deals and go, you know, I had lunch with, with Jay Smith. I, you know, he, he would definitely like this deal or, you know, this is not something that I’d be interested in buying, but I know Don Harris is really interested in doing this deal. So I’ll just give it to him. So it’s, it’s just a much better way to build your tribe, you know, and just get to know people for what you’re doing. And it grows from there. It’s, we’ve lost the art of belly to belly conversations and COVID surely hasn’t helped.

Tony (26:04):

Yeah, no doubt about that. I was going to say, there’s not much we can do about it now, but –

Wendy (26:09):

There isn’t in South Carolina cause we’re ignoring it here.

Tony (26:12):

Yeah. We’re kind of getting to that point too, a little bit in, in San Diego, but it’s still fairly strict in most places. But no, actually what I was going to say was, I remembered now you said that you said that when someone gets their money back on a deal, that’s when they like start licking their lips. And they’re like, oh, you know, for us, we pay monthly. I don’t know if you do do as well. We pay monthly. It’s usually after that second or third check where someone will call us on their first deal and there’ll be like, okay, I’ve been getting my checks and if have extra money, that’s when they say, by the way, do you have another deal? You know, I’ll go ahead and do another deal with you. And then a couple months later, they get checks on those. You got another deal, you know, and it just snowballs from there.

Tony (26:55):

I mean, I can’t, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met investors and they started with one deal within, you know, six to 12 months. They had, you know, several hundred thousand dollars or even, you know, a million dollars with us within a 12 month period, just because we did what we said we’re going to do, which is basically 90% of your whole program. If you do 90%, if you do what you say you’re going to do, that’s 90% of the whole thing. That’s right. And the other 10% is just small logistics. But once they see that you’re legit, you’re paying them doing as promised, they trust you they’ll start doing more deals with you. They will refer other people to you.

Wendy (27:27):

That’s right. And you know, another thing that you said that I really liked is you talked about somebody that had 500,000. You don’t even really need the money right now. It’s so important. I think for investors to understand that if you’ve got somebody that’s willing to give you money like that, you are better off just saying, you know, what, how about if I just continually pay you? You give, give it to me like a line of credit and we’ll switch houses in and out, but you’re going to get paid that money, whether I have a house under contract or not, it’s better to keep that money rolling. And to keep that person happy with that money coming back than it is to take a chance on him saying, well, yeah, I had that 500,000, but this guy over here needed 300. So I loaned it to him. You don’t want to lose that.

Tony (28:16):

Yeah. We’ve done that one time where we had an escrow account set ups and when something closed, it just went into the escrow account. We still paid interest on it. And we’re, we’re doing enough deals that we made sure that we were using his money continuously. So that’s, the caveat has got to make sure you’ve got deals work, and where else are paying, you know, three, four or $5,000 a month on, on money you’re not using, but that’s, that’s a good point. If you can get someone’s money tied down for a period of time. That’s great. But you know, you treat them right. They’re probably not going to take it away from you anyway.

Wendy (28:41):

So that’s right. That’s right.

Tony (28:43):

Well, good stuff. So I appreciate it, Wendy. We ran in the same circles. We’ve communicated, I think here and there, maybe on Facebook or something, but this is the first time we’ve actually been able to connect. So it’s been really great connecting with you. So give us, give us some last words. You’re doing some things on a high level. Usually we have real estate investors in here. You know, so having a lender from a lender’s perspective was really great to have you and you know, you’re still doing things on and on a high level on the lending business. Any nuggets that you can give to the audience, just to wrap up, you’ve been in the business 20 years now going on your 21st year, you’ve learned some big lessons. I know you have,

Wendy (29:23):

I’ve stepped in every pile of poop out there. Trust me,

Tony (29:27):

Me too. I think so. What are some, what are some good lessons that you’ve learned?

Wendy (29:32):

That’s right. It’s always easier to learn from someone else’s mistakes. And, and, you know, I’ve, I’ve made, I’ve made all of them, plus I probably made all of them twice. And, and so it’s easy to learn from other people’s mistakes, but there was a couple things I’d like to make sure people understand is what we do is not brain surgery and nobody’s gonna die if it doesn’t work out. Or if you, if you don’t close tomorrow and, and I’ve see so many people trying to force a deal they’ll force numbers because they haven’t done a deal in so long and they’ll, they’ll go outside their guidelines, set some guard rails up and stay in the lines because you can’t control the market. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the market. We never thought 2008 would happen, but it did. And it lasted a long time.

