Beyond the Deal

From $60K Loss to $75M Portfolio: Joshua Ferrari’s Real Estate Transformation

• Michael Wagman

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Lost money on a deal? Wondering how to bounce back and scale? Meet Joshua Ferrari, a former aircraft technician turned real estate investor, who went from losing $60,000 on his first deal to managing a $75 million portfolio and raising $27 million in investor capital.

Want to learn how to raise capital and scale your investments? 

🔗 Book a free discovery call:
https://calendly.com/mwagman/capital-coaching-exploration

Josh shares how mentorship, mindset shifts, and smart strategies helped him pivot from house hacking and wholesaling to multifamily syndications—where he now manages over 900 units with a fully integrated real estate business. If you're navigating your first deal, raising capital, or wondering how to scale, this episode is packed with practical insights, industry secrets, and game-changing advice.


Key Takeaways:

✅ How Joshua turned a $60K loss into a growth opportunity
✅ The role of mentorship in accelerating real estate success
✅ Why he pivoted from house hacking & wholesaling to multifamily investing
✅ The truth about property management & vertical integration
✅ How he raised millions in investor capital and built trust in the industry
✅ The mental habits & routines that keep him performing at his best


📌 Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction to the Podcast 

00:02:21 From Wholesaling to Real Estate Investments

00:04:34 From Pecans to Podcasts: Diversifying Business Ventures

00:06:42 Challenges of Real Estate Wholesaling

00:08:42 From House Hacking to Real Estate Empire  

00:11:00 Reducing Maintenance Costs by Over 50%

00:13:09 Benefits of Managing Your Own Property Portfolio

00:15:29 Overcoming a $60,000 Financial Loss

00:17:30 Budget Overrun in Renovation Projects  

00:19:44 Challenges of First-Time Real Estate Investing  

00:21:49 The Role of Mentorship in Business Growth

00:23:49 The Importance of Leaning on Expertise

00:26:04 Overcoming Sales Challenges as a Coach

00:28:20 Transformative Habits for Success and Health

00:30:26 Overcoming Gym Excuses: A Year of Transformation

00:32:37 Discovering More About Our Offerings and Resources



🔗 Follow the Host & Guest:
👤 Michael Wagmann: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelwagman/

👤 Joshua Ferrari: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaferrari/



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https://www.nimblecapitalgroup.com/
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https://www.instagram.com/nimble_capital_group/


Interested in learning how to raise capital and scale your business to build a lifestyle around freedom? 

Schedule a call today and let's find out if you're a good fit for mentorship.

https://calendly.com/mwagman/capital-coaching-exploration


#RealEstateInvesting #Entrepreneurship #FinancialFreedom #WealthBuilding #MultifamilyInvesting



