welcome to the root of all success with the real Jason Duncan a podcast that explores how the world's most powerful entrepreneurs unlocked success and how their stories can help you do the same a successful educator turned entrepreneur Jason has built multi-million dollar businesses that have been featured in Inc magazine and Entrepreneur magazine his life's Mission now is helping entrepreneurs live what he calls hashtag the exit lifestyle introducing tedx speaker mastermind leader author entrepreneur Cigar Aficionado motorcycle Enthusiast and host of the root of all success the real Jason Duncan the real Jason Duncan welcome back to another episode I am the real Jason duck and you could call me JD I'm glad to be here today I've got a guy that I met on Instagram uh Anthony deposino is going to be my guest today he has gone from being homeless eight years ago our 10 year years ago to owning and managing over 70 million dollars worth of Assets in multi-family real estate really interesting story I met him like I said on Instagram because I follow a lot of really cool Concepts and around real estate to investing Etc and I saw some of his reels videos that he put on Instagram and I thought you know what this dude's probably got some information I need access to so reached out to him and asked him if he could give me some advice on syndications I'm about to do my first syndication with my Mastermind group The Exeter club and uh he was kind enough to set up a phone call we talked for a few minutes he introduced me to his attorney that could help me do it and then in the process I said you know what why don't you come on the podcast and talk about your story and that's what we're going to do today so let me tell you a little bit about who he is like I said he was living in the back of a van in Oakland California with 80 000 worth of debt 10 years ago and but since then he's written over a dozen best-selling books very interesting not what you think they might be he's built two eight figure companies and he's acquired like I said over 70 million dollars worth of real estate assets and he did this through the power of delusional self-belief and it's interesting what he's going to say about that so that's why I named the episode what I did it's the power of delusional self-belief uh he and his partner uh Dan Krueger own and Invictus capital and they are doing they're killing it and they're doing all of their work in Minneapolis Minnesota in the Twin Cities region and uh Anthony's going to start off by telling us a story about a recent trip that he took and then there's a very cool special offer he's making at the end so make sure you stay tuned all the way to the end help me welcome Anthony bacino to the show Anthony welcome to the show man it's good to see you thanks dude it's good to be here well so we had a little bit of recording difficulty so I'm not sure how this is going to work out but I want you to tell that story because you you told me pre-show like off the cuff like just nonchalantly uh yeah I just got back from back from Antarctica and I've never heard anybody say that before ever in my life so you got to tell me about this what were you doing down there and how did you get there yeah so so one thing I got to say about going to Antarctica is Antarctica is really really cool but maybe the best part of going is being able to stay in casual conversations like oh I'm going to Antarctica I just got back and people are going wait what like it's a real Icebreaker so that's kind of cool the Antarctica is a totally totally yeah it's funny because like we went in February which is summer down in Antarctica so it's like 30 degrees sunny we got really lucky with weather it's not always like beautiful and sunny it can be really rough but where I'm from in Minnesota like it's been below zero during that same period so it was warmer in Antarctica than it was back home so when we finally got back home I was like I'm not ready for this like gotta bundle up and put all these clothes whereas in Antarctica is like it was really beautiful so the trip itself though like for full disclosure like I am terrible at planning in a trip like this requires a lot of organization a lot of flexibility so like I was really lucky that my brother his fiance is a travel agent and they wanted to go to Antarctica they invited us we're like yeah let's do it so she took care of everything and so if anybody's interested in going hit me up I'll connect you with her she's she's rad she'll take care of everything for you but effectively how it works is like you have to get down to the southernmost point on South America which is for us it was Punta Arenas in Chile and then from there you have two options typically the the main way that people get down to Antarctica is they take a tour or an Expedition boat or ship and they'll go across the Drake pass which is a really really gnarly bit of ocean it's like a two-day sale it's really big waves it's it can be really really gnarly we chose to forego that and instead we caught a plane from Punta Arenas to King George Island and the downside of that is you have a two-day window and you're going to make the flight but it all depends on weather and it's really unpredictable in Antarctica so like you get you're just sitting around waiting for the phone call and then they're like oh yep we're ready to fly get to the airport now so you have like 20 minutes to go so you're just sitting and waiting and then we got really lucky caught the perfect opening and when uh the weather window got to the the island and then we just hopped on this ship with like maybe 30 other passengers something 20 30 passengers and then we just you know took a five-day cruise down the the coast of Antarctica every day we'd stop in the morning so up in the afternoon to do Expeditions so we'd go hang out with penguins we'd see some whales doing their whale thing and then the highlight of the trip for me was seeing this thousand pound leopard seal stalk and catch a penguin and then eat it and we were in the Zodiac which is like this big inflatable boat and we're like right next to him arm length away like getting crazy pictures just watching this thing happen and it's a reminder that like that nature is really brutal but also incredibly amazing so it was it was one of those trips that like it's a it's a true bucket list like you check that off you're like that's that's really worth going to see because it is it's hard to put into words just how vast it is like how big and pristine so absolutely incredible so is it like what I imagine like it's just white everything is completely white and there's just different levels of whiteness you know you've got low white