Wendy (30:31):

And it, it hurt me. I mean, I, I suffered for a good two years badly for a good two years after that. And, but you know, I, I came out on top and I thank God for that. But it’s really, really important not to force things. The other thing is, is be careful who you’re doing business with. You want to make sure that you are, whether you’re investing money, whether you’re borrowing money, whether you’re just working in a partnership or you’re, you’re even hiring a vendor, you want people to be on the same page as you are. It’s so important to have the same ethics, the same morals, just, you wanna, you want to attract people. I tell people I’m a Christian, I’m a believer of a follower of Jesus, and I’m proud of it. And I’ve talked about it all the time.

Wendy (31:23):

I have an investor group that I run on Friday mornings called Sunrisers. We’ve been doing it for 18 years now. We meet at seven 30 in the morning on a zoom call. Since we can’t have breakfast and we do a 10 minute devotional, and then we talk about real estate. So I I’ve had people that come to that group that, you know, just want to talk about real estate. They’ll come in after the devotional. So they don’t have to hear it, which is, which is fine with me. But from what I’ve discovered from that, you’re going to either attract people that are like you, or you’re going to repel people that aren’t, and that’s okay. You can’t be all things to all people and want to be in your tribe. You want to have people around you that are going to lift you up and encourage you and, and feed your soul and feed your wallet too.

Wendy (32:16):

It’s possible. Instead of having people that are just draining you and, you know, it’s okay to fire a client. It’s okay to fire a lender, it’s okay to fire a borrower just because the, where your brain out it’s. So just, just, you know, be cognizant of who’s around you and what you’re doing, because this should be fun. If you’re not loving every day, there’s going to be times when you want to jump off the ledge. I get it. I’ve been there, but if you’re not having fun every day, then change up what you’re doing, because this should be fun. It’s, it’s a passion and follow your passion because you know, your life is short and, and you need to really enjoy it.

Tony (33:05):

No, I love what you said, because you know, I’ve been in this business 20 years now, and I can always compare my first 10 years of my second, my second 10, or my first 10 years, my second, 10 years. And it’s dramatically different with the people that are in my business and in my life, right? Because I used to let everybody in and I wanted to do deals with everybody and make everything work and push things so hard the first 10 years. And then eventually I was like, no, I want the cream of the crop. I want the best employees. I want to work with the investors that are easy to, easy to work with. I don’t want the ones that are calling me every week asking what’s going on. I want to have the contractors that had show up and do the right things.

Tony (33:43):

Like I just want to work with people that are like me, that get stuff done. They care, and they, they follow through. So that’s, that’s a really good tidbit is attract the right people, no matter what it is that you’re doing, and your business is gonna thrive. You, you try and push the wrong people, or pull the wrong people in your business. It’s kind of like deals like you. And I both fund deals. If we try and push a deal and try and make a, make a deal work that maybe is not quite there, just that just to make that money, it may go south. And all of a sudden, we’re spending a lot of time trying to clean it up and explaining to investors that we have investors in the deal, why that deal went bad. So I really liked how you finished with that and that’s good stuff. So Wendy really appreciate your time. I know you’re busy. You have a Wednesday with Wendy. It is a long Calendly link that you gave me. So I’m going to, I’m going to put it either in the show notes, or I’ll put a redirect link down in the show notes. If you guys want to get a hold of Wendy, tell us about Wednesday with Wendy. It’s 15 minutes with you.

Wendy (34:45):

Well, it’s 30, 30 minutes for on, on Wednesdays that I have this open. I usually set up times between 10 and two in the afternoon, and I stayed booked. I’m, I’m usually booked a couple months out, but we talk about everything, anything in your business, whether you’re new or whether you’ve been in the business for a long time, because from when you’re a lender, you get an opportunity to put your hands in every kind of deal. You get to see the good, the bad and the ugly, and you know what I can’t help you with or give you direction on. I’ve got an incredible amount of people that are way smarter than me, that I can connect you with, that can help you out on that. And that’s, my goal is just, it’s kind of help you, help you get over the hump or get started and really that’s what that’s for. And then I also put the zoom link for my Sunrisers meeting on Friday mornings. That’s in the chat box too, over there.

Tony (35:41):

Okay, fantastic. I’ll make sure I get that in the show notes. So again, Wendy, I appreciate your time. It’s great connecting. I’m sure we’re going to do some other things together and keep in touch. So I look forward to that. Thank you so much. All right. Have a good one. Thanks.