Resilience and Reinvention: Sean Grabow's Path from Rapids to Realty

Sean Grabow, co-founder of Res VA, shares an extraordinary journey that's both adventurous and inspiring. Growing up in Lansing, Michigan, Sean turned a challenging upbringing into a powerful motivator, eventually becoming a successful entrepreneur in the world of real estate. His unique story unfolds from an unexpected stint as a whitewater raft guide in Colorado, where he honed essential sales skills without even realizing it, to the creation of Res VA, a virtual assistant company based in Egypt. This episode promises a testament to the strength of non-traditional career paths and the relentless drive to overcome one's past.

Hosted by Preston Zeller, Founder of Zellerhaus - a Venture Studio focused on developing and investing in mission-oriented and community-driven businesses. 

Transcript

00:00 - Hope (Announcement)
What if that chip on your shoulder from your past is actually your biggest competitive advantage in real estate? Sean Grabow, co-founder of Res VA, sits down with host Preston Zeller to discuss how challenging backgrounds can fuel motivation and how non-traditional career paths can lead to business success, dollar deals. This is the property perspective where seasoned real estate pros reveal how they spot value others miss and industry disruptors share the unconventional strategies reshaping real estate. Now here are your hosts, hey everyone welcome. 

00:34 - Preston Zeller (Host)
This is Preston Zeller. I am Chief Growth Officer of BatchService. I'm here with Sean Grabow today. He's a co-founder of ResVA. I'm excited to learn about his story. And yeah, sean, how are you doing, sir? Thank you for being here. 

00:49 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Doing fantastic. Preston, excited to connect today and, yeah, share my story of real estate and kind of what I got going on. 

00:58 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah. So tell me a bit about Res VA before we go into your past a bit. What is ResVA all about? 

01:07 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah. So ResVA is a virtual assistant company based in Egypt. I partnered with a lead manager who had worked for my real estate investing company for a couple of years and we eventually decided that we could do a lot of outbound marketing in-house better than the third, better than we were doing, than the third party companies were doing it. So three years ago we partnered up and started doing cold calling and lead managers for my company and then it grew from there to do it for other investors that I was friends with and then people started referring people so just kind of organically grew from there cool, yeah, brave move to go into like a services-based business, uh, like that digital services. 

01:53 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So, um, well, uh, I'm excited to hear more about that later on, but for now, I'd love to just go back in time and, um, just talk about like you growing up. Like what'd your parents do for a living? Do you have any siblings? 

02:06 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Um, yeah, so I and I grew up, um, grew up not always in the best situation, but you know it's. Uh, I always say that you know the first 15 years of my life were a little bit more difficult, but it set me up for a lot of the motivation that I've had later on in life. You know I always put like a big chip on my shoulder so, yeah, not the most stable, but definitely really motivated me in a lot of ways, showed me kind of like what I really did not want in life and, yeah, I motivated me to move out of my hometown. So when I was 18, I ended up jumping on a Greyhound bus and moving across the country, moving out to Colorado, doing whitewater raft guiding for school and then pursued that for probably about four or five years, which was a blast. Yeah, it was always kind of like my whole life. 

03:07
I was always working, you know, for working for tips. I didn't realize it was sales growing up, but you know it started off when I was caddying at a country club, probably when I was 13 or 14. And then also the whitewater raft guiding for, you know, five years is always getting getting placed with, you know, either a golfer or a family and having three or four hours where you know I could build a connection with them and what, how much I got paid that day was very dependent on, you know, if that person liked me and trusted me. I didn't realize that at the time, but it was a great. You know, if that person liked me and trusted me I didn't realize at the time, but it was a great. You know, setup for for the sales which I've always been the strongest with. 

03:54 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So it was a great setup for that. So where, where is the? Where were you doing the whitewater acting? Or where'd you grow up first off, like? 

04:01 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
yeah, yeah, so I grew up in Lansing, Michigan. Up first off, like what? Yeah, yeah, so I grew up in Lansing, Michigan and Michigan is a beautiful state, but I, you know, Lansing wasn't necessarily like the nicest part of the state. So I visited out west when I was 14 and it really like I was like okay, there is so much more than what I've experienced so far and that's what really kind of initially like put the planted, the seed in my head that okay, like I can, I can get out from the Midwest and go, go explore places that are more aligned with kind of what I was looking for out of life, which was, you know, big outdoors person. 

04:44 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So, um, yeah, I think there's something. I mean I didn't grow up in the Midwest, but even when I cause I, I I grew up in, you know, west coast. But I feel like there's still something about this idea of going out West that you know. I mean, even if you just look at population breakdown, I mean what is it? 80% of the population lives on the eastern half of the united states. You just come out here and it's, there's so much open land and it kind of like I think it's got to do something mentally. Where you're like it's just different. You got the Sierra Nevada's, the cascades, I mean all that stuff. I don't know if that's part of what you were, you know after, or just you you know the mountain scene in general or what. 

05:27 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, no, absolutely. I've always been like a big outdoors person, always been into backpacking and, just you know, I love getting, you know, off grid somewhere where my cell phone doesn't work, and you know, just yeah, exploring outdoors, whether it's snowboarding or mountain biking or hiking, all of that good stuff. So, um, yeah, when I I had some uncles out west who had done the same thing and were always very active and telling me about all the cool stuff they were doing. So, um yeah, that's what it was is it was an escape to the mountains and you know more, more things going on outdoors. So, yeah, when I was 18, that's when I moved to Colorado first and spent a few years out there. Then I went up to Alaska for a couple of summers and continue to do the whitewater rafting, oh, wow, ok, yeah. Then eventually Northern California. 

