Becoming a Multifamily Entrepreneur with Gino Barbaro
Gino Barbaro is the Co-founder of Jake and Gino LLC. He is a father of six children and a restaurant owner for 25 years. He is also a certified professional coach. He invested in over 1,500 multifamily units and $100,000,000 Assets under management.
Gino Barbaro is a realtor and investor who has become an authority on multifamily investing. He is the host of the incredibly popular podcast, Jake and Gino Podcast, which he hosts with his business partner Jake Stenziano.
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Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. He is a multifamily expert and he has a passion for helping others build wealth when it comes to real estate investing. He is the Co-Founder of Jake and Gino LLC. He’s going to tell us more of his story. Please welcome to the show with me, Gino Barbaro.
Gino:
Brett, this has been a roller coaster ride with me for the last couple of minutes. My camera doesn’t work. We can’t do the intro, right. But that’s what it is about being an entrepreneur. And that’s what l excel about. It’s about committing and then figuring it out. Being an entrepreneur is tough. I spoke in front of a group of college students at Flagler College last week. I asked them to define what an entrepreneur is. They had some great definitions. I said the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who makes enough money to pay for their mistakes. That’s what it comes down to. Right. You’re out there. You’re figuring it out every day. If you can stick in it long enough. It’s an amazing life. I’ve got an amazing life right now. I’m working towards my sole purpose. I’ve got more than enough money that I’ll ever need. I’ve got six wonderful kids. My wife is amazing. I’m living the entrepreneurial lifestyle but it’s not what you think when you first start out. There are those days when the technology doesn’t work when you can’t read the script. When you’re figuring out how does this deal make sense? Where am I going to get my next paycheck? Why am I going to work and working 14 hours a day, I’m working on my holidays, I’m working the weekends. This sucks. This is not what the entrepreneur life is, but if you can stick in long enough man, let me tell you it is fantastic.
Brett:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more and from behind the scenes, we try to make our production as clean and crisp as possible. But to be honest, this is exactly what your kind of trip fall and you go live and you go with what you have in a given day and so I appreciate you sharing that. Now for our listeners to get to know you for the first time, Gino, give us a little bit more about your story and your current focus.
Gino:
I’ll keep this as brief as possible. Um, you know, amongst 50 years old, I’ve got six kids, we homeschool our kids. The most important facet of my life is my children. Got out of college a long time ago back in 1992. Couldn’t get a job. I went to work in AIG for a year. I hated to sit in a cubicle. I’m sure a lot of your listeners out there like, wow, that is painful. It was painful for me. I decided to go on “the entrepreneurial route”. My father owned the restaurant, so I decided to open a restaurant with the family. I loved it for the first 10 or 15 years. It was awesome. We were making great money. It was just a different economy back then. Everyone says all the good old days they, it was a different way to make money. You could live a great middle-class lifestyle by having one business, one stream of revenue, and doing really well. Expenses were less. I mean, he didn’t have all these luxuries we have today like cell phones. I’m paying 200 bucks a month for my cell phone, that’s what my mom’s mortgage was 30 years ago, you know what I’m saying. So if you put things in relativity, we had one car. Now everyone’s got a car, right? I mean, it’s just amazing the luxuries we have. So I loved it. Up until 2008. My father passes away in 2007. And I sit there and I say to myself, am I living his dream, right? Living my dream. I always wanted to create this amazing business, amazing lifestyle. The restaurant really didn’t let me have that lifestyle. I had to work on the weekends, I had to work on Christmas, I had to work on New Year’s, on Easter. As you get older, and you start having more kids, it’s draining on you. I didn’t want my kids to see me hate work, right? Because I want my kids to love to work hard. I was working hard, but I started dreading, coming home and not liking it. So like, what’s the next step in my life? What am I going to do? I’m in the mid-30s, probably where a lot of listeners are. Now, I’m at that precipice. And I’m, to me, it’s the really the pandemic of 2020, the great recession of 2008 on there, I’m like, what’s my next step? I have done a couple of real estate deals, they didn’t go well. I said I want to this multifamily thing. So what I did is I went out and got coaching. I went out and I invested in my education. I usually say I spent money on education, but to me, it was a big investment. It was just the next stepping stone to meeting my partner Jake. Back in 2009. Jake moves down to Knoxville in 2011. From that, it takes us 18 months to find that first deal. But we stuck in there. I mean, as I said, the entrepreneurial journey, you’re not gonna find a deal. If you know, first two or three months you’re looking I mean, if you do, you’re amazing. You’re a rock star. I wasn’t a rock star to be a long time. But after that first deal, we found our second deal. And then after six months, we found our third deal and I guess the rest is history. But for me, I knew back in oh eight I wasn’t on the journey that I should be on Now fortunately for me, I like I said I went and got coached found Jaken and I guess the rest is history.
