Building Businesses While Living A Balanced Life

Play This Episode

0 Votes

Is it possible to be in four companies and still have time for important things in life Edwin Carrion s expertise in all aspects of managing operations of startups from development design organization legal financial marketing capital financing and strategic negotiations with client and vendor partners has made him the key player in growing four of his most notable companies from start-up to annual revenues exceeding 15 000 000 With all of these he s still able to focus on making himself and his loved ones happy In this episode he talks about how creating a replicable business model and finding the right partner and team helped him to achieve success while still living his best life 00 01 – 05 19 Living Life to the Fullest Having an early head start in business The secret to diversifying Making a model of success Creating a team 05 20 – 08 04 Bringing in a Technical Partner Why you need a technical partner The value you can offer as the business-side partner Growth mindset Capital resources 08 05 – 15 19 Important Lessons for Business Owners Edwin on why he s not interested in service-type businesses Instead of reinventing the wheel perfect the wheel Building the way he wants to Managing risks Learn from your mistakes 15 20 – 16 16 Closing Segment Reach out to Edwin Links Below Final Words Tweetable Quotes Once you create a model of success that model can be duplicated into whatever you do And as long as you follow the same business model that got you to success everything else is going to work the same way – Edwin Carrion I will not change one thing because I know that today I will change one thing in my life My life wouldn t be the way it is right now And I don t regret anything that I have done in my life and I m happy for those mistakes – Edwin Carrion —————————————————————————– Connect with Edwin through his website Follow him on Facebook Instagram and LinkedIn Connect with me I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns Facebook LinkedIn Like subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on Thank you for tuning in Email me sam brickeninvestmentgroup com Want to read the full show notes of the episode Check it out below Edwin Carrion 00 00 Once you create a model of success that model can be duplicated into whatever you do And as long as you follow the same business model that got you to success everything else is going to work the same way And I have created that so I don t go crazy and I start four things at once What I do is I focus on one of them become really good at that one Once I create a team that is able to sustain a step back and then I m able to go into the next investment on to the next thing that I want to create Intro 00 27 Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show Whether you are an active or passive investor we ll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big Sam Wilson 00 39 Edwin Carrion is an entrepreneur a businessman and deal maker with more than 20 years of successful experience in multiple industries Edwin welcome to the show Edwin Carrion 00 48 Hey Sam thank you for having me Appreciate it How are you Sam Wilson 00 51 Hey I m great The pleasure is mine Three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90 seconds or less where did you start Where are you now And how did you get there Edwin Carrion 00 59 I started in real estate in 2002 I started enterpreneurship when I was 14 years old Where am I now I m living life to the fullest And you probably wonder what that means is having a balance of my life enjoying all aspects of my life working 20 hours a week and spending a lot of time and creating a lot of memories with my family Sam Wilson 01 20 That is fantastic And that was gonna be my next question is what is life to the fullest mean to you Edwin Carrion 01 26 It means having a balanced life as entrepreneurs as business owners you know at the beginning we ve focused into making a big you know and we put aside and that becomes our number one priority And we forget about everything else we forget about our health we forget about being happy We forget about spending time with our family being present for our kids be present for our wife if you have one and we lose sight of all of that It comes to the point that yeah we get the success but success is not fulfilling you know at a very early age I was fortunate enough to go bankrupt and realize that when I went back about 27 years old when the real estate market crash and from there on I ve been living you know the YOLO life when you only live once meaning that I ve been making myself happy And through that of making myself happy I m able to make my family my kids my employees my business and just the growth is continuously going Sam Wilson 02 18 That is interesting You said you ve been involved in multiple businesses What were some of those businesses outside of real estate Edwin Carrion 02 25 Started when I was 14 years old Like I mentioned my first company was a DJ company I was a DJ I played throughout South Florida radio stations clubs had an entertainment company So that was my first company Carwash prior to that actually I started doing washing cars when I was 13 years old And 14 my DJ company When I was in the military in the United States Marines I used to sell calling cards because without cell phones back in the day so I will sell calling cards to the marine so they could go home especially because I was stationed in Japan From there left the Marine Corps started real estate development Before real estate development I went into the jewelry business built a massive company sold that company in 2014 Back into real estate development from there on I bought a transportation company With a transportation company we got into the InC 5000 As you can see back here behind me we are in the Inc 5000 in the transportation company Opened up an investment firm into the forex market And that s what I do So today nowadays are four things transportation real estate development forex investment and business consulting and education Sam Wilson 03 31 That s a lot of moving pieces And going back to your idea here that you want to live life to the fullest It sounds like you ve kind of like the lots of variety and a lot of things going on And that s part of your living life to the fullest Is that right Edwin Carrion 03 45 It s not gonna like there s a lot It is in everything in life And you learn a lot even the financial planners tell you you have to diversify right can t put all eggs into one basket So what I learned with me is that once you create a model of success that matter could be duplicated into whatever you do And as long as you follow the same business model that got you to success everything else is going to work the same way And I have created that So I don t go crazy And I start four things at once What I do is I focus on one of them become