06:27 - Preston Zeller (Host)
I'm curious. I mean, I imagine you kind of glossed over it for a reason, but if there's something you could share from, just like you know, that early formative years that did shape you. I mean, we've got a lot of people on the show who've come from pretty tumultuous upbringings, and the way that shapes you is, um, you know, of course, different than, say, just like, a normal kind of stable. I guess for lack of a better word upbringing. Was there something in particular in there, though, that really drove you to go. I'm going to just, I'm going to do, I'm going to do this very different direction. 

07:01 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, what I was exposed to, Um yeah, um, yeah, I mean just seeing my parents always struggle and not have their you know everything together the way they wanted it to. Um, and then probably too man, just uh, not feeling, you know, just not feeling like you know. Feeling like I was kind of different than a lot of the people I grew up with, feeling like I was always at a disadvantage, probably really kind of, I think, planted in my head this urge to you, a ton of motivation and, um, you know that can go either way, obviously, like there are plenty of people who, like you know, don't you know who grow up in similar situations and, um, maybe tend to go down the road that they're used to, that they've been exposed to their whole life. 

08:00
But, um, I guess I was just kind of lucky that, you know, I chose the other of the other split in the road and was able to use it to motivate and just give me a very clear, you know vision of like what I did not want, yeah, yeah. 

08:18 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So I mean, if I'm hearing that right, it's just kind of a unstable, you know, kind of upbringing in terms of security, that kind of thing yeah, um, just yeah. 

08:32 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about it for a long time, but um, just, yeah, just um. Yeah, my parents just never had it together as like always having to be supported by other family members or just not. You know, I was able to like, luckily, like grow up in a decent area, but just always being, you know, the the kid who is way different than everybody else I grew up with as far as resources and all of that just always made me feel a little bit of an outcast. 

09:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So, yeah, um, and it was curious how much of that now that you're older, how much of that do you think was just like there's an insecurity there, I get, but how much of like. Was there sort of a judgment on you, or is it just how you felt, you think? 

09:22 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
yeah, I think there definitely was a judgment on me. Um, yeah, there was, and at the same time, it was something that I wanted to prove wrong. Yeah, I got bullied quite a bit and it was, you know, just wanting to show that. You know that I, that people, were wrong. Um, you know that, you know I did deserve to be respected. 

09:48 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing that, because I I mean and why I'm drilling into that for people listening is like what all of us are formed by that, whether you have a very sort of vanilla upbringing, uh, or whether it's like, yeah, there's a lot of hardship, financial substance abuse, physical abuse, all those things, or you're, you know, grow up in a very wealthy environment and you lack direction because of you know, parents are absentee, they're off, making so much money or they just throw money at the problem, and you know all those things are shaping us. I actually grew up with, you know, my, my dad. He grew up, you know, quite poor in Florida and that's, I've heard my whole life kind of similar thing, where it was sort of like, just I'm going to prove all like my circumstances, I'm going to flip those around and you know any of the kind of things I felt during that time, I'm just going to, like, you know, be it, turn into a positive thing to drive. 

10:53 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
But yeah, I feel like it's also something I for a long time I just kind of didn't, I guess I just kind of like ignored a lot of the problems that I had early on and I didn't really realize how much that impacted me. 

11:11
I feel like having the more you can kind of be honest with yourself and explore that and understand you know some of the reasons why you act the way you do, based on kind of the experience that you have when you were younger, I feel like that's super beneficial, like for one thing for me, like a good example of that is like respect is really big, I feel like because I was disrespected or I felt like I was disrespected a lot when I was younger. 

11:38
So where, like in business, if I got disrespected, I would just kind of go over the top and overreact and, you know, be too much of a hothead or not kind of control that to have a better outcome for what I was going for. Like you know, there's definitely a place to, you know, be a hothead and you know, and to make sure that you're getting across. But also sometimes you can just create more problems than what you need to, and I think over the last five or ten years, really kind of evaluating that and thinking about it more on a deeper level. It's allowed me to have more control and more awareness of how I act today and, you know, always trying to get better, trying to always, you know, be honest with yourself and look for ways that you can improve from a business sense and then also just personally, to be more happy. 

12:39 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, no, that's, that's a great insight. And I, you know, we go through those stumbling blocks of thinking, oh, the opposite of this, whatever I was doing before, is the right thing, and you're like, ah, maybe there's an in-between. Have you seen the movie Molly's Game? I haven't, I haven't heard of it, um, so I think Jessica Chastain plays um. So it's about this woman who basically, she's an ex professional skier, has this crazy accident and then goes and starts, you know, through a weird series of events, gets involved in running high stakes, uh, private poker rooms and then starts running them for um, for you know, there's like mobsters and all this kind of stuff, and eventually she gets involved in some federal case. 

13:28
But it's, it's interesting in the movie because she, she gets so deep into this world where she's running these high stakes poker games and then she's like getting into drugs, like pill popping and, um, making a lot of money but at the same time getting deeper into particularly when she gets into Manhattan that underworld. Her dad, played by Kevin Costner, is a, um, you know, psychologist or whatever therapist and she eventually you know, if anyone's listening hasn't watched this is going to spoiler uh, spoil it to some degree, but basically, um, she, she gets into this situation where she gets beat up and she, her, she has a sit down with her dad and she's like I don't know why I am this way, all this kind of stuff. He's he's like well, I'll save you years of therapy. Um, you were raised by a dad who you grew to resent because he drove her so hard so she created an environment where she could control men through this poker game. It's a and it's a pretty just interesting thing. You go huh like very it's. 

14:38
It was believable in the sense of like that was what drove her. It's like why do you want these poker games? And it wasn't about the money. She never cared about the money, that was kind of a theme. It was just being able to have this environment where you know these kind of rich guys are, you know, around doing their thing. Um, so, whitewater rafting in Colorado. Where were you in Colorado? 