right next to the ocean and high white with mountains I mean what is it yeah yes and no so there's actually a whole lot of rock exposed especially in the summertime when like the the snow is maybe melted a little bit more so there's actually a lot of contrast between white snow and then like Black Rock which creates this really beautiful juxtaposition and then where the Penguins all hang out like during this time of the year it's all rock and so it's a lot of exposed Stone and they have this kind of algae that's red covering all the snow so there's a lot of red Hue where the penguins are hanging out so it's not just like a white Tundra if you go like deep into the continent that's all there is this is just a white desert they call it the white desert but where we were on the coast there's actually just a lot of texture and contrast is is really gorgeous this time of year so how long was that trip like leaving Minnesota and getting there and getting back was it a couple weeks how long was that yeah yeah I think we left on like the sixth or the seventh and then we got back on the 21st and so the the travel just to get down there and back that was you know two full days right there and then kind of hanging out waiting for the the opportunity to catch the plane down there so when we actually were there there was about four or five full days of expedit of expedition and going out they call it Expedition but really is this like you hop on a zodiac they take you around you feel really cool and badass but like you're not like doing anything too extreme well that's quite a bit different than your experience about 10 years ago of living in a van um so that uh that's a big time difference now you're hopping on Jets and going across the world to the South Pole and doing that kind of stuff so take us back to 10 years ago when you were living in a van what was uh what predicated your homelessness I suppose and then and then of course we'll get to how you got to where you are today but what happened back then yeah so I mean 10 years ago it's interesting I was actually doing a lot of similar things in terms of going on pretty crazy wild trips as a professional rock climber at that point in my life which sounds really really cool because I got to go to like Yosemite got to travel overseas and go to like these just a remarkable outdoor locations and climb rocks but the downside is that you don't really make a lot of money so like on the one hand you get to go and explore but you're you're dirt poor so the the trade-off for me there was I had a life of a lot of freedom and the ability to go and and do these epic trips but I wasn't making very much money out of subsidizing a lot of my lifestyle with credit card and this all came to a head I tried to marry this this woman I asked her her parents if I could marry her and uh her mom looks at me and she goes what are you gonna do to provide for our daughter and it was like this is the first moment that um I'd never really been faced with that question of like what's my role as a provider or my my role in society as being like a meaningful uh contributing member of of the team and so I went home after that conversation and really like looked at what I was doing with my life in terms of climbing and that was a fun lifestyle but I knew that it wasn't sustainable and it wasn't something that was going to lead me towards a life that I necessarily long term was going to be proud of like for in a very real way I was just kind of Peter panning my way through life through my 20s like I came out of college had these degrees but I really I lacked the ability to like work in a W-2 could work for somebody else I have severe ADHD and it was very problematic because I was always getting fired like I was unreliable it was like undisciplined and like just all the things that make for a really bad employee so like that's what led me to rock climbing was this feeling of like oh I can be the in charge of myself I get to go do what I want have these adventures and make a little bit of money but when I decided I wanted to like get serious about this relationship with this woman I looked at my skill sets and I was like I don't really have any good skills for making money or providing so I went to the one skill that I did have which was writing and I started writing Science Fiction and Fantasy stories and this was a skill that my dad had like really ingrained in me when I was young he would pay me to write him short stories he would pay me per word like 10 cents per word which is like way too much to pay a kid for writing your story but it it got me um a lot of reps because then I was like I'm just gonna write a lot of stories and make a lot of money so my dad was just paying me for that so all those years later you know when I went back to to figure out okay how am I going to make money I was like I'll write Science Fiction and Fantasy so just kind of like maybe an indicator of like how delusional I was at that point in my life where I was like who makes money uh Stephen King makes money I'll be the next Stephen King so all that's to say is like I wrote for about a I've been writing ever since but about a year later that that woman who we got engaged she left me and it was that point where she kicked me out of the house I was living in the van I had all the debt still I hadn't really gotten a lot of traction with the writing yet and now I was just looking down the barrel of a life of like regret and resentment and like this isn't what I signed up for so things were looking pretty bad there that was about when I was 28 or so wow so so you found yourself living in the van because you were struggling with this idea of whether or not you're going to be able to provide for this woman you thought you were delusional thinking you're going to be the next Stephen King or something like that but you are a multiple best-selling author so is that did that come as a result of you writing these fantasy fantasy books or or was that something else tell us about that yeah I mean it's interesting when it comes to I think being good at anything or being great whether that's in business or real estate like you have to be a little bit delusional in the belief that you have in yourself I think that's a really helpful skill set to have is the skill set of delusion but also to be like rooted in a little bit of reality and like be able to look objectively how good can I really be at this thing and I I knew I had the capacity to write well but I was a little bit delusional in terms of thinking oh I could be the next Stephen King but because I didn't have that limiting self-belief in myself I actually went and made an effort and as a result made it way