Welcome to Beyond the Deal, a podcast where I interview successful individuals and we go deeper than the numbers to talk about all the habits, tricks, tips, successes that they've had in life and in business. My name is Michael Wagman, and I am obsessed with personal growth. Today on the show, our guest is Joshua Ferrari, the man with the coolest last name ever. Josh has an incredible story of overcoming a $60,000 failure on his very first deal. So stay tuned for that. Before we get started, though, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's show, me. Nimble Capital Group is my company. We provide a variety of different alternative investment options for passive investors. Whether you're interested in tax depreciation, cash flow, or straight up equity appreciation, we have something for you. Secondly, I offer private coaching to individuals who are learning how to capital raise. So if this is something that is interesting to you, please see the show notes in the description below and reach out to schedule a call with me. All right, let's get into the show. Joshua Ferrari, welcome to the podcast. This is really such a full circle moment for me. I think it was probably two or three years ago that I was on your podcast. And, you know, things have changed a lot for both of us in that time. I love that we both got our drum sets in the background. This is, I think the last time I did your podcast, it was the most rock and roll episode you've ever done, record a little guitar solo for the intro. But welcome to Beyond The Deal. So happy to have you here. Happy to be here, man. I'm sure a lot we could catch up on things we could talk about that we've done before we last spoke. And then of course, things we could talk about that is more prevalent. I'm sure the listeners probably want, want to hear a little more. Yeah. Well, so speaking of the listeners, in case my audience doesn't know anything about you at all, why don't you tell the folks a little bit about your background and what you're doing today? Oh, my background. Well, let's see, I got started investing in real estate back in January of I was 21, fresh out of college, newly married, just actually moved from Tennessee to Southern Alabama to start what I thought was gonna be a long standing career as an aircraft technician. Then my dad calls me up, tells me that him and my mom are getting ready to start flipping houses. Literally the rest is history. So I never actually flipped a house, but that conversation just got me interested in the industry, what it could mean for me to jump in. So the wife and I jumped in headfirst into wholesaling, we tried that for about six months. Didn't close a single deal. Realized that I just didn't want to be on the transactional side of real estate. I wanted the benefits of owning it. So we pivoted the same year in 2018, bought our first real estate investment, which was a fourplex. Shoot, we were excited about that. We were going to house hack it. And then anything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We lost about$60,000 on that investment. But you know, you always learn a lot of valuable lessons when you lose some money. So maybe we can talk about those lessons in a minute. But after going through the school of hard knocks, it was around February of 2019, we made the decision that we were gonna focus solely on commercial, commercial real estate through multifamily and more specifically syndication. I'm negative 60 K in the hole, so not like I've got my own money to go. dive and dump into some deals. So how can I get into the business? Maybe a little bit more creatively and syndication was that for me. So I hired a mentor immediately. It's probably the best investment decision I've ever made. And I think the reason for it was just that it was a very personal relationship to the point that we knew each other's wives, kids broke each other's houses. And they actually sold me my first deal at a $450,000 discount just to help me break into the business. So I learned a ton underneath him. I was underneath him for about two years. I met my two business partners during that time frame. Then we bought our first deal that he sold us in December of 2020, which was a 42 unit local to where we were at in Alabama. And then fast forward to today, it's been just a little over four years since then. Now we've got about 900 units, fight around$75 million. We've raised a total of $27 million in equity from investors. To buy those deals, we vertically integrated a couple of times. We've got our own property management company and our own construction company. Matter of fact, as of last week, we're fully vertically integrated with all of our properties. So we self-manage and self-handle all maintenance and CapEx and renovations with both of those companies. Got about 23-ish full-time employees between those two companies. We currently have about 750 multifamily units spread across A, B, and C class. We have 150 to 160 RV park pads between two different assets. And then last year we actually bought a business, a pecan business that has nothing to do with real estate. The one and only deal that we haven't syndicated. So the three of us actually own the business outright. And then as you mentioned earlier, I've got my own podcast called Creative Capital. We've been running now for, shoot, since April of 2020, we've got over 2 million some odd downloads, 370 or 380 episodes. wish I remembered which episode you were. I could send people there, but feel free to go check that out. Had a lot of fun there and met a lot of really cool people. And then the last thing I'll say is in the summer of '22, I was finally making enough money to quit my day job. And then at age 25, you're not really looking to sit on the beach and do nothing for the rest of your life. So we've done a couple of vertical integrations. That's cool. But I really wanted to know what could be next. So I thought, well, what about a horizontal integration? What would that look like? So what would it look like