14:58 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
uh was in Canyon City, about two hours south of Denver, hours southwest of Colorado. 

15:06 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Springs, okay, nice. How long did you do that for? So I? 

15:11 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
did it for two years in Colorado and then another two years up in Alaska and then one more year in Northern California. Do you still do it? I do. 

15:23 - Hope (Announcement)
I do. 

15:24 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I'm actually really excited I got a trip to India this summer where I get to guide a boat down a big river in the Himalayan mountains for like eight days. 

15:39 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Do you do any of the solo canoe stuff or kayak stuff, I guess? 

15:44 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Um, so I'm not, I'm not the greatest kayaker, but um, yeah, last summer, uh, up in Alaska, I did a really amazing trip where I got dropped off in a float plane and had a little inflatable whitewater raft that was like a one person raft and spent yeah, I think it was three nights, um, just completely off grid by myself doing a small like class two, class three river. 

16:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Um, that would terrify most people. What do you, uh, are you when you go out on a trip like that? Are you trying to not think about things? Are you trying to like, process life, maybe all the above or what you know? Yeah, what do you get out of that? 

16:26 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
um, I mean avoiding the distractions, like you know, like everybody, including myself like glued to my phone, glued to my slack channels, glued to the email and just being very, you know, reactionary. But when I can get off grid, get away from the phone, it's thinking about everything. You know, I feel like a lot of the times I'll have the best business insights, kind of best personal insights. Insights kind of best personal insights. Just, you know, really getting ideas for kind of like long-term stuff, because I am somebody like I kind of I am very much in the moment. I don't think about the future too often, but I feel like when I'm forced off grid, like, like you know, that forced thinking time is super beneficial for me. 

17:22 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, I've had a few times in probably the last 10 years where it's I was actually able to go a little more than that, but yeah, where your phone just doesn't work and you're like, cool, well, I'm going to forget about it, and then you do and you're just very much in the moment. I mean, I think there's sometimes, you know, pieces of us that long for a hundred years ago or 150 years before any of these conveniences were created, like I could have just read a newspaper and uh, that was it. Yeah, go about my day. Uh, so, uh, I do want to. Actually, before I move on from the rafting, I'm sure, uh, people listening are curious what's your craziest rafting story? 

18:13 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
oh man, um, okay, so it's actually going down like very mellow class one, class two. So it was my second year rafting out in Colorado, so I was only 19. I wasn't very confident, like as far as my rafting skills, but like, at the same time, I was always trying to make the best experience for the people I was taking rafting. So I had this family and we were on like what you would call the scenic section no whitewater. Just, you know, you're just enjoying nature and I had this like five-year-old he was probably like seven or eight years old and the whole time he was just like this is boring, this sucks. 

18:57
Like I thought we were whitewater rafting and I'm like I'm like you know, like I'm trying to give this kid the you know a good experience. Um, so, as we're floating down the river, there's this big hydraulic and it's the only part of the river. You know like you can easily avoid it and there's no reason you would maybe like want to hit it, unless, like you're really trying to get like a good splash. And I was like, ok, like I'll give this kid you know a little bit of a throttling. 

19:27 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Like it's a hydraulic just pumping water from below, or what. 

19:29 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
So it's like a recirculate. It's where the water goes over a rock and it recirculates. So it's a hydraulic, it's a hole. It's a lot of times what will like flip a boat. It's a hydraulic, it's a hole. It's a lot of times what will like flip a boat. So I decided to just like drop into it completely sideways Not smart at all. 

19:48
So the next thing, you know, like I've never flipped a boat. And the next thing, you know, the boat flips over. I actually get tangled up because I was doing an oar boat so I was rowing it For a second. Like I get tangled up, my jacket gets tangled up. I'm thinking if I'm going to have to like use my knife, like trying to figure out how to get out from underneath the boat, and I get up, I get the boat flipped back over, but the dad and the son end up swimming like a quarter mile and it was like pretty shallow, pretty shallow, kind of rocky. 

20:22
You get them out of the river. They're a little beat up, you know nothing bad, their shins, you know, maybe a little bloody, and they refuse to get back into the boat. Yeah, and so we have to. You know, it's just so embarrassing because it was just this very mellow piece of whitewater, and so we get them back, like we have to call them a van, we get them back to the rafting company, and so for the rest of my rafting career I was known as the toddler throttler. Yeah, I guess that section of river, that hydraulic, that part of the river, is still called the toddler throttler hole. 

21:02 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's funny, I wish. 

21:05 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I had something a little bit more flattering, but that is definitely the one that always comes to mind, were they? 

21:10 - Preston Zeller (Host)
understanding of like what you were trying to do, or were they just like your amateur hour? 

21:17 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I think I was so devastated at that point, like I just devastated at that point, like I just like did not, I think I probably like went and like hit the rest of the afternoon. 

21:25 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, that's funny. So, and how old were you when you were doing the rafting like guided? Um, like, probably like 18 to 2324. Okay, and so where, where do you go from there? 

21:40 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Um. So after that I ended up having a pretty interesting career. So I was out in Northern California for about, let's say, eight years, nine years, doing um cannabis cultivation um Northern California Humboldt area. So I started off for the first year or two in Humboldt, but then it was more kind of over by Yosemite Lake, Tahoe, East of Sacramento. 

22:09 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Uh-huh. 

22:12 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
That was very interesting. Talk to us about this cannabis cultivation. 

22:16 - Preston Zeller (Host)
There's so many sophisticated terms for this now. 

22:19 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's like, that's the vanilla way of saying it. 

22:23 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's I mean. Does that mean you were um, you were a grow specialist, or you were just clipping buds, or what was? 