further than I ever would have if I had just never taken a first step in that direction because I thought you know this the likelihood of finding success is just so low and I think that's what holds a lot of people back is they think like I have this big audacious stream and goal but like oh I could never do that right and so maybe for me like the thing I got lucky to be blessed with when at Birth maybe is just this this delusional self-belief and that really did pay off in the grand scheme when it came to writing have I've written 12 or 13 books at this point and majority of them have hit the best seller list at some point and did really well with that but I think even more importantly is from the writing that really set me up to start building businesses which you have to have you have to believe in yourself because nobody else really will in the beginning like everybody else in your life your friends or family everybody will look at you and say like this is crazy maybe you shouldn't do this like this is this is risky and if you don't believe that it's possible for yourself then you're not going to do the work and show up on day in day out you're just going to kind of let the critics hold you back and so I think delusion's a little bit of a good thing but again self-awareness is a superpower so you have to be able to objectively look and say okay what is this just me pumping myself up or is there something I can point to in my history that gives me a sense of belief that this is something that's doable right and a self-awareness is a it's a tricky two-edged sword you know you go too far on one side and suddenly you're on the delusion side again right so your books am I to understand then the the fiction books that you're writing helped provide the financial ability for you to kind of launch into this real estate thing is that am I seeing that right is that right interestingly no um these days yes it took a long time for the the fiction to really start generating good income at that point in my life when my fiance left me I was living in the back of the van still trying to get these books going and trying to get something you know trying to get traction and it was while I was in that van a friend came to me and he's like hey we need to get you out of this situation your your books aren't selling yet like you're working at a gym you're not making much money um and so he invited me to start building a business with him and we started a window washing company and that was really the Catalyst that's the thing that started making me really good money was realizing like oh I have this skill set that lends itself well towards building businesses and that was the initial um source of income that got me into real estate was having all this cash flow from these businesses and I ultimately sold that one and had you know a pretty good chunk of change that I started pouring into real State because as I was asking all these people who were further ahead on the journey than me in life I was like what should I do with this Capital they're like just buy real estate so I was like okay that's what I'll do I just buy real estate and it wasn't until many years later than that the books because I continued writing throughout all these years that they started making money as well and then I just had this vehicle of real estate that just kept pouring it into it but the initial bit was actually just from that window washing company so you so you're writing books that were um getting published but not you're really making any money you're you're started the window washing company and you ended up how many years did you operate that company before you sold it about a year and a half two years so we got in there we scaled it pretty quickly from you know zero to about a million a little over a million dollars of top line revenue in the first year and a half and then I sold it to so the way that we had formed this company was me and a buddy and then we were bringing in our rock climber buddies to wash the windows because they're really good in high places on ropes so they could get into these jobs and do them at a rate that other cleaners can do and so when I decided to exit we sold it to the employees to give them a means for you know following suit in the same thing that we had done so it wasn't like a big crazy exit to a private Equity company or anything like that it was it was a good exit um made good money from it especially considering it's just window washing um but that was like if anything the biggest benefit to it was the knowledge of like how to do this like how to build a business how to exit it how to build teams and systems to to be profitable and that served me really really really well both in real estate and in other endeavors so I think that's really interesting that you're you were able to kind of go back in your um what your experience was and used rock climbing as a way to benefit a window washing business like if you if you had said hey Jason Manuel I'm going to talk to you what do you think these two things have in common rock climbing and window washing I mean at first I might thought well you know be able to climb but but what I wouldn't have really put two and two together that's that's really very clever and that helps you build a a very successful Million Dollar business that you were able to exit the launch in real estate so what do you think now moving into real estate so you've moved in real estate did you immediately go into real estate like by yourself to buy land buy duplex by the apartment complex when you took that first chunk of money whatever that amount of money was and bought your first real estate what was it what were you trying to figure out what were you trying to do so real estate was interesting for me because it came like the universe kept trying to put real estate in front of me at different points in my life and I continually ignored it for a long long time so the first the first time the universe really tried hard was I was in college and my roommate and his dad were fixing and flipping single-family homes and I would live with them in an exchange for cheap rent we I would help knock down walls and do construction and the the thing I learned from that after doing two or three flips was like if this is real estate I want nothing to do with real estate because I can swing a hammer but I can't hit the nail like I am not the handy guy I I did not want to be doing renovations and I think for a lot of people that's the first experience that they have with real estate they watch HGTV and they see like The Fix and Flip shows and they think oh that's real estate and that was my experience and I was like I don't want