really good at that one the ones I create the team that is able to sustain I step back and then I m able to go into the next investment on to the next thing that I want to create Sam Wilson 04 25 When you talk about team what does that mean to you and who is the first person when you re starting a new business that you always bring on Edwin Carrion 04 34 It all depends on the business that I m starting But let s talk about the transportation company because I did mention transportation In the transportation company I have no knowledge and I didn t have a lot of experience in transportation So when I bought the transportation company the first person that came in was my technical partner because I am the business partner I have all the knowledge in business but I don t have the knowledge into like the Forex for example my Forex investment partner I am not a trader I don t know anything about Forex trading Now that I ve been in business for two years I have learned a lot But I still cannot you know be responsible for other people s money and for my money into the business side So what do I do is I bring in a technical partner So that will be the first person that I ll bring into any business is a technical partner if I don t have the experience on the technical side of the business Sam Wilson 05 19 How do you find a technical partner that wants to work with you that if they already possess the technical skills what value do you offer them maybe that they haven t already self-created in their own life Edwin Carrion 05 33 There s a lot of things that a business partner brings to the table that a lot of times a technical partner doesn t see And again is not just partnering with somebody It s finding the person that is looking for the growth So on the transportation side of the business my business partner he grew his company to eight trucks And that s all he was able to handle He didn t know how to scale from a truck to 40 trucks or a trucks to 100 trucks he didn t have the mindset So when I talked to him you know when he explained to me the business model I told him why don t you have 50 trucks Why don t you have 100 trucks And his mind just went no no no that could never happen we can ever get to that level is too much So that s where I come in and I bring the value in number one I ve seen the value And as far as being able to know how to scale a business and know how to sustain how to create a team to sustain the scale of a business That was number one Number two I could bring the capital you know I have earned the financial freedom and being successful at what I have done in the past So I have capital resources that I m able to raise capital to bring the capital into the joint ventures and the businesses that are part of What the other one is how do I find that besides me jumping in with anybody I make sure that we do share the same values because I only work with people that share my values like my business partner in the Forex business This is somebody that I mentored six years ago and into business and real estate actually deciding real estate wasn t for him He liked it But it wasn t for him It wasn t his passion So he got into the Forex trading he became really good at it he got to the point where he was making good money But again he goes talking to him if this is such a great business model why haven t you taken it this far And again the mindset is not there So once I partnered up with him in less than two years we grew that company really big And just as again because I know how to scale things I know how to create a system And I know how to bring the capital in for projects like that Sam Wilson 07 22 Right You find the technical partner when you bought the transportation company had you already identified the technical partner Or was it Hey I ll buy it And then I m sure there s somebody out here that could find Edwin Carrion 07 33 Well when I bought the transportation company the person that I bought it from that became a business partner he was the technical point And the transportation company you know I could break it down into three components logistics maintenance and administration So I took over the administration part he started with the logistic and maintenance And that s how we grew Sam Wilson 07 53 Right Yeah Because you had the mindset on the administrative side maybe how to bring in more business how to grow the company and he knew how to run it and just was growth growth-minded That s really interesting Is there any business right now that you would say hey that s too difficult or has too many moving parts to just say No that s not of interest Or is there anything on the table now as a possibility because you know how to grow and scale companies Edwin Carrion 08 18 I mean the businesses that I personally don t like to get involved with are the service-type businesses hair salons nail salons restaurants because the profit margins are too small So one of the things that I learned throughout being in business for over 20 years is that you need to learn what each customer is going to bring you What is the average revenue per customer And in the restaurant business in the nail business the average revenue per customer is very small That s one of the things that I tend to stay away from And I learned that when I had my jewelry business again I was the business partner And I had a technical partner in the business And we realized that our average client was around 100 to 1 000 And that s a good number to have because that means that we don t have to have a lot of quantity So with time you learn about that is better to have quality versus quantity And it goes the same thing for my development When I started in real estate development I used to build so many houses I was crazy like all over the place trying to find land And I was doing like all these small little houses which they were you know 200 to 300 000 Nowadays you know I don t do that anymore I built one house every year and a half two years But the house is a 3 to 5 million project Like my next project I m starting to work on right now It s going to be a 10 million project And it s only one house so I don t have to go crazy building 10-15 houses I only do one project and it s going to need me the same amount of money as the other ones would But at the same time I work a lot less because I do not like to work Sam Wilson 09 49 Right that makes a heck of a lot of sense On the development side what have been some of your favorite developments and why Edwin Carrion 09 56 My favorite developments have been the first ones that I built And I m going to tell you why Because I realized at the time I was building 1600 square foot houses four bedrooms two bathrooms with one car garage And I didn t create the floor plan for those What I did was I always understood that you have to add value to everything that you doing life So I used to go to these big developers the Lennar the Schumacher homes