22:35 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
going on. It was, it was running an operation. It was having a piece of land and you could grow 99 plants so, yeah, just growing pot, selling it to dispensaries, having people come out and trim, having the trim seen in the fall. So it was, you know it was. I don't miss it at all. So it was, you know it was. I don't miss it at all. There were a lot of aspects of it where I didn't enjoy it very much, but then, at the same time, it definitely was running a small business. I learned a lot. I learned a lot like about business, what to do, what not to do yeah, so it was a very interesting experience. Like you know, I definitely learned a lot. 

23:26 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Well, I mean California has had a medicinal marijuana culture for, or culture you know, industry for quite a while. Yeah, yeah, so, um, well, so you were up there. I know one of the one of the challenges with up there is there's a lot of cartel activity kind of in the they're, you know, redirecting water from farms and all this kind of stuff. I mean, did you guys ever run into any trouble with cartels and whatnot? 

23:57 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
No, we didn't experience that. You know it's definitely. It was a gray area back then and anytime you have like a gray area, it just brings a lot of nefarious people into it. Yeah, um, so you're always wondering, you know, if somebody is going to rob you or you know if, just you know, always having your head on a swivel and not being able to trust people, I always, I always joke around, like you know, there's any, any industry where there's a lot of money involved, there's people who tend to you know you can't trust. So with that, like you know, I was with real estate too. But you know I always joke around, like you know, with real estate, at least you have contracts and attorneys and you know that eight, nine years I was doing that there was, you know, like it definitely sharpened my skill set to where, you know, real estate seems a lot easier and not, you know, not that way at all. 

25:04 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, I mean that I think that culture you're describing and like cannabis culture, I was like grew up in SoCal and there's, I mean, you inevitably run into that to some degree, but it's very handshaky and which is fine. But I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people will just abandon their word if you know that fits them, versus being like you know. I don't know if you ever watched like an old show where it's like your, your word was your word. You didn't have that. You really had nothing. 

25:39
Yeah, in a way right, because it was like if you know, we don't have, let's say, we don't have phones or anything, and you go, I'm gonna be there at this time, and you just never show up like why would I ever trust you again? You know you couldn't text him or call them. Be like, yeah, I'm gonna be. Like, no, I'm going to be there at this time, I'm going to do this thing, and it was just. I think it took one time for someone to be like and I think you know some degree today that's probably true too. But yeah, so any crazy stories there you want to share? 

26:16 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Oh man, there were a lot of crazy stories. 

26:34 - Preston Zeller (Host)
I guess the best part is just you know. Once again, man, it was. It showed me what I didn't want. I was really dying to get out of there. It was yeah, I mean there are a lot of crazy. What was the last straw? 

26:40 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
for you, where you're like I've learned enough here here, I'm ready to do something else. Yeah, um, so there was. It was like I say it was always a gray area, um, and then we had moved. I'd moved to an area where it was. They had like a very clear parameters like this is what you're allowed to do. Um, if you follow our directions, like you don't have to worry about anything. It was all done on a county by county level. So they're pretty much like give the county a lot of money, we'll give you permits, you can do this. And I was like okay, perfect, this is what I'm looking for. 

27:17
Moved to that county, purchased a couple pieces of land and signed up, gave the government a ton of money and at this point, like I was really over it, like I wasn't even I was having somebody else run the garden for me. That year I was taking a, like I was actually traveling for six months and like I did all the groundwork, laid it out, disappeared, and halfway through the year, all of the old timers in the county decided that they didn't like what was going on and that they wanted things to go back to the way they were, which I guess I can understand. But so halfway through the through the season, probably like in June, they had a recall election and so they recalled the board of supervisors who had put the regulation in place, and that allowed the allowed a group. 

28:13 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah. 

28:13 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, and so they kicked them out of office. They put in a bunch of their own people. So halfway through the season they had rescinded the like the law that they had put into place. And so now all of these people who were trying to do it the right way, who had paid all this money and like the original thing that the county had said is you know, we're going to take your money and we're going to get rid of all the bad actors. So instead, what they did is they took all everybody, all of the good actors money, and then they threatened them like hey, like we know exactly where you're at, you're not allowed to do this. Instead of you know, having 99 plants, you can have six plants and so we had to. 

28:59
you know have six plants and so we had to. You know we had to quit in the middle of the season, so that was that was the last straw. 

29:06
I came back from my trip and I was just like, ok, this is done, I'm done, yeah, and ended up that's. That's when I decided to go into real estate too, I was just like, you know, this is, I'm sick of this. You know, I really want to do something where I can be my own boss. You know, I want to have the freedom like that I enjoy, like you know, in my lifestyle. But yeah, I had, you know, ended everything. So you know, actually the funny thing is, at the end of, at the end of everything, like really all I had was a couple of pieces of property that I bought. 

29:45 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So interesting yeah. 

29:46 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
The real estate was the most valuable thing out of all that yeah it was, yeah, like you know, like it was such an up and down thing within that industry that I really walked away with nothing other than having a couple of pieces of property that I sold. 

30:00 - Preston Zeller (Host)
What area of was this more towards? Like Yosemite, where it was like Merced or something, or yeah, it was. 

30:06 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
It was over, like Placer County. 

30:10 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, yeah, okay. So that is sort of, yeah, serendipitous, huh, you, uh, you're sort of transition out of, uh, cannabis farming goes into real estate, which you were already had already owned, I guess by virtue of that you owned it, right, you weren't leasing the land, you'd bought the land, exactly. So I mean, what got you into the notion of doing real estate? 