anything to do with that so fast forward maybe around the time that the window washing business started doing well a friend came to me and he's like hey I'm buying these quads in Oakland uh do you want to go in on this with me and I was like still thinking about that previous experience I was like I want nothing to do with that but I believe in you and your skill set so I gave him money to go do it and like that was almost passively investing before I even understood what that really meant and those we still own them today they're still doing really really well and it wasn't until uh maybe a year after that it was right around the time that I was exiting the the window washing business that I was starting to think about real estate in a different way and when people were like put your money into it I was like okay I I can understand that this building is like a tiny business and if I understand the levers that go into like making it profitable whether that's increasing revenue or decreasing expenses then I'm gonna have this lovely little business and I wanted to understand every aspect of the business as intimately as I could I didn't want to Outsource any of it and this is this has always been something that's been core to how we build businesses is whether it was window washing or our manufacturing company we try to eliminate as many of the middlemen as possible so that our teams our our skills our competencies are the ones that are running the show and so what I did from the very beginning was the first asset that I acquired where I was like this is my real estate career I'm like moving into this this new area it was a Triplex that I had with an FHA loan and I lived in one unit while renting out and managing the others and that was the perfect experience because I got to see firsthand how to be a landlord and how to operate this building from ground level which then served as the springboard as we started to grow and expand the portfolio so I could really understand what needs to happen and I think that's allowed us to to scale relatively quickly in the grand scheme of things over the last four or five years we've grown to about 70 million dollars of assets under management we have about 12 people on the team now that are actively managing the portfolio on our behalf and um it wouldn't have been possible I think if from the beginning I had just gone straight to Outsourcing to a third-party property management company well you obviously are doing some things right I mean nobody nobody stumbles upon a 70 million dollar portfolio that's actually your your uh presence on Instagram doing videos about investing is What attracted me to you because I I didn't know you from Adam nor did you know me and I saw a couple of your videos and and I'm in the process of putting together my first syndication and I was like this guy I like his videos he does a good job with the videos and um he's probably been in Antarctica I don't know maybe and so maybe I should maybe I should reach out to this guy and ask him a question and you were so kind enough when I DMG like get back to me and here we are so so let me ask you let's kind of put this in the timeline perspective living in a van 10 years ago to take a quick break to thank our using sponsors for making this podcast possible thank you as an entrepreneur I know that you have to deal with sales on a regular basis I mean every entrepreneur does and if you aren't paying attention to sales as an entrepreneur you're not going to be an entrepreneur for very long but I've got a sponsor of this show called dub that helps you bring the personal back to sales if you want to figure out how to 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your first two months of dub you can't beat that so go check it out go to the real jasonduncan.com dub 40 years ago you weren't in business unless you had your business in the Yellow Pages you remember those things and 30 years ago you weren't in business unless you had a door-to-door Salesman 20 years ago you weren't in business unless you had a website and today you're not in business unless you're doing social media content am I right social media content social media content in the form of like micro content which is 30 to 60 second spots on Instagram reels or Tick Tock or YouTube shorts that's the way business is done as a matter of fact that may be how you found out about this podcaster me as a business coach this medium that we're using today to communicate what we do is vitally important and just recording yourself isn't enough you've got to do it right and my friends over at story do it right and one of the problems with doing it wrong is that you sit around thinking well what the heck am I going to record what am I going to say how am I going to say it like I don't know what to talk about Well story takes all of that away from you stop wasting time trying to come up with content because story will send you a video prompt on what to record you can pick the categories you want to record in whether it's real estate entrepreneurship Finance relationship leadership life insurance it could be anything don't waste time on that and by the way if you're not confident and talking on video or if the video editing portion takes up way too much of your time story will edit the videos to perform well on social media they add the subtitles the pop-ups the zoom Cuts they remove all the filler words like uh and um and uh they remove the awkward pauses and then they take that video and post it for you they write the captions they add the relevant hashtags and they post it on the platforms that you care about the most it's exactly what you need to be in business today and to be successful at it so if you want to learn how to do social media the way the influencers do you need to go to the real jasonduncan.com story and that story with two eyes why because they're awesome go to the real Jason duncan.com story that's s-t-o-r-y-y for ten percent off your first three months to try story out you're gonna thank me later thanks for listening to our sponsors now back to the show did the window washing thing and you sold that I'm guessing if I'm putting my time together about eight years ago is that right is that am I is that timing correct and and then so so you've only really been into real estate for eight years is that correct so now eight years to 70 million dollars so that's not quite 10 million dollars a year on average obviously that's not that's not the way it works it doesn't work that way but if you look at it over the eight years you've been doing it almost 70 million that's significant why do you think you've been so successful at this well I think there's a luck luck is