Forged In Fire
Hosted by Nate Pharmer-Eden and Cole Farrell, Forged In Fire is where real entrepreneurship meets raw, unfiltered stories. This isn’t your typical business podcast—we skip the fluff and dive straight into the heat of what it really takes to build, run, and grow a business. From late-night doubts to game-changing wins, we explore the trials, setbacks, and breakthroughs that entrepreneurs experience at every stage of their journey.
Whether you’re a seasoned business owner navigating new challenges or someone with a burning desire to launch your first venture, this podcast offers powerful insights and practical lessons for everyone. No sugarcoating—just honest conversations about what it takes to forge success through the fire.
Get ready to be inspired, learn from real-world struggles, and gain the tools you need to make your entrepreneurial dreams a reality. This is your front-row seat to the highs, lows, and everything in between. Are you ready to step into the fire? 🔥
Forged In Fire
Episode 46: Numbers Don't Lie, But They Need Someone to Tell Their Story
What does it really take to thrive as an entrepreneur in today’s challenging real estate market? In this episode, we sit down with Lilian Chen, founder of Proptimal, the 10X real estate analyst platform for lean teams.
Lilian’s experience spans multifamily, commercial, and hospitality deals, having advised on over $2B in transactions, including $100M+ acquisitions and major projects like the Iovance Biotherapeutics HQ in Philadelphia. She’s worked with 200+ real estate firms, teaches 300+ high-net-worth investors how to underwrite and structure deals, and has guest lectured at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
We trace her journey from corporate financial analyst to digital nomad entrepreneur, building her business while traveling to 40+ countries. Lilian shares why entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, the courage it takes to be disliked, and how persistence (“If you don’t quit, you can’t fail”) fuels success.
We also dive into the evolution of her business, from offering financial analysis services to building software that democratizes sophisticated underwriting tools, giving everyday developers and investors access to resources usually reserved for large institutional teams.
Whether you’re a seasoned real estate pro or just beginning to explore entrepreneurship, this episode delivers both inspiration and actionable insights on building confidence, prioritizing what truly matters, and scaling without burning out.
Forget what you've heard. Forged in Fire is where real entrepreneurs come to share the untold truths of success the late nights, the crushing setbacks, the moments that change everything. No fluff, just fire, ready to step into the heat and unlock what it really takes to build a business. This is where legends are made.
Speaker 2:Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of Forged in Fire. I'm your co-host, nate Farm-Reedon. However, today's going to be a little bit different. Kool's unable to make it. He does send his love, his regards. Unfortunately, he's got some other things that makes it a little bit hard for him to be able to attend this interview, but that's just fine. You guys are stuck with me. This is going to be an amazing episode. I'm super excited.
Speaker 2:We're actually going to be diving in talking to Lillian Chen. She is the founder of Proptimal and it's real estate strategies and the experience across multifamily commercial and hospitality deals. She's advised on over $2 billion worth of transactions, and so let's just go ahead and dive right in a little bit. But before we do, before we do, one word of advice that I just want to give to all of our listeners out there Take that leap, take that next step. If you're thinking, is this the next best thing that I should be able to dive into? Time is now. Best time was yesterday, but second best time is right now. So make that step, move forward, and I'm sure Lillian is going to tell you all about her journey, and this is going to be awesome. So here we go Lillian, how are we doing today?
Speaker 3:I am doing so well. Thank you for having me on. I'm so excited.
Speaker 2:Oh no, the pleasure is all ours. This is going to be awesome, so please tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you here? What brought you here?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. My name is Lillian Chen and I'm the founder of Proptimal. As of now, I'm building the 10x real estate analyst so more people can have access to financial analyst services instead of just me doing it the whole time and I started off also as a financial analyst in a corporate environment, took the leap during COVID, went through a lot of struggles and challenges as a first time founder, and now I'm a couple years in now working on a prop tech company. So hopefully my story would be able to motivate some of you and maybe some lessons I would be able to share as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, this is going to be an exciting episode, okay, so before we dive too much further into all of this, in where you are right now, take us on the journey as to what made you, or what steered you, in the direction of becoming an entrepreneur. What, what made you want to get into that, and then more so. Why? Real estate, out of all things yeah, that's a fantastic question.
Speaker 3:Uh, so we have two parts. First is how did I know that I was an entrepreneur? And the second is how did I get into real estate? So the first one I feel like being an entrepreneur. It's one of those things where you either know it or don't know it. And let me explain.
Speaker 3:Ever since I was little, I generally was a good kid, but from time to time I would push back, I would challenge adults, I would come up with creative ideas to solve problems instead of just blindly following rules.
Speaker 3:And when I was in high school, that was the first exposure that I had to entrepreneurship, because I moved from one high school to another high school and I was really active in this business club that I was participating in the previous high school.