effectively for us to help other people? And then by so doing, maybe we grow faster, more efficiently, and then just create real win-win situations for folks. So I looked inwardly at my own experience that I had with my mentor, decided to start the mastermind that we did in June of 2022, building the same personal one-on-one relationship with every student. And then today we've helped a total of about 100 people. Over the last two and a half years, they've closed over $2,000. Raised over 100 million in equity. They are roughly 1200 under contract. Even in the last two years when people said interest rates were too high and cap rates were too low. So it's been a lot of fun. Been up to a lot over the last seven years. Yeah, that is one heck of a pedigree. And just before we started recording, you mentioned that you just turned 28. So at a very young age, you have accomplished a stunning amount of accomplishments. So props to you for that. I wanna backtrack a little bit because you mentioned so many things there that I wanted to unpack, but I wanna go back to the beginning a little bit and I wanna talk about... wholesaling and flipping and why those things didn't work for you. So what was it? 'Cause my background is similar. I started as a house flipper. I tried wholesaling. I absolutely hated every single decade of it. I would never recommend. Anybody who's successful at wholesaling, props to that, right? But talk a little bit about your experience and how it led you down towards multifamily. The wholesaling stuff. So I went to this local real estate investor meetup, I went to multiple, but I went to one in particular that when you signed up, they gave you this free wholesaling course. Cool. Well, let's figure out what wholesaling is all about. The guy that ran it kept saying over and over again that that's the lowest period entry, the least risk, highest chance for reward. And I'm like, all right, whatever. I don't know anything about real estate up to this point. Just do whatever I can do to start making some money, get into this business and start owning some real estate. So I went through all the videos. DVDs, whatever they were. I don't even remember what they were at this point, but I went through everything and then I started doing everything that was in there. So we spent a couple thousand dollars on some marketing for like letters and pulling lists and cold calling. I even did some door knocking. Like I was really trying to just get in the thick of it and do everything that this little course told me to do. And it semi panned out to the point that we got over that six month timeframe, we had about six or seven deals we got under contract, but not a single one of them transacted for one reason or another. I don't know if it's because I'm an idiot and didn't know fully how to like underwrite deals at that point. So everyone I sent it to was like, this isn't a deal. I felt like some of them were pretty sweet deals. And then on top of that, it wasn't just my network either that I was going to because since I'm already a part of these multiple real estate investor meetups, I was like, Hey guys, I'll give you 50, 60, 70, 100% of like the wholesale fee on this deal. Let me just see how the process goes, I haven't been able to talk, I haven't even gotten to the point that I'm talking to title companies. I don't know what happens after I get the deal under contract, because I've never been able to assign it to anyone else before. And some people took me up on it, and they sent it to their lists. But then even sending it to their list, I still didn't get like a single bite. Not a soul was ever interested in any of my deals. So every person I got, every seller that I communicated with whose deal I got under contract, I had to come back to them and back out basically to say I can't close. And it just felt kind of scammed me personally. Just being like, Hey, I'm gonna pay cash for your house. And then being like, Oh, sorry, I gotta back out 'cause I'm just not paying cash for your house. And some people make it work, but I couldn't. So that wasn't for me. And then that was when we pivoted to acquiring, which hindsight, I probably should've bought a smaller deal than a Fourplex, but that's what we did. Hey, I mean, my first house hack was a Fourplex too. And it's the game changer, right? The suddenly you are living. not only are you having no housing expense, but suddenly people are actually potentially paying you to live where you're living. It's the eye opener of all deals, and it's often where I tell people, if you're going to start anywhere, then. this is the most effective way to do it. Very cool. So listen, you pretty much own everything that you own in Alabama, is that correct? So all of our properties are in southern Alabama, southern Mississippi, and northern Florida. We own one property in Florida, and that's one of our RV parks. And because of that, you've been able to vertically integrate. And for our listeners who don't know what that means, that means Your own property management company, your own construction company, everything in-house, correct? Yep. That's all recent though. So just over the last six months, both of those companies have been built. And just as I was saying last week, we took over property management of the remaining roughly around 200 units that we owned in Alabama. Like the last arm was the Alabama arm. And Besides just saving, you know, 4% or whatever, what is the real motivation for getting into that and being your own property manager?'Cause everything that I've ever heard and tried to do myself says being a property manager is the worst job. Tell us a little bit about the motivation to get- It's not fun, not something that I got into the business to be like, Ah, man, I just can't wait to property manage my own deals. So we got into it strictly out of necessity. What we were finding out was that our property managers were, I hate to think negatively of people too, 'cause it's not like they ever came out and factually said