a really big one um I think it helps to be in the right place at the right time but maybe maybe to give a little bit of context so when I started in real estate actively managing my own portfolio I just thought I was going to buy real estate with my own money I was going to manage it and that it wasn't going to be a career thing it wasn't going to be a business that I was building it was just this other side thing for me and it wasn't until 2019 that I was getting a lot of questions from friends and family about wanting to invest alongside me and like how to get into real estate they're asking all these questions I was like oh this is that's interesting I hadn't really thought about what that would look like and I happened to coincide with when I met my now partner Dan Krueger was a end of 2019 and that's when we formed Invictus capital and started bringing investors into our deals that's when we started syndicating so before that you know over the the years where I had just been acquiring my own assets I maybe had one maybe two million dollars of assets at that point just with my own money and then from their 2019 moving forward that's when we've acquired the bulk majority of our of our assets and so a lot of it was understanding the right systems and the right business model that would allow us to scale like if I was still doing it with my own money and everything was predicated on my balance sheet and my skills to to operate it we I would grow a lot slower it would just it'd be you know it the the theory of constraint says that you know the the area that's than the most constricted is going to hold you back and I would be the the biggest bottleneck there especially from a capital perspective because to go and acquire 70 million dollars of assets you need you know 25 30 million dollars of capital which I just didn't have sitting around so the way that we got there was first by getting really specific about what makes us unique and special in this Marketplace and that was a couple of things one is we focus only in our backyard which is Minneapolis Twin Cities so that's the only Market where we acquire assets because we know this market like the back of our hands we know all the sellers know all the Brokers we know all the lenders we can operate in this market in a way that our competitors if they're coming from out of state they simply can't so that's one thing that makes us unique the second is the in-house Property Management so that allows us to operate our assets more efficiently than pretty much anybody else can if they're relying on third party and so once we got really clear on like what makes us unique then it was just a matter of letting those sellers lenders Brokers know hey we're in the we're buying here's what we're looking to buy here's what meets our criteria so that when they have opportunities they bring it to us and then two was we needed to find a way to get our deal flow and our Capital flow synced because if you have too much Capital but not enough deals it doesn't do any good it's just dead money sitting there right if you have too many deals but no Capital then you can't get them done and so our queue is always we need to figure out how to get our deal flow and our Capital flow so that they're in the lock step so on the one side of getting very clear about what our parameters were what makes us unique on the operations side we also needed to simultaneously start putting out the message to attract investors who maybe resonated with our business model our investment thesis thesis and just us as individuals and so over the last three four years that's really been the challenge is like let's bring in the deals and let's bring in the capital at the same rate and the third part of that stool that complicates everything is because we have in-house management we can't just throw tens of thousands of units on the team simultaneously they have to be able to you know keep up with that and so the the hiring and the training of the team is just as critical as the deal flow in the capital flow so for a lot of groups that do what we do they don't do the in-house management they'll just Outsource that part so they only have two of these things that they need to worry about capital and deal flow and then we like to complicate it and make it harder for ourselves by also putting in the operations so did you say that up until 2019 so so if we go back eight years so we're looking at 2015 if I'm doing my math correctly so about 2015 you get started in real estate you are able to take down a couple of million dollars if I have understood you right personally like in assets you you had a couple million dollars in assets is that right and then and then in 2019 you and Dan kind of came together and formed Invictus capital and our Invictus multi-family is that right Invictus multifamily.com that's the name of this yeah the company is Invictus Capital but there is a crypto fund that's going that's out of the Cayman Islands that has invictuscapital.com so if you want to find Us online you go to Invictus multi-family they are actually we're in we're gonna try and get that URL from them because we have the trademark to invict this Capital but they they took the URL so it's uh right well we're at it you and Dan you and Dan Forum you and Dan formed Invictus capital and over the last three and a half years you guys have been together been able to take down through syndications uh seven a total of about 70 million dollars in multi-family real estate so um was that was that all through syndication it sounds like it is but is it pretty much all through syndication or most of it no that's a good question so the I would say of the the 70 million about half of that is syndicated the other half is just joint ventures so we will find one or two investors we'll find an asset that's a good fit for everybody on the on the team and we'll maybe just do it as a small joint venture um recently in the last year we've done six tenant and common structures so what that is is one of the things that attracts passive investors to the syndication model is they don't have to be active right like they're they just put their money into the deal the the operation operational Partners us at Invictus are the ones that will find the deal manage it do all the hard work and everything associated with it and so they love that structure but a lot of people they discover the syndication model only after having already bought some single family home some duplexes maybe some airbnbs so they've acquired a little bit of an active portfolio and they they get to the point where they're like oh you know what like this is great I love real estate but I don't want to actively manage