30:39 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Um, yeah, so I had a mentor, a good friend of mine, who I lived with or lived near. He was always a neighbor in California and he had had some. He had bought a couple of properties owner financing, and both the properties that I had bought I bought from him owner financing, and he was always, just always, just like man. He was always pushing me to look more into it and, you know, saying that he thought that would be a better path. Um, so finally, after four or five years of him pushing it on me, I finally took him up on it. Um, and you know I was on. 

31:17
It was actually during this last season I had gone on a six month backpacking trip out of the country and that's when I started. Really, I thought like I could disconnect for six months, but after like a month I was like, oh, what do I do next? I got to like, you know, I got to be, I got to be working, I got to be figuring something out, and so that's when I just went really deep into, you know, listening to all the you know bigger pockets, podcasts, reading all of the books I could get my hands on. 

31:48 - Preston Zeller (Host)
What, what year is this, by the way? When you, like, you decided I'm I'm shutting it all down or they, you know, forced you out of it. Yeah, it was 2017. Okay, cool. So about eight, eight years? Okay, uh, okay. So you're on this backpacking trip, listen to podcasts while you're traveling around, where? 

32:08 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
uh, southeast Asia, so like um uh Thailand. 

32:13 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Speak any of those languages or just just hand gesture your way through it I mean traveling internationally. 

32:21 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
You realize how lucky you are that you know like in most tourist areas you can always find someone who speaks English, or even eight years ago, the google translate was, you know, a lifesaver a lot of the times yeah, yeah, that's true, um, okay. 

32:37 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So yeah, you're going through Southeast Asia that's pretty cool and listening to these podcasts and was there some kind of light bulb moment where you go, wow, this, this one thing this guy said really resonated with me. 

32:52 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Well, so I read the Gary. I really I read a couple of books by Gary Keller and the one was I think I forget, even forget the title, it's been so long but something like you know how to become a millionaire in real estate, or something like that. And it was the whole strategy of you know buying a house, paying it off every year, doing that, and it just kind of broke down. You know how you buy one house every year for 10 years, you buy one house every year for 10 years, and then you, you know, wait 30 years and just kind of really breaking down, um, you know how you can leverage real estate and leverage loans, um to be able to be able to build long-term wealth. And that was the one where I was just like okay, this is, this is what I'm looking for. You know, I need to start figuring out how I can buy and hold properties. 

33:47 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Is it the your first home? No, what is it? 

33:51 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I know it has a millionaire in it, Gary oh yeah, I just saw that one. 

33:57 - Preston Zeller (Host)
It is the millionaire real estate agent, that one one. It is the millionaire real estate agent, that one, oh, that's one of the stuff, man, yeah, yeah, anyways, okay, so yeah, and I'm just curious for anyone listening. So go check out Gary Keller books. Yeah, there's the how to find, fix and sell houses for profit flip. I guess, hold hold, maybe I don't know how to find, buy and rent houses for a while. That's another one. 

34:29 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Maybe, maybe that that's it. 

34:31 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, it sounds kind of like what you're talking about. Cool, okay, so you read. So that book kind of was a good catalyst for you. 

34:41 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
So that book kind of was a good catalyst for you. Yeah, for sure. No that. And then just taking in as much information as I could like other ways, but yeah, definitely turned. You know, it was a light bulb moment. I was like, okay, this is like what I want to do next. I thought, like I thought that doing it in California would be difficult just with how expensive real estate is there. And then also I just kind of wanted to reset, like as much as I loved California, I was like, okay, you know, like I think just a total, you know, new environment would be good. So, um, kind of toward the end of that six months I started, once I had really committed in my head this is what I was going to do. 

35:22
Next I started researching different markets and you know I had maybe dialed it down to four or five different markets. I remember Kansas City, Indianapolis, Houston, Minneapolis and then Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis, Houston, Minneapolis and then Columbus, Ohio. So I was just kind of at that point I thought I was really I wanted to just figure out how to buy rentals. I didn't quite know how. I didn't have that much money saved up. I would have ran out of cash pretty quick. 

35:54
But I was dead set that you know that's what I was going to do and so I was looking at, when I was evaluating things. 

36:00
I was looking for a market where you know I guess my big things where I wanted a economy that was growing, a population that was growing fairly cheap purchase price to rental ratio yeah, those were really like the main things. And so I ended up choosing Columbus, Ohio, and ended up, I guess probably about three months after I got back to California I packed everything up, put the properties for sale with that agent and packed up and moved to Columbus. I think I went on like a weekend trip out here to just do a little bit of scouting. But yeah, within three, four months I packed up, drove across the country, didn't know anybody in Columbus. You know, once again I got on BiggerPockets and just started making connections and to anybody who looked interesting, who was there, I reached out to and started making. It's funny, I still have probably four or five friends that today, um, that I became good friends with and first met just from scouring bigger pocket posts back in the day. 

37:16 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That's awesome um, people, you've done business with what as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's amazing. I think people overlook that sometimes, especially if I mean, if you're listening to this and you're like I don't know where to start, you know what you just said just being in a community or getting into a forum and being comfortable reaching out to people, I mean you got to do it. Yeah, I mean whether you're going to meetups and just doing it that way in person, or you're initiating it online. Okay, so you moved to Ohio. You start getting into what I mean did. Were you buying and paying down homes right away, or what did you jump into? 

37:56 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, so, man, I keep bringing it up. But, yeah, the forums on bigger pockets were a huge thing for me when I started off. So I ended up finding somebody in Columbus who wanted, who was looking for a partner to do wholesaling with. I had it in my head, like you know I, I didn't really want to do wholesaling. I guess you know know, there are a lot of negative associations with it and, um, I guess I really didn't understand it very much. But at the same time, I was like I don't know what else I'm gonna do. So, you know, like you know I, I was thinking about getting my license, but I was like, okay, this gets me into the investor game. Um, I can probably learn a lot from this. So, um, I ended up um finding a partner, um worked with him for about a year. It was very beneficial in that, like we had a lot of success. Um, we were, you know, lean two-person team. Um, you, guys were wholesaling wholesaling 100. 