this, but it was just a lot of data points that seemed to be pointing to the fact that we were getting gouged on pricing from maintenance interns and things like that. For instance, they were charging us$52.50 an hour for labor, didn't include the actual materials itself. And we knew on top of that, they were charging at 10 to 15%. fee effectively on top of everything that they did as like a GC fee for handling all the maintenance. This is like just fee to death. And then as you actually get the list, the breakdown list of everything that's being done, you start to realize that they're maybe not as efficient as they should be. And it was probably strategic. So for instance, right, $52.50 an hour. You say, okay, if we're gonna go out to a property to do something, it needs to be something of substance. so that that 5250 can actually be worth the cost. Like we need to be replacing big items that's legitimately gonna take an hour to replace. We don't need to go out and replace one light bulb and pay 5250 for one light bulb change because that's what was happening. One light bulb's changed. You get it in the P&L at the end of it, the end of the month, and they're like, oh yeah, here's everything we spent money on on everything, but then here's the section of all maintenance stuff. And you see like five, six, seven, eight times throughout the course of the month, we spent 5250 times eight on changing eight light bulbs. So I'm like, this is ridiculous. You guys made over $400 on us changing light bulbs, and it didn't cost you more than probably $2 to pay that employee to go out there yourself and do that. And then they were buying nicer products than they really needed to, which typically you wouldn't think is a bad thing. You want your tenants to be taken care of, but it was too nice. The specific property that I have in my head was a C-class asset. And workforce housing, C-class investments, you're not spending$1,000 on a bathroom vanity with granite countertops and those slow closed drawers, so unnecessary, they're not gonna take care of it in the way that they should, and you're not even gonna get $1,000 a month for that unit. So we shouldn't be spending $1,000 on a vanity times two, three, four, five, however many bathrooms. So it was stuff like that. And then they pay $1,000 for the vanity and then they charge you an extra 10 to 15% on top of that, plus the $52.50 an hour to actually install it. And I'm like, they're making a killing. They're making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on us on a monthly basis, I feel like across the portfolio. So we thought, all right, we're just gonna take this in-house. And since taking it in-house, we've reduced our maintenance overhead by over 50%. go out for what it actually costs to do the work versus what it actually costs to pay employee. And then on the property management side, it's same thing. They just didn't care. No one cares about your property like you're going to care about your property. it's really hard to find like a golden standard property manager. So couldn't find one and properties kept not doing well and not doing well. And then it's like, all right, we just can't, we can't keep not doing well. So you're gonna have to go, we're gonna have to take over and do our own thing, do it the right way. And then, like you said, saving money is a big part of it helps the P&L bottom line. It's also an additional revenue stream too, though. Now we make that money. We can charge less or charge whatever we want and we're gonna make double the money on both sides of the coin for the property management and the ownership side. It's so powerful. We have very, very similar size of portfolio and units under management, but I own in three different states and each one property is like a two hour flight from the last one, right? And so as much as I wish, you know, to our listeners, there's so much power actually really digging down into a specific market. And not only because you can do that, you can vertically integrate and you can have a real strong basis in that market, but also because you're seen as a position authority in that market, right? I'm sure all brokers in southern Alabama know who Joshua Ferrari is, and anytime that they see something, they know that you're the guy who closes. Am I right? Yep. That's the goal. Try to communicate with all the legitimate closers on the broker side, too, who find good enough deals that you actually want to close. If I could go back and do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing because I'm happy with where I ended up, but having a strong base in one market makes a ton of sense. from an acquisition standpoint, from a management standpoint, from really every sort of standpoint. So cannot recommend that enough to anybody who is thinking of buying more properties. I'd say the biggest benefit you have that I don't is geographical diversification. We have a little bit of it since it's in Mississippi and Florida and Alabama. We have a little bit, but they're all coastal. So let's say one massive hurricane come through. I'm gonna be here if they hit all the properties. Whereas if you're in, you got some properties inland, you got some properties And over here, you got some properties over here. The ability to get away from natural disasters or other crazy things is something to be said about that too. Well, and I'm in Arizona where we don't even have natural disasters, but we do have very high electricity costs in the summer. So, you know, I'm sure the South gets bad too. I want to go back a little bit because your pivotal moment, and, you know, I've heard your story quite a few times now, is that losing $60,000 on your first try on your first real go at this. So can you tell us the greater story around that and the psychology really of what happened and how did you move past that loss? Well, there's a ton of things that happened. I don't think we have enough time to go over them all. I'll try to go as macro as possible. So I too did the 203K FHA loan. I