this stuff and they discover the the syndication model maybe that's through our book or maybe through a podcast and they're like oh I want to do this well now they have a problem they still have this active portfolio that they have to do something with so what a lot of our investors will do is they'll start to offload those buildings but the problem is when you go to sell one of these investment buildings you're going to get hit with capital gains right so the Golden Goose in real estate is to be able to do a 1031 exchange which is you sell one building and then you roll the proceeds into a new building and you delay the the taxes so the difficulty of that is the timing has to be really good and then two for a lot of our investors they still don't want to be actively managing that asset after they do the 1031 so what we'll do is we'll create what's called a tenant in common where we will co-own the building with them we'll help we'll find the asset we'll help them roll their 1031 proceeds into it we'll manage it as though it was a Syndicate but we're co-owners in it and it's a way for them to preserve the 1031 and so all that's to say is that that's actually turned out to be a fairly significant portion of the deals that we do these days they're not big deals by comparison to the syndicates or the fund that we we do but they end up being pretty meaningful for our investors because you know the the biggest expense that you're going to pay in your life is typically your taxes so anything that you can do to delay that is usually pretty advantageous so it's a it's a pretty cool service that we we offer we kind of fell into it backwards a number of years ago we didn't know about it before um an investor came and said hey I got a 1031 do you think you could help me out and in talking to our lawyers CPAs we we devised a means for facilitating it it's been pretty pretty great so far well congratulations on the success on that that's pretty that's pretty phenomenal in three and a half four years to take down 70 million dollars worth of real estate and I think that um what what I what I would like to impress upon the listeners is to know that you don't have to you don't have to come from a pedigree of Real Estate Investors you don't have to come from you knowing exactly how to do it all right as as Anthony you just said you fell into that one part of that attendant and common stuff backwards um and I think it's about putting ourselves in the right place at the right time which is interesting that you said that earlier as one of your kind of keys to success is that one of the things I teach my clients is that one of the keys to success is of course being the right place at the right time and it's sometimes it's lucky but I think more often than not it's we're putting ourselves in those places we don't know that we are but we find out that we're in that spot you know for example I don't know what's going to turn out from your Antarctica trip but like you might have met somebody there that eventually you're going to do something pretty amazing with later I have no idea but you put yourself in Antarctica it wasn't you it wasn't dumb luck so if you do meet somebody who helps you get to that next level in life it's because you put somebody there let me ask you uh let me ask you another question after you've experienced quite a bit of success in a short amount of time over the last eight years what do you think you know like what's your definition Anthony of success how would you define that word for you like what does that mean to you that's a good question that that um a number of years ago I did a podcast series with my buddy Austin Lenny called the brain dump that was all about like unpacking the the science of success and really trying to understand what's it mean to be successful because one of the things that I didn't realize when I was younger is that I was living a life in accordance with what I thought was everybody's definition of success like I thought there was one definition like the American dream right and because my life wasn't in alignment with that I thought myself to be a failure and it wasn't until many many years later that I realized that in The Game of Life in the game of success like you get to Define exactly what it looks like to win to lose like you get to chalk the field you get to make the scorecard and then you just get to live every day in alignment with that and so for me it's the ability to do what I want when I want how I want to do it where I want to do it and for me a lot of it is just built into am I moving towards my highest and best self like that's that's the thing that really gets me excited these days is just knowing that I'm doing something that's progressing me not necessarily around money not necessarily around business not necessarily around Fitness or relationships but like all of these things like it's it's this whole package of like what would my highest and best greatest self look like if I could just max out all the stats like what would that look like and I get really excited about just trying to like move towards that because it's an unobtainable ideal to be your greatest self because you you never like the goal isn't to be the best the goal is to be better and better has no Finish Line right and once you understand that then you just show up every day and like keep moving forward and that's that's what success is is just at the end of the day did I move forward so what that is a definition of success do you consider yourself to be a successful person it's interesting because it's you gotta you gotta win every day right like it's every day is a new battle every minute is a new hour like or a new new battle you can break it down to like every second if you wanted to so you just gotta figure out what what's the metric you're gonna measure it by and some days like some days I feel very successful some days I feel horribly unsuccessful and I share I talk about this all the time on Twitter and Instagram because I think a lot of people will look at people like us with platforms and we'll be talking about the highlight reels a lot of times like oh look how we turn 7 500 into 70 million and like built this business and people look at that and they're like oh you've got it all figured out and the truth is that like I would say even these days only 60 of the time do I feel like I have it somewhat figured out so that's barely more than half the time the other 40 of the time I'm just like what am I doing like what what's actually happening because like you know like I mentioned before I have severe ADHD and while I've figured out systems that have helped me get out of my way the truth is I'm still constantly