the Better World Builders right now which are some of the big ones D R Horton s I used to go to their developments And I will pick a model that I like and I will take the model and instead of reinventing the wheel I perfected the wheel And what I mean by perfecting the wheel was I added things that didn t have little things meaning like in their bedrooms they used to put carpet So instead of me putting carpet in the bedrooms I used to put tile so when somebody that was buying their first house they would walk into this house and be like Oh my god he has tile on the bedrooms He s like crazy like this so much money maybe it cost me an extra 1 to add that you know In the closets instead of putting the wires closets I used to put the rod the metal rod which cost about the same amount of money And people were like oh my god he has a cloth He has a rod it has ever been the wire mesh So those were my favorite projects because I realized that I was building somebody s dream And in America to own your house or to buy your first house It s like you accomplished the American dream right Especially because I m coming from another country coming here and buying your first house like wow I made the American dream So I was building and I was creating people s American dreams Sam Wilson 11 30 That s awesome Absolutely awesome never really think about it from that perspective So you re building right now your 10 million home that s your next project If people just come to you and say Hey I ve got this big giant home I want to build will you build it for me Edwin Carrion 11 43 No like I told you I don t like to work And one of the things that I do is I don t build for people I build for myself So every project that I do now is a spec project meaning that I m going to build it the way that I want to And when it s 90 complete that s when I put it for sale on the market And the reason I put it for sale on the market when it s 90 complete because there s very little changes that the new owner could make Versus that me put it on our market like a lot of developers do you know before it breaks ground or when it s the beginning stages people come in and they want to make all these changes And it just prolongs the process And it makes it more tedious So to me I said I have good taste My wife has amazing taste as an interior designer and we just build the way we like it And if you build it it will sell Sam Wilson 12 25 What are your risks in that Let s say the economy takes it What are your risks and building a high end luxury home Edwin Carrion 12 32 Risk is like anything else in business there s always a risk right So as long as your key with your risk and you know for me my risk tolerance could be 30 For you it could be 10 So as long as I m okay with my risk tolerance I try to mitigate that risk Since the beginning I try to figure out what is going to be my risk So in this case my worst-case scenario could be that Well number one let me explain a couple of things I m doing development right So I m not flipping I m not wholesaling Flippers or getting an old house putting some paint here and there and making it look pretty right So the profit margins are very little right and you re a developer you profit margins are larger than that So we got about 30 profit margins from the total costs of construction So my project profit margins are huge So if the market was to crash which now everybody s talking about a real estate bubble coming up which there might be a bubble but I don t think it s going to crash like it did back in 2007 2008 So let s say a crash 30 I m still at breakeven And if the market crashes that way I can rent a house because high-end luxury homes a lot of people I didn t know that before it started building higher luxury homes But there s a huge rental market for that there s a lot of companies that bring their CEOs and CFOs to other states and they pay for all these luxury homes and they pay a lot more than you were to sell the house because they don t want to have the liability on their books So they rather rent right So there s two parts to this The third part is you can always rent it for movie shoots video shoots all those things Because I have done that in the past with one of the houses that I used to own We film a couple of music videos in there and everything else there s multiple options on the high end luxury market And the last one that I always tell everyone is that even though let s say we re in a bad economy there s a lot of people making a lot of money when there s a bad economy just like when there s a good economy right I made millions of dollars from 2008 to 2012 When everybody was suffering we had of course the economy the United States you know I made millions of dollars in the jewelry industry during that economy and I was buying real estate I was buying properties and taking advantage of the fire that there were out there Sam Wilson 14 33 If you could look back and your business career and there was one mistake that you would rather not repeat again what was it And then how can you help our listeners avoid that Edwin Carrion 14 42 I love this question And I don t know why everybody likes asking this question And my answer is nothing I will not change one thing because I know that today I will change one thing in my life My life wouldn t be the way it is right now And I don t regret anything that I have done in my life and I m happy for those mistakes But the one thing you have to remember is that as long as you learn from that mistake you re going to be better off But if you do not learn from that mistake and you keep making the same mistakes over and over again you re not going to get anywhere So it s not about changing or doing something different is about learning from that mistake and make sure you don t commit and you don t make the same mistake again Sam Wilson 15 19 Absolutely Edwin if our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you what is the best way to do that Edwin Carrion 15 25 The best way to do that is join me on my social media Facebook Instagram LinkedIn edwincarrion78 Or you could just go to my website Edwin Carrion and send me a message and you could connect to me If you have any questions about real estate live business relationship marriage kids anything send me a message I m very easy to get in contact with I love to help people out Sam Wilson 15 45 Edwin thank you so much for your time Certainly appreciate it Edwin Carrion 15 48 Oh thank you for having me Have a great day Sam Wilson 15 50 Hey thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Podcast If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts whatever platform it is you use to listen if you can do that for us that would be a fantastic help to the show It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories so appreciate you listening Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode Click here to visit this podcast episode