Brett:
It’s amazing. I love it so much. What’s the biggest challenge or biggest secret to overcoming getting out of your own way hiring that coach, Gino?
Gino:
Well, I’m going to give everyone a tip that I’ve been reflecting on the last few weeks. It’s the word is proximity. Tony Robbins, a lot of these high-level, you know, thought leaders talk about proximity. And for me, the more people that I surround myself that are higher level than me like Jake, like my partner, Mike, like I’m discussing a business deal with somebody else right now. His name is Rick, they are all high-level amazing people and they bring so much to the table. Being surrounded by them. Having that proximity being able to learn from them being able to be part of their mentorship is it’s been amazing. So that’s what happened for me with the accountability piece when I had with Jake and back in 2011. I may have quit after six months. But I was working with him. And he was working with me. And we were holding each other accountable. I would do more for Jake, right now than probably myself. I’m on this podcast because it’s all about Jake and Gino and about holding our company accountable. You know, if I didn’t have the team members, I’d be like, you know what, maybe I’ll skip the podcast. But it’s not like that when you have accountability. So for me, that proximity in that accountability is gonna really help you out early on. And also that word clarity. I mean, most of us on the show, I almost guarantee you we don’t lack motivation, we lack clarity. Like I said back in ‘08, I was having that struggle. Well, what should I be doing? I don’t want to be doing the restaurant. That wasn’t the question. I should be asking, what do you want to do not what you don’t want to do? And I knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to create an amazing company where people want to work like the Jake and Gino, you know, brand, I have an amazing group of, you know, employees, they all want to be there. We’re all changing people’s lives. And for me, people attract not what they want. But what they are. And back in ‘08, I wasn’t the person that I needed to be to attract those high-level people at the restaurant. I always complained about the employees. I shouldn’t be complaining about myself first, not having core values, not having a mission statement, not having a cadence of accountability, all these things that businesses need. I didn’t know back then these are things that you learn as you continue on your entrepreneurial journey. And it’s really funny, Brett, there are so many signs out there of successful companies. Look at Virgin Atlantic, look at Apple, they’re all out there. They all leave clues and look at the companies that crap out. Look at the Enron of the world and all these other companies, WorldCom, What did they do wrong? It all comes from the top. That’s why when people say CEOs are really vastly overpaid. I mean, it all depends on what you think vastly overpaid is. If you have a CEO that drives a ship, that creates that culture, that creates those core values and guides the company forward and grows the company and changes people’s lives, that’s amazing, valuable. It’s very hard to find an individual like that, that has everyone beat into the same drum especially day after day, year after year.
Brett:
Amazing. What’s the best secret to achieving clarity?
Gino:
Well, I don’t think people want to hear this answer. But I went to life coaching school back in 2014, 2015. I want personal development. So for me, it was all about reading books. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of books and I said I really want to work on personal development. I love Zig. I love Tony. I love Jim. I love Napoleon, but I really want to get down deep. I want to learn some skills. So I went to coaching school, I learned all about empowering questions, I learned all about energy levels, I learned all about setting goals. For me, all of a sudden, when you start figuring out why you want to do something, the clarity and how to do it, it becomes amazing and what I love about coaching when you’re coaching students, you’re coaching other people you’re learning along the way, you’re learning how to ask those great questions. You’re learning how to pull stuff out of people, you’re getting energized, you’re on the road to helping people and what really happens in return, helps you and for me, that clarity and getting those questions and learning how to ask myself those tough questions really helped me along my journey.
Brett:
Next question, the cadence of accountability, what is it? How have you implemented it to grow your company.
Gino:
it sounds really sexy, to be honest with you, it just really isn’t. What happens is when you start a company, it’s just you and Jake, it’s the island mentality, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna do that, right. We can go through the seven levels of starting a successful business. But when you first start out, as an entrepreneur, you need to do everything. You’re bootstrapping every single thing. So you buy your first deal, you’re doing the QuickBooks, you buy your second deal, you get 60 units, you’re doing QuickBooks, you’re doing marketing, you’re changing toilets, your septic fields blow out, you’re out there cleaning the septic fields. But when you have 200 units, all of a sudden, that mind shift has to change, you need to shed that old person need to shed, that old identity, and start creating systems. If you don’t, then you’re in the wrong business. You’re not going to grow a business, you’re going to be that employee/self-employed as Robert Kiyosaki talks about, and Jake and I had that inflection and we’re both, Jake was a W two employee, and I was a small business owner. We didn’t have these skills. These are skills that you need to learn that you need to invest in your education. We went out, we got scaling up coaches, for about a year and a half to figure out what our core values were.
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