39:01 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, doing nothing but wholesaling in local where you were in Columbus, yeah yeah, I've always only done local. 

39:08 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, um, and it was a, it was a good experience, learned a lot. Um, the partnership, like we I think we both wanted to be in charge, like we were both like very much like wanting to do things our own way. Well, it's probably pretty stubborn in that way. So after about a year I was like, ah, like I can't really do this. I'd rather kind of need to be in charge, or, you know, I really want to do things like the way I want to. So I think the first year we had, the first year we had a lot of success, did about 50 properties together, but, yeah, I was ready to do my own thing. So after a year I broke off and about halfway through the partnership we had hired somebody and you know I was lucky enough to get that guy to work with me and you know, today he's my partner on, you know, the real estate side and we've been working together for about six and a half years and we started the current company six years ago. 

40:10 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So walk me back to then. How are you guys finding these deals? I mean, do 50 in your first years, that's impressive. So yeah, how are you? How are you finding them, given you're so new at? 

40:23 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
it. Yeah, so my partner had my partner was actually living, he was virtual, so he was doing all the backend stuff he was, he was good with the data aggregation and all of that. And you know it was, honestly, 2018 was just so different as far as marketing for properties, you go. You know it's like man, if I only knew, if I knew then what I know now, like hindsight's, 2020, but, um, we were actually, we were only sending mail the first year. 

40:55 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Mail, physical mail, yeah, yeah. Only sending mail, just like yellow postcards, those freaking, those have worked for so long and people are doing them right now and they're working, you know. 

41:06 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I mean so we were getting a 2% response rate and so now I get like a 0.2% response rate on the mail. So, and you know, turning down, turning deals down, that, like you know they had to be great deals, but there were a lot of deals like I just didn't know back in the day. 

41:25 - Preston Zeller (Host)
You left money on the table unintentionally. I mean, that's just you know like that comes with experience, like you were alluding to. Yeah, yeah. 

41:37 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Only mail to start off with, but the mail was just. It was just so much easier back in the day and there's just way less competition yeah. 

41:46 - Preston Zeller (Host)
And you know, it's funny when we have these cycles where so many people get into it, like you know, towards running up to that early 2022 time period where it just got wild, I think, especially early times, of all the COVID stuff and people sitting at home and stimulus checks and texting, and you know all the huge investment bankers or you know black rocks getting in and just paying whatever they whatever price for homes. I mean it just it's just so lucrative for a while, but you know, I think it's great, makes it for a more lucrative environment. Also attracts people who aren't serious right, they can make a few deals. Same with the real estate agents, right. But I think it's when, when there's kind of a contraction, people stay in it, who really care about it, not just because it's this opportunistic thing. 

42:50
Okay, so you know what? What's evolved over the last five, six years? For you Say, let's start with the real estate side before we go to res VA, but on the real estate side, what's kind of evolved over the last five, six years, either technique wise, I mean, I think we know economically what's sort of gone on. Yeah, walk me through that, your insights there. 

43:15 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I mean, it's drastically changed. So I guess probably the biggest thing was for the first three years we did nothing but wholesaling. Um, you know, looking back it's like oh man, I wish I would have started buying rentals before. You know that big COVID bump. And then now you know interest rates, how they've steadily grown the last three, four years. 

43:37
But at the same time and this is advice I always give to people a lot like when they're starting off is, you know, focusing on one thing. 

43:46
And so really, when we, when I started off, I really just focused on wholesaling you know, running a sales and marketing company and, yeah, did we passed up a lot of opportunities where we could have had different, better exit strategies, but at the same time, like just laser, focused on becoming really good at data aggregation, marketing and then the sales process. So I think that was a huge advantage, uh, but then three, about three, four years ago, probably four years ago started buying a lot of rentals, doing a good amount of flips Now we do probably about 50 or 60 flips a year and just really building a team. So started off with just me and my partner. And then, you know, today we're probably close to 30 people and we have in-house property management, we've got a couple of project managers and it's really, you know, built out to a more well-rounded it's a lot more of a real estate company these days instead, of just being a sales and marketing company With that you know a lot of challenges. 

45:03
And marketing company With that you know a lot of challenges, like you know. Like I think one thing I've really learned is like you know, when you're at five or 10 people you can be really loose with how you do things. 

45:09 - Hope (Announcement)
You can't? 

45:10 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
you don't really need to think about a lot of the HR stuff or you don't need to maybe be as serious about your systems and processes, onboarding, you know all of that kind of stuff. 

45:22
But one thing I really learned the last year or two is, as you grow a big team, just like, if you don't have, if you don't have those processes in place and if you don't give that stuff consideration, then you're just going to experience all kinds of problems and you're not going to be able to keep the alignment, keep the good culture in place. So that was, that was one big piece. Another thing that we've done a lot is, well, I mean, expanding marketing, learning how you know, learning how to really make data-driven decisions, you know, just even you know with data aggregation and just being really meticulous about how we're spending money and just making sure we're getting the right ROI. Yeah, there's just so many ways that if you're not doing things the right way, especially when you grow a big team, it can just blow up. Or you know a lot of people, like you know, will grow these big teams and then be less profitable when they than they were when they were just a few people, um, which, yeah, I think. 

46:33 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Sometimes I question that um, uh yeah, when you hear someone constantly chirping the uh, this top line revenue number and they stop sharing like how profitable they are, you go interesting. 