thought it was going to be fantastic, get the chance to pay for both the down payment and the renovation costs, all lumped into one loan, pay 3.5% down on all I didn't really have a lot of money to begin with. So I borrowed a little bit of money from my dad to get the deal done, which was that 3.5% that I needed. And then renovations were supposed to kick off. Now, because I didn't really have any money to begin with, it's not like I had reserves or any kind of working capital to get this deal. All of my money was truly in the loan. Mistaken. So when you do a 203K FHA loan, for anyone out there listening who's never done anything like this before, You need the work to be completed fully before the loan will actually pay for the work that was just completed, which, you know, sounds semi-standard. But what sucks is that the loan, at least the product I had, only allowed you to have a specific amount of draws. So I think I had about $105,000 or something like that in renovation loan costs or budget there, but they only let us do five draws. So since I'm only able to do five draws, they've gotta be about $20,000 a piece. So I need $20,000 worth of work to be completed before anyone gets paid. Not many contractors out there looking to do $20,000 worth of work before they see a penny. So it was difficult to find someone first and foremost that was actually reputable and willing to go with that structure. Because what would have been better is if I had money myself and I just paid for it sooner than that and then reimbursed myself and the money came in. But I didn't have any money. So mistake number one. Then I hired the wrong contractor because I was in such a hurry and wanted so badly for this deal to work. I hired a guy I was actually working with in aviation. He did this on the side, basically. By the mistake, he actually doubled the budget and tripled the timeline on the first unit that we renovated, which really hurt. You know, the budget was being that we had about a hundred grand and there was four units, we had about $20,000 budgeted per unit and then about another 20,000 on exterior for painting and driveway and a couple of other things. Well, he spent over $40,000 on the first unit. I'm like, well, guess we got crappy units for the rest of them, or we're not doing anything on the exterior. That sucks that it costs that much to do it when you said it wasn't going to. So I had to fire them. And then in the process of firing them and hiring the next contractor, it literally took five months for the paperwork nightmare to be completed. It was a disaster. I already had another contractor lined up before I fired the first one because I didn't want that delay to happen, but it didn't matter. Freaking FHA wants to take ages on everything that they do. And I don't even remember the exact nuances of why it took so long. I just remember it was all paperwork. This had to be signed and this had to be done. And there's a third party that had to come in and do something. And this had to be completed before this could be done. It was ridiculous. So five months basically of no work happening. So while no work has happened, I am not sitting around twiddling my thumbs, not doing anything. I'm like, you know what? Hey, if I can fix an airplane, I can fix a flippant house. So started buying tools, got a, got a personal loan and some credit cards, great low interest debt, right? And then put tons of money on all of them and bought a bunch of tools and materials and just started doing work myself in the spare time that I had anyway, which wasn't much, but. got as much done as I could so we could at least start renting out some of the units because none of them were livable when we first bought it. So that was another mistake, trying to do the work myself and then I maybe didn't do it the right way or just spent extra money and resources on tools and materials when maybe I could have bought the materials, but should have just had a professional do it. And then I didn't bring in the right tenants, man. I was trying to be nice. I literally was playing on the worship team with one of the women that I brought in to be a tenant. She was a singer, I was the drummer. Seeing her every single Sunday, I'm like, she seems She's a nice, nice lady. And so she reaches out to me and says that her, she lives with her mom and her and her mom were being evicted. I should have immediately right then and there, like red flag should have been thrown up, but I'm just never rented anything before, never done anything in real estate before really. So I'm like, oh yeah, what happened? Why are you guys getting evicted? And she gave me this big sob story and basically said, it's not her fault and blah, blah, blah. And so I just totally bought into all of it. I was like, all right, well, we'll get you and we'll eliminate your security deposit so you don't have to give me any security deposit. We'll lower your first month's rent. We'll get you in. We'll take care of this. And then they paid on time in full for maybe three or four months and they basically didn't pay after that. It was a year lease. So I'm like, hey, I really need the money. And they're like, sorry, we're going to pay next week. And they lived right across the hall from me. So we saw like every day, like, hey, I really need you to pay. I really need money. And then it was over a hundred year old house too. That's another big factor. So there was wrapped on issues. Property wasn't actually designed to be a fourplex. It was a single family house in the 1920s. In 1994, someone decided it was a genius idea to turn it into a fourplex and they did the worst job ever. Literally the worst job. So leaks everywhere, problems everywhere. I was already foundational issues that I kind of knew about, but didn't really know about when I bought it. So then there was that added cost and there was roof problems that I didn't know about after the fact. Then we had to replace some of the windows because they were old and rotted. I'll stop talking because I