Speaker 3:So when I moved to the new high school, I was really active in this business club that I was participating in the previous high school. So when I moved to the new high school, I realized we didn't have this business club and the only way I was going to see my friends at future conferences is if I founded it myself. So, wanting to see my friends and continuing to be a part of that environment, I put everything into it, started a business club and within one year it became one of the top three organizations of my high school. I had over, I think, 50 to 100 members. Didn't remember it was way too long ago, but even at 16 years old I was working day and night for getting to eat and sleep, just pouring myself into that one project, and I loved it. I loved every bit of it. So early on I knew that I was going to do something entrepreneurial.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh my God, I love that a thousand percent. So here we are, someone that realized that you kind of defy the odds just a little bit by just kind of asking the questions that most folks might be too nervous to ask adults. You kind of push back a little bit, not saying that you defy it, but saying, hey, I kind of want to push the boundaries, push the envelope a little bit. And then, from transferring from one high school to the other, you're like, hey, I really like what we had going on over here. It's not going to be going on over here. So you know what I'm going to make this happen. And you did successfully. Over 50 to 100 students that registered within the first. Hats off to you. That is huge.
Speaker 3:Thank you, yeah, I think it's fun for me, right, and it's a personality thing where I realized after working for two years in corporate that I just didn't thrive well in large, defined structures and I tend to do a little bit better with chaos. I love chaos, so you kind of know it if you're meant to be an entrepreneur. And when it comes to real estate, it was something that I thought would give me an edge into business, because I was studying economics in college and most of my friends wanted to go into investment, banking or consulting and I didn't want to and I knew that if I had to go down that path, the only way to out-compete them is to outwork them, and there's no other arbitrage opportunity, if you will. So I went to the career center opportunity, if you will. So I went to the career center, I flipped through the entire book of careers and I ended up on real estate. Reason is I love people, I love buildings and I love money, so real estate gave me all three.
Speaker 2:People, buildings and money. It's a monopoly right there. Yeah, exactly. So talk to me a little bit about maybe the first couple of transactions and what it was like, because you said something and, for those that are listening, this is the point in the episode where I know that you guys really don't like me for it, but you guys need to pause, rewind, play this whole thing back, because William has been hitting on some amazing points, and one of the biggest things that I want to drive home is hey, I knew that I had to compete, but the only way that I was going to be able to do that is I need to not work them.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of mentality that I want you guys to start having. Is that it's not one of those kind of situations where, if you're going to jump into entrepreneurship, let me just work the structure. Nine to five, I'm going to clock out at five o'clock. It's going to be just fine. Next day I'll clock no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are grinding 24 seven to make sure that you can become the best at whatever industry, whatever field that it is that you would like to get to become a part of, or whatever it is that you're trying to start, so I'm hoping that you guys are driving that point home. So, lillian, tell me a little bit about what it was like trying to get into that first transaction and then take a little step further. Talk to me a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations, some of the struggles, from two years in corporate America to now. Hey, I got this. I got to outwork everybody else that's going to be in my competition. How did you do it?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think you bring up a really good point is finding your own niche and not just trying to outwork everyone, right? So the way that I see it is, if you want to get into real estate and you want to do this as your full-time business, figure out what it is that you're good at in real estate and which strategy works best for your own personal goals, because everyone has different personal goals and it's very different to work in real estate in a corporate environment, which is how I started in my career to work in real estate in a corporate environment, which is how I started in my career, versus working in real estate as a sponsor, which means you have your own deals and own transactions For full transparency. I never did my own commercial transactions. I've only done a residential deal before, which we can also go into that, but what I've done is I've advised on a lot of commercial real estate transactions and help other people get into commercial real estate, so that's where I specialize in.
Speaker 3:So I guess which one should we talk about? I know, nate, there's a couple of points that you brought up here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no, no, no. This is awesome and, in all honesty, I want to talk about all of them. So I want you to start to whichever one that you would like. To begin with, and maybe it was one of those kind of situations I don't know, but maybe it was one of those situations where you became an operator and did the residential and then realized, hey, you wanted to scale. Or maybe it was one of the other where you were kind of different, where you're advising first. So trajectory, from a linear standpoint, what came first and then how did you progress from there?
Speaker 3:Okay, perfect, let's do it chronologically. So I would say the first stop is I was working as a real estate analyst for a large commercial real estate developer. So the way that I got into that was I went through the career center, I applied for jobs. I did two real estate internships while I was in my undergrad. One of them was being an office manager at a local brokerage and the other one was working as a financial analyst investment intern. So I was starting to run financial models before I even graduated from college, which allowed me to land that first job post-college.
Speaker 3:So if you don't know what a financial analyst does, basically we sit in front of the desk, we work somewhat like a finance job. We look at Excel and PowerPoints all day. We are analyzing the different deals that come through to our desk. Day we are analyzing the different deals that come through to our desk and then we advise the company on whether or not we should invest in certain deals by figuring out how much does this project cost, how much is this project going to make, how much does it cost to build and where should we raise money from, how do we price the different debt and equity and what is ultimately the returns that we're going to have. So that was my job right Just sitting in front of the desk running numbers and what I liked about it was that I learned a lot about real estate and how to think about investment.