46:46 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, how many deals you do how many contracts? 

46:49 - Preston Zeller (Host)
you sign in a month, it's like none of that really matters. Um, so you mentioned data has always been an important piece for you guys. Like where's, where you sort of manually curating data at first, or have you guys always used a provider for that, or how does that work? 

47:10 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
So, yeah, we definitely started pulling it ourselves early on um working with a virtual assistant, um going to the County websites. We've all like every single year, we'll um do pay somebody to, or you know, starting off, I did it, my partner did it, driving for dollars. 

47:29
Always like to do it this time of the year early on, kind of early summer, late spring, where the grass is super high. But yeah, always try. You know, with data, the harder it is to get it, the better the list is. So if you can go and pull those lists directly from the county websites or wherever it's released, if you can do the driving for dollars, we learned early on that the harder we work to get lists, the better they are. We work to get lists, the better they are. 

47:59
But you know at the same time, like everything, PropStream, some of the high-end providers, like you know, 8020, we've always invested heavily in data because you know it is the lifeblood. It all starts with having good data, but then you know doing smart things with it. Like we've always used, uh, you know, batch list stacker to be able to help score a list and you know, figure out, okay, there's uh, 200 000 people we might cold call but who are the top 20 or 30 or 50 000 people who we're gonna mail to and even within that 50 000 who are the top 5 000, 5,000 that should get, like you know, multiple pieces, you know per cycle. So yeah, we've always been really, we've always tried to go really deep on data and how we use it to market, and then you know, it's one of those things where, no matter how good you are or how much you level up, you realize how much further you can still always go with it yeah, have you guys used batch data yet, or any of the services there? 

49:08
um, we've always used batch for skip tracing and list stacking. Um, I don't I'm not super involved in the day like they keep me really far away from the game I don't like anything. I like, I know enough to just kind of BS about it. 

49:22 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That's all right. Yeah, no, I'm curious to talk to you about that. But that's awesome. I mean, you know I've I've talked to like investor fuel and other you know, like, uh, jamil's meetup and stuff like that. Just about data and how so many people you know it's actually interesting people who come into like our products and they sample like 50 leads and they'll like complain that there's something off about the 50 leads. 

49:47
I'm like that is such a small sample size to be working with. Like go, go, pull a much bigger list, um, and then they may, you know, they may happen to hit a you know pocket of that, um, you know those types that that small number of leads. It's just like, yeah, um, you're not going to get a hundred percent on your right party contact on your phone numbers, uh, that's just not how it works. But, um, yeah, people get kind of tripped up on that. So you moved into the VA side of things or having this VA company, uh, with people out of Egypt, which I first heard about this about two and a half years ago at another event I was at, was the call and contact center conference and I guess a lot of uh part of the draw to Egypt. My understanding is they don't have thick accents draw to Egypt. 

50:43 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
My understanding is they don't have thick accents. Yeah, so there are a few different things. I mean they're very well educated. It's a huge population, over 100 million people, and they really value education a lot. Very big, like middle class. So that's one thing. 

50:59
Yeah, you know, I think any anywhere in the world you'll, you know, have virtual assistants that have, you know, like, very clean English, and then you know other places you're, you know it varies a lot, like we've been using VAs from Central America, from the Philippines and then from Egypt, and from my experience, you get people who speak perfect English sometimes and then you also have very thick accents. So it's all about finding the people within that region. So that's one piece. But a couple of the things that I've really found work really good with, uh, people in Egypt. One is um, they just tend to be natural sales people. Like everything is negotiated, Like I've been to Egypt probably 10 times in the last four years and everything from a gallon of gas to a loaf of bread is negotiated. It's just, it's part of the culture, part of the lifestyle. 

52:01 - Preston Zeller (Host)
I think Middle Eastern culture is very much that way, Just in general. It's just like market oriented or something they love to haggle man. 

52:09 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
A thousand no's is still a maybe. 

52:13 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Right, right, for sure. 

52:15 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Okay, the time zone is also really awesome too, because there's six, seven hours ahead, depending on the time. The time zone is also really awesome too, because there's six, seven hours ahead, depending on the time of the year, um. But then there's just also night owls. Like you go, like you can go on the streets of cairo at 10 o'clock and it's kind of a ghost town, but then you go out at midnight and you know the barber shops and the cafes and everything is just bustling and stuff. I think it has a little bit to do with the temperature and the heat. 

52:44
Like yeah, but yeah, it works out really well to where people prefer to not start the day till later on and work later in the evenings. 

52:53 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That's what Arizonans should do. Probably similar heat out here. That's, that's awesome and like, was this something you had? I mean, I, I you said this earlier that you just kind of said, hey, I think we can do this better. Um, which to some degree, I think most people are going to say it is what it is Service is only going to get so good. But you sat there and said I think there's a way to do this better. Services only going to get so good. But you sat there and said I think there's a way to do this better. I mean, why did you think that was the smart way? 

53:26
to go versus just accepting it for what it is and focusing on what you're already doing. 

53:29 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
No, that's it. So that's a good question, and I've always been an advocate of not trying to focus what I'm the best at, like you know, like do, like I've. I tried to do cold calling in-house, like before when we were smaller and it's a lot to manage and I honestly had like no desire or intention of doing it for myself or let alone other investors. Um, but how it all came about was I had a really amazing lead manager who was working for our real estate company and he worked with us for a couple of years, but in the last year we worked together, he was very much just like constantly in my ear, like hey, like let me do the cold calling. I've done the cold calling before. Actually, he worked at the company I was working, or you know, the third party company I was working with at the time, and so he was just like always in my ear. Let me try it out. Let me try it out. I was like no dude, like like we do not A thousand. 