can go on and on and on, but lots of lessons learned. I have been there. I have done that. And I think that if anyone in our audience can take away anything from this, it's that. Getting into real estate, a lot of people think, oh, this'll be easy. I'll just buy a house and I'll put a tenant in. It'll just be so simple and so problem free. And it just never turns out to be like that. And so many of the people I speak to in the capital raising that I do, I hear that story over and over and over again. Well, I bought a duplex and then I found out I bought myself a second job, right? So you have transitioned into the world of capital raising as well. Talk about what that was like for your first large raise that you tried to do. And I know you said you had a mentor who got you along the way. I think that there's such tremendous value in mentorship, particularly in this industry, whether it's paid or free or whatever. But just talk us a little bit through that transition into, now you're raising millions of dollars. Yeah, that was a big switch for sure. Never having raised money before outside of just borrowing a little cash from my dad to help me get into the deal. and then losing it. I think to work out a way to be able to pay him back, which, you know, hurts the pride a little bit. I hurt the pride too, telling my wife that, you know, she never really cared too much about any real estate stuff, still doesn't, as far as what I do on a day-to-day basis. She didn't really want to be involved, but she was supportive. Here I am, gung-ho about it, super stoked, spending all my time, all our money into this business, and then we lose 60 grand. The first endeavor of wholesaling doesn't work, so we lose a couple $1000 on marketing, and then two years later, lose another 60. So it was really hard to convince her to continue to spend more time and money into this business, but somehow I was able to do it. So the shift really came, I think once I got the mentor, because I remember that one of the first things the mentor said me in one of our first meetings was like, you're an idiot, which is kind of insulting, but also eye-opening because there was things in the business I thought I knew, I thought I understood. And I quickly realized that that wasn't the case because I was going over some things with him as we had our first sit down, like, here's what I'm seeing and here's what I'm thinking. I did this, I did that. He's like, you're an idiot. Don't do any of that. What are you doing? We need to do this instead. We need to talk to these people instead. We need to read these books or whatever instead. And I was like, this is great. It's awesome having someone who knows what they're doing tell you what you need to do. And then that in and of itself shifts the mindset. Because now that you've got a professional telling you what to do, you can be an idiot and it's okay. You can just listen to what they have to say and you don't have to figure it out all on your own. A lot of entrepreneurs really think when they get into a new endeavor or anything, that they're like, well, I just don't want to do it because I'm working for myself and it's kind of like being a solopreneur. But that's just not really the case, especially if you get some help or assistance or a business partner or a coach or anything. You can lean in to others' expertise and use it as the backing. It's kind of what you do in college. If you're going to get your degree, you got to lean into the teacher's expertise and what they're telling you to do and what they're teaching you. And then you use all that to pass all the tests and ultimately get your degree. Then after that, it's on you. So the mentor's not going to be with you forever, just like the teacher's not with you forever. But they help you just enough to get that first deal done, to pass that first test, to get that degree, to do whatever it's going to take. to take you to the next level. I think that if you reach a point in life where you think I'm done learning new things, you're screwed. You've just, you've just lost, right? And you're going to stop growing. And that is not where you want to be. And, you know, you have your community, which has grown, you said 150 students at this point, and I have my private capital raising students that I take on as well. But I'm not past paying for mentorship at this point in my life, too. In fact, at any given moment, I probably have a coach or two or a mentor or somebody that I look up to, somebody who is where I'm trying to be, somebody who's done what I want to do. And I'm trying to get into those rooms still. Right. So talk to me about just what that was like for you instead of going from being coached to now I am a coach and I'm ready to start a huge community that has grown into something. really spectacular in the last few years. Yeah, it's a little bit of imposter syndrome, thinking that, you know, who are you to go out there and actually teach other people how to do what you've done, which was a big thing that I was thinking about, especially when you look at just the commercial syndication industry as a whole. You look at a lot of the other programs and people that are out there, and most of them are really big. They got 10s and 10s of thousands of units. I'm like, well, geez, I don't even have a thousand yet. It's like, who am I to go out there and teach people how to do this thing? But you, you're always ahead of someone. There's always somebody behind you that can learn from your experience and may learn better from the way that you teach than the way that someone else teaches. Your style, format, maybe more customized one-on-one connection. or just the simple and basic way that you teach on a call or something like that may just mesh and connect better with that person. So there's almost always someone you can help, all that to say. And so once I realized that, I was like, Okay, well, maybe someone could benefit from this. So I remember trying to get actually started and basically getting on some sales calls, talking to some folks and saying, Hey, what would you think about me teaching you? And jumping in and enjoying it. It was tough. to get someone to pay me money to teach them how to become a millionaire. I was like, I can raise millions of dollars, but no one will pay me like 10 grand and teach them how to become a millionaire. This is dumbfounding. It's like a totally different type of selling. So I ended up having to actually hire a coach to teach me how to be a coach and how to sell myself as a coach. And I was like, if I'm gonna do it, I gotta do it. So put some, put my money where my mouth is. Make this a reality. Learned a whole new way to sell that I'd never known before. Learned a ton of things really, but that was the biggest one because it seemed like every call I was getting on, no one was actually interested or serious about it. And I've hired multiple coaches since then about so many different aspects of our business. I've hired like leadership coaches for some of the other businesses we've owned. I've hired coaches that specifically just help you like hire, manage. train people. Geez, that's a beast. You could read book on book on book, but that's not going to help you until you actually start hiring people and getting slapped in the face with people's personalities and them doing the thing wrong or the business just not doing well because you're not training them right and you're not tracking KPIs and you're not doing all these things that you got to do that you never knew you had to do because you've never done it before. So I've hired coach on coach on coach at this point to aid me in getting to this point. As right now, I actually don't have any coaches that I'm currently like working with aside from a personal trainer, but just for my own personal health. So I've been thinking it's time. It's time to hire somebody else and continue moving on to the next level. You just mentioned something, which I'm really glad you touched on. So you have a personal trainer for your health. As you have gone through these ups and downs in growing multiple massive businesses at this point and managing millions of dollars of investor capital and things not always going according to plan. What are you doing to manage your physical health, your mental health? Do you have any like habits or teams that you swear by that have really impacted sort of the way you approach your days? So at the very beginning of this journey, coming off the cusp of losing the money and really needing to make a pivotal switch, I read this book called Vivid Vision by Cameron Harold. Familiar. And then I actually did the exercise. It's one thing to read the book, but it's another thing to actually do what's in the book. So did the exercise and it was pretty pivotal. Gave me a new level of focus and understanding, motivation to want to achieve a specific thing. Then post vision, I did this thing. I haven't done it in a while. That's what I'm saying. I did this. It was Miracle Morning. That was it. Miracle, I think it was the Miracle Morning Millionaire book. Yeah. So I actually did the morning routine. I did that for like a year or two, and it was great. Don't really have a specific reason why that really kind of died out and I stopped doing it. But waking up early every morning, journaling, visualizing, thinking is a whole, it was like the Saber's method. It was scripting, affirmations, visualization. E was exercise, R was reading, and then the last S was supposed to be like scripting. Kind of like journaling, reading my Bible in the morning. So now it's Bible in the morning, it's exercise, I get up super early. Try to get up at least 5 AM every day. I go straight to the gym, meet my personal trainer. He tells me what to do. It's not that I never really knew what to do physically as far as just going out and being healthy and working out. But you reach a plateau. You only know so much, you only do so much, and you only have enough motivation to do so much before you're just kind of like, eh, do I really want to go to the gym and push myself? Or do I just want to go to the gym and just remain healthy? So when you have someone there right next to you, you literally paid, they're like, yeah, we're gonna push. We're gonna do another set, we're gonna go for longer, we're gonna do more, we're gonna do something different. So I've learned new things that I didn't know just having the personal trainer. And I used to be really into physical fitness in high school and college. Sometimes I would even go twice a day. Got to the point that I was bench pressing like 320. I was really into physical fitness. And then I got married, kids, moved out, moved away from that gym that I was part of for so long. And it got lazy. Nothing but excuses, man. I got real lazy. I stopped going to the gym, stopped exercising, at least on a macro level, like really lifting weights. I do some body stuff like push-ups and jumping jacks, but that wasn't doing anything for me. And so it was actually last year, it was like midway through last year, I was like, I'm tired of this. This is ridiculous. This has been like 6, seven years. of me being lazy and it's time to do something a little bit different. So they just opened up this new $5 million gym, literally five minutes away from my house. I'm like, there's literally no more excuse. There is the nicest gym I've ever seen five minutes from my freaking house. I can no longer say, oh, I don't have the equipment I like, or it's too far away to drive. I don't want to go through the traffic or I don't have enough time. I've got kids and stuff to worry about. You just wake up earlier, like all the excuses were gone. So then I spent a couple thousand bucks on a personal train here and I've learned a lot. It's been great. So morning is exercise, read the Bible, make breakfast every morning for the kids and for myself and for my wife, hang out with everyone for a little bit, take the dog outside. Traditional things one has to do. And then after that, I jump straight into