Speaker 3:It was a fantastic intro to understanding how to think like a professional investor. What I didn't like about it was it's very structured. You come into the office every single day, you do a limited range of deals and limited range of tasks that you have to do. There are also other lifestyle factor constraints, such as you have to stay in a specific city that the company is in, and I didn't like the city that I was in back then. So that was the main reason that drove me to want to go out and do my own thing was because I wanted to travel. So when I left my full-time job during COVID, I ended up becoming a digital nomad and I went to 30 countries over a span of six months towards the end of COVID, across three continents, and now I'm at country 42, which is really fun.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. There is so much more that we also need to kind of unpack. Yeah, 142, 39 of them, 30 plus that you did during COVID. You're like, hey, I'm just going to be able to do everything online. I'm just going to start traveling because you like it and you hit on so many important points where you were able to extract, even though you were just working there.
Speaker 2:You worked your way up from the intern position as a financial analyst and you're like, hey, I can see the pros and the cons to this, but what we're going to do is we're going to double down on the pros and I'm going to become the best of my class to be able to understand exactly what we've got going on and how I can analyze these deals. And then what I can do is make that applicable towards something else that I want to do. So what I want to do is pass the mic back to you, because you ended at a point where everything was really getting juicy, so a little bit more on this year journey of what it was like then having that mindset shift and then saying you know what? I can take everything that I've got and I can apply that to my own practice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and I think this is why I'm so excited to be on this podcast, because I know exactly how that journey went. I would say I at this point, before I even quit my job right, I was already looking at a bunch of different resources on financial independence, retire, early movements of the fire movement. I was reading Tim Ferriss, I was looking at nomad capitalism, understand how to be a digital nomad and plan different bases at different countries. I have a little bit of a multicultural background, so I I grew up in Asia and I did half of my studies in the US, half of my studies in Europe, and now I'm actually based in Europe, waiting to move back to the US. So I love the idea of being able to go to multiple places and I place a lot of value on my freedom, and the work didn't allow me to do that.
Speaker 3:Now, becoming self-employed was hard Because, at this point also, I was very young. I was 24 years old and I didn't realize fully who I was and what I wanted in life. Everything right, I did well in school, I went to Berkeley for my undergrad and I got my dream job. I was paid well and everything was supposed to be exactly just the way that I wanted it to, but I wasn't happy. So it was lacking the sense of fulfillment that I know a lot of people in corporate can relate, and I wanted to do something that is on my own terms. And basically the first process that I went through is okay, if I had no restrictions and I could design my dream life, what would it look like? And then I realized it's actually not that hard to achieve. So maybe I just start doing freelance work as a financial analyst and then I'm gonna go travel in the meantime.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, this keeps getting better and better. Okay, so my next question just oh my gosh, keep talking then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm learning so much and I know our listeners are getting so much value from this as well. But what was it like then, especially because there's so many different layers of complexity, with being in the US and being in Europe, stationed in Europe, still being a digital nomad? What was it like trying to obtain clients and how were you going about the first couple of transactions to be able to advise? For example, one issue that I'm running into and maybe it's not even an issue, but one, I guess hiccup that I could see is how are you getting folks to know, like and trust you Like? How are you building that report to gain clients or folks that you can work with while you're still traveling the world and doing all this? So please fill me in. How did you crack the code?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question and, to be fair, I sound like I have everything figured out now, but I'm telling you about the things that I figured out, you know, four years ago and I was really struggling back then, right? So I don't want to gloss over that and make it sound any easier than it actually you know, than it seems like, and, yes, it was forged in fire, as your podcast very accurately portrays. I love what you just did there. It was hard. Yeah, there it was hard. Yeah, it was hard.
Speaker 3:So the first thing that really scared me to death was I was this 24-year-old analyst that I was just beginning to understand how to do things right, and I think I'm a relatively competent person. But things Right, and I think I'm a relatively competent person, but I learned that skill. I thought it was more important than my job security, because job security implies that you need somebody to not fire you and keep you on the payroll, whereas if you have the ability to make money yourself, you have job security, because you can always go out and make more.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Yes, yes, yes, okay, all right. So moving forward on this one, because, again, we could talk for hours about that specific topic, tell me a little bit more about what it looks like now, and you could take it geographically if you would like to. But one of the things that you had mentioned earlier on in this interview is that one of the cons to working as a financial analyst was being confined or constrained to whatever market. They told you right. So what does it look like now? Especially because you know, going over your bio and listening to you talk, you can span over different asset classes. You could also geographically be positioned anywhere. So how do you go about choosing markets that you want to help somebody in? Or is it that somebody in a specific market would reach out to you and then you would say, okay, let me do my due diligence and my research and I'll get back to you? So can you fill me a little bit into, like, how that works a little?
Speaker 3:bit. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good question. The first thing I would say to that is wanting to be remote has ruled out a lot of career options for me in real estate, right. So I thought that I would have been a great broker and I would enjoy brokerage, to be honest, but I never became a broker because I would never be able to stay in one place. Given that I'm still at a young age, my life isn