54:31 - Preston Zeller (Host)
no's is a maybe. Yeah man. 

54:36 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Finally, I was, like you know, I've always been a big advocate of split testing when it comes to marketing. So we had like 10 callers at the time and I was finally like OK, man, here's, here's two cold callers. You take two seats, let's see what you can do. We'll make everything you know, give you the same data, make everything even and track the results. And within about six weeks he was able to start getting the same results that the cold calling company was getting, which you know. I thought that was pretty good. 

55:06
Starting from scratch, this was a cold calling company that we'd been with for like a year and we were really happy with them. We'd use other, we'd probably use two or three other service providers over the years. So once like once, he was able to like start getting the same results in a short amount of time. That's when I was like okay, like I believe you, you can go ahead and take it over. And so we gave him all of the seats. And then, at that time too, we were also starting to move away from in-person lead managers and do more virtual lead managers. So that's when he also brought on a couple of virtual. He had to replace himself too, because I was very, you know, very much like man, like what are you going to do without you? But yeah, so that was a little over three years ago, um, where we made that transition and um, then he was once, you know, once we got everything in place, he was, he was very eager to go ahead and like continue to bring more people on, and once again I was like very hesitant, like I I really had no desire to do it, like I want to focus on, you know, the real estate, which is what's working, and you know, I constantly see people take on more than they can, you know, handle and you know it just hurts their core business. So I was very much against it once again. 

56:36
Um, but what really made it change was we used, you know, sharper for coaching for the last five or six years and, like we were doing quarterlies for, you know, running something similar to EOS, and as we were running our full day quarterlies, our coach had saw, you know, our performance in our marketing, our cold calling how much it had improved over the last three months, and so we were drilling down on that and he was actually, he was not only a coach but he was also, um, the operator for a big cold car for a big, uh, real estate investor. Um, so he he was like, hey, like I can see like this is working really well for you, would you, you know, consider doing this for other people? Would you consider doing this for us? So that's how it started. 

57:32
Once again, like reluctantly, through me, I was like, okay, yeah, we'll, we'll do it. And so he was our first client and then from there it's just like okay, you know, started to talk to some other people within my network. Um, that was a little less than three years ago, um, and yeah, that's how, that's how everything started up people sort of don't. 

58:06 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Are you under under I don't know if it's underestimating just looking for those opportunities. Maybe they go, man, staring you in the face. It's okay to be reluctant to those, but the man they persist. Sort of like someone's knocking on your door a bunch and you go. All right, I guess, I guess, I'll guess, I'll let it in. So what is your hope? I mean, you're still wholesaling, right, or do you just do resume? 

58:24
yeah, yeah, okay so you have you know res va. So you are an outsourced uh cold calling agency right for yeah calling and uh virtual lead managers. Okay, uh, the new year wholesaling business. I I mean, how do you? What are your hopes in the next three to five, 10 years, whatever horizon, you want to focus on what you know and how can people help you. 

58:51 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Well, I mean for the VA company. Like the thing that I really love about it is the opportunities that it provides for the people in Egypt. So, like my real estate company, about half of our team is virtual. We've had lead managers like really rise up over the few years, like whether it's my partner in the VA company, zane, who you know became a partner on the VA company, or you know we've has we have we have probably four different people in the real estate company who do very high level roles like sales manager, head of dispo, head of marketing. Those people have all came from being lead managers. 

59:32
So I love giving opportunities to people who work really hard and we've been able to scale that a lot with the VA company. So, like one kind of crazy thing is the Egyptian pound. Like it has been devalued a lot in the last five years, so we pay in dollars and we're like a first year doctor, engineer, they might only make five to $8,000 a year in Egypt. So they're able you know they're able to get these jobs working with us where, like you know they can, they have so much more opportunity to make, to make money than they might might in their hometown. So, yeah, so I love that aspect, like that's that's the thing that really drives me. And then also my partner on the VA company. And then you know it's just, it's very beneficial because I love like I've always been very much into networking different masterminds and then just like trying to build a really good network of friends within the real estate investing company. So you know, I love giving sharing. What's helped my business be really successful has been the whole working with virtual virtual people, virtual team members, and being able to share that with them and help them scale their businesses and, you know, do things a different way. So you know, that's that at the end of the day, like that's what really drives me. 

01:01:07
Like we don't do any marketing for the VA company. It's been always pretty hands off. I would have never gotten into it if I didn't have my partner. He's the one who runs all the operations. Like you know, I just like I don't have my brain's not wired for marketing. It is not wired for operations either. And cold calling is just an incredibly intensive operation. You know there's so many people behind the cold callers, whether it's quality insurance, listening to the calls, training, managing the data correctly, managing the software there's so much other stuff that goes into it that you know that I'm not involved in. But yeah, to circle back to your question, man, like you know if anybody might be a good fit, like love, to you know, explore with them and see if we can help out in any way. But even if they're, even if it's helping other people optimize you know their, their cold calling or virtual lead managers, like, we're always down to help any way we can. Cool. 

01:02:20 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Well, Sean, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Um, where's the best place for people to find you? 

01:02:26 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
Yeah, um. So Facebook, instagram, um. Sean Grabow is uh like where people can find me on social media um, linkedin, um, and then yeah, um, um and then yeah, um. Email is R E S dash V? A, um, or, excuse me, sean, at R E S dash V? Acom, or R E S dash V? Acom is the website. 

01:02:53 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Cool, yeah, so hit up Sean for any of your uh, you know you need a cold calling team or um. Talk to him about wholesaling. So thanks again, sean. I appreciate you coming on the show. 

01:03:04 - Sean Grabow (Guest)
I appreciate you having me Preston Really enjoyed it. 

01:03:09 - Hope (Announcement)
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