work around 8:

30 in the morning. I start my meetings and start my day. So I would say those are my habitual daily routine, at least Monday through Friday, that I think's helped me. I love something you just said, and I think about this a lot because I think as entrepreneurs and people who have a lot going on in their lives, you only have really a finite amount of decision-making power every day, and you don't wanna waste that making superfluous decisions, right? So sometimes you just need to go in the gym and just have somebody tell you what to do, you don't need to be thinking about that, you just show up, And that's the last bit of your decision making. This is like the thing about Steve Jobs, who wore the same pair of pants and the same shirt every single day, because at that level, you don't want to be making those decisions. You don't have time for that. You don't have the brainpower for that. And if you really want to be operating at a high level, you need to systematize your life into ways that take the pressure off of you. So I really, I really do believe that wholeheartedly. And I think, you know, having a trainer is one more way to, to make that work. Having a coach, having whatever, right? Just take the pressure off of you so that you can be your optimal self. Perfect. Well, we are a little bit out of time, so I wanna thank you for being here, but before we go, I want you to tell the audience, where can they find out more about you? The easiest way would be to go to the website, govertoof.com. A lot of information's in there. So we've got our podcasts in there. We've got any blogs we've ever written. We've got any of our newsletters that we've ever written in there. I've got a free ebook about syndication in there. All the details and information and testimonials about the mastermind are in there. The direct access to our investor portal, if you wanted to actually decide to look, see what we do and potentially invest passive with us, that's in there, our portfolio's in there. matter of fact, I actually update that, but that's in there. So you just go to the website and you can really find out a lot about us. Follow us on social media. It's all right. One last question. Do you plan on buying a Ferrari? That's a good question. I was actually just talking about this for the guy I was on call with right before I got on this interview. And right now, I think the answer is no. Eventually, maybe. I mean, you were born for it, right? I feel like I was. But at the same time, I'm trying to think practically. And it's one of those, when we're just looking at the difference between assets and liabilities, even if you have the money to pay for it, is it really something that you need? Let's say I dropped $400,000 today on a Ferrari. I got a really nice Ferrari. But what's it gonna do? Sit in the garage? It's a two-seater. There's like no Ferraris out there. There are any more than two seats. It's the front seats too, cause there's only two seats. So immediately kids can't go. So now it's no longer a family vehicle, which looks cause who's gonna watch the kids for me and the wife to actually go out and do anything. Hopefully my parents or we get a babysitter or something like that. Let's say we do that. Then I'm really only taking it out on nice date nights for ours aren't like daily drivers. Maybe it gives me an excuse to take more date nights. I don't know. But then I might be scared to actually drive it because insurance is going to be through the roof and maintenance is through the roof. And if any tire pops, it's probably like 2 grand right there for a new tire. get someone to actually change it. So it's like, no, I don't know. No is the answer. How much am I really going to enjoy that thing? And I wish it was more, but right now I think the answer is probably no. Josh Ferrari, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, man. Glad to be here.