trying to get in my own way and so you have to like keep showing up and fighting that battle so long story short is more days than not I feel as though I'm moving forward and I'm winning and I'm successful and that's that's good enough for me because the goal will never be Perfection it's always progress over Perfection well I think that's a very healthy healthy perspective after interviewing hundreds of people on this show and talking to them about their views of success I think your perspective is very healthy because you know it is about progress It's about moving from today to tomorrow tomorrow to the next day Etc and if like you said if more than half of those is moving the right direction I think we're probably doing all right if we're going the other way then yeah we better do some self-reflection some checking on things so let uh how many so how many hours you got you got 12 employees I think you've said at uh at Invictus Capital you guys are managing about 70 million you've got in-house Property Management you're doing all the operations how many hours a week does Anthony put active hours into uh Invictus capital is it is this a full-time gig for you or is have you got it pretty much set on autopilot you're just involved well tell me tell me a little bit about that that's a hard question to answer because in my life and I think in the life of a lot of entrepreneurs and owner business owners like it's really hard to figure out how many hours did you actually work because you're always thinking about the thing like it's it's almost never maybe I'm just not doing it right but I don't know how to like dissociate um when I'm just sitting on the couch and hanging out or when I'm on a walk with my girlfriend like how to to not have it be cycling in the back of my mind and truthfully a lot of the work that you will do as the owner or the founder CEO is thought it's thinking it's it's mulling over strategy high level vision and like how what direction you want to move and how you want to move and it's not so much the minutia of day to day and one of the things I really struggled with as I started to step out of the day-to-day getting the not grunt work but the the work that moves the wheel forward is as you move towards having a team that does that for you you feel more and more like what am I really doing am I am I holding my team back am I actually helping because you spend so much time in meetings and talking to people and emailing and messaging and just thinking that you're like it can be very hard sometimes to look and say what did I actually do today like you don't have a widget that you got to make like you weren't working the the line so you don't have something you can point to so all let's just say is like I'm always working like I'm always thinking about it but in terms of like day to day what is does Invictus need of me I would say it's it's probably realistically two to three hours maybe a day and then the rest of it is all around these types of conversations we're going on podcasts and spreading the message and just trying to attract people into our sphere potential investors or maybe a broker is listening to this who's from Minneapolis and like oh I I got a deal I want to show it to them right like so this is a little bit more intangible stuff that's helping build the business but at a certain point you're like you can't really measure the ROI on a spreadsheet right but the truth is that like the most of the things that are worth measuring in life can't be measured on a spreadsheet and this is one of those things so while this is technically in um the job description it's really hard to know like what's the ROI of this rather than going and finding a resume and placing the resident or doing a unit turn right and those things are very very easy to measure well so so there's this thing called The Law of the architect it's a universal law that kind of governs how businesses should be run by the founder of the business who we refer to as the architect in that and the law and there's only three jobs that the architect of any business should be doing anything to to grow his or her business number one set the vision number two communicate that vision and number three build the asset so what you just described is that most of your active hours is about number three there's building the asset and you're probably spending a lot of time effectively setting and communicating the vision to your people and what I asked you was about active hours and you I think you answered it correctly at least from the way I could tell two to three hours of actually pushing paperwork and doing things but most of your time is doing those three things which is good because that's why you've been successful when we break the law of the architect when we as the owners get involved in the daily minutia of pushing the Rocks around and pushing paper and all that kind of stuff that's when our businesses that's when the businesses don't succeed long term they can't grow outside of our own ability so I'm congratulations on doing that even whether or not you knew that or purposefully intentional about doing that you are living according to the law of the architecture congratulations sweet I did not know that but it's good to know it's good to have that confirmed well so I want to invite everybody to file follow to follow Anthony he's on I found him originally on Instagram he's at the Anthony Vicino and that's v-i-c-i-n-o-v-i-c-i-n-o the Anthony vecino he's also on YouTube got lots of great videos on YouTube and you can look him up at youtube.com Anthony vecino same thing on LinkedIn at Anthony Vicino there and then Twitter he's also a very active on Twitter Anthony vecino so you've got a special offer that you're going to make to everybody would you like to explain that or you want me to talk about what we talked about the beginning I'll give you the opportunity yeah um so the thing is like we have this community one of the things that I really struggled with in the beginning of my journey was I knew I needed to upgrade my my network right you hear all the time your network is your net worth but in the beginning you're like well how do I get in the same room with badasses who are doing the things that I want to do especially if you're stepping into entrepreneurship for the first time you're like I don't know where to find other entrepreneurs and so we created this community called beyond the Apex for people who are interested in trying to create a life where they go beyond the Apex they're trying to be their best self they're trying to move towards that every day and so we created this community of awesome people that come together and some of them are entrepreneurs some of them are W-2 workers who just are love what they do and they just want to do it better we have people in there who are struggling just with all the things that all humans struggle with which is like you know distraction and feelings of overwhelm or self-sabotage like all the things that get in our way of achieving our highest and best self and I think currently we're just under a thousand members in there so it's like 950-ish or so last time we looked and it's an awesome Community we put a ton of content we have paid courses we have free courses like all around things like entrepreneurship copywriting how to tell stories how to how to raise capital for Real Estate how to develop hyper Focus so it's a it's a broad swath of content in there and that I invite your your listeners if you guys would love to come join us like it's typically uh 50 bucks but for you guys we'll make it 25 so we'll give you guys the link for that and you can come join it um you can check it out for free too and if you don't like it like just ask me for your money back and we'll refund you it's not a big deal at all like we want to make sure that this is a community that's being well served um but it's it's our attempt to provide something that we we wish we had had when we were first starting out all right so that's a good offer if you are interested in uh investing real estate investing specifically Anthony and his group uh Beyond Apex is the community that you want to be involved in normally 50 bucks a month you get it 25 bucks a month as a listener to the root of all success uh What uh Anthony you want to tell them to email you with the code or how do you want them to reach out yep shoot me an email Anthony at Invictus multifamily.com and say hey I listen to the podcast loved it would love to join the community I'll hook you up with a special registration link but do me a favor like if you do that make sure that you've left a review for this podcast too because a lot of work goes into podcasting and it's a bit of a thankless art like I know Jason's putting a ton of work into this and so just take a moment before you shoot me that email to leave a review and then when you shoot me the email say hey I left a review and if you did I'll hook you up with something super secret super awesome I'm not going to tell you what it is but you're definitely going to want it so make sure you leave that review first well I think I'm going to leave a review for my own and send you an email because I want to see what this but thank you for those kind words it is we do love the reviews as podcasters because obviously it does make us feel good to see that people like it but more than that it puts us up in front of every of the other podcast so that we get out in front of more people to make the impact so email him Anthony at Invictus multifamily.com that's invi c-t-u-s Invictus Invictus multifamily.com and just make sure you've left the review for the root of all success and mention that you heard him on this show the root of all success and he'll not only give you that half off for beyond the Apex Community but also something super special and private maybe it's a rock from Antarctica we don't know I don't know what's going to give you but Anthony it's been a pleasure having you on the show I do enjoy following you on Instagram your videos are informative they're well done and uh so good on you man congratulations on all your success thank you brother I appreciate it thanks for having me guys it was I love these conversations a lot of fun so thank you all right thanks well there you have it another very successful entrepreneur about his journey to success and the power of delusional self-belief you know his definition of success I think is interesting because it's one that a lot of people you know I record every single one of these shows of course and then I write down a record of everybody's definition of success and that definition that he gave which is essentially being the ability to do what I want when I want with whom I want Etc that definition probably has appeared if you call that verbatim even though people say it a little bit different that verbatim definition has appeared more than any other single definition and what that refers to is freedom with time freedom of money freedom of energy the ability to make the choice and have control over your daily schedule and Anthony has achieved that in just 10 years they're not really even 10 8 years so you can achieve it too no matter what you're doing no matter where you are no matter if you're living in the back of a van in Oakland California with 80 000 worth of debt within a few short years you can be well on your way to being a multi-millionaire achieving success and having complete freedom and control over all the things that you do every day so listen to shows like this go watch YouTube channels like Anthony's you can go to youtube.com Anthony vecino and you're going to listen and see what he's doing to create wealth generational wealth not just for him but it's going to be for his family long terms kids if he hasn't you know later on I mean those are things that he's he's doing what he's doing right now is going to be blessing people for generations to come so I want you to go follow him at any of those places YouTube LinkedIn Twitter he's at Anthony bacino on Instagram he's the Anthony bacino so go check him out there and don't forget to send in for his free gift and you get half off the beyond the Apex Community just email Anthony at Anthony Invictus multifamily.com and just make sure you've left a review for the root of all success tell them that you did that he's going to be half off of the community price the community is 50 a month but you can get the 25 and then you also get a special free gifts so please tune in again next week when I talk with yet another very successful entrepreneur about his or her journey to success until then I am the real Jason Duncan and Jesus is King thank you for listening to another edition of the root of all success with the real Jason Duncan if you've enjoyed this week's episode visit therootofallsuccess.com to access the show notes and other helpful resources follow Jason on social media at the real Jason Duncan are you an entrepreneur who feels Trapped In The Weeds of daily operations not experiencing the freedom you thought you'd have as a business owner want to know the way out take Jason's free exit Readiness assessment to see how close you are to getting ready to experience true freedom and success as an entrepreneur go to am I ready to exit.com today that's am I ready to exit.com see you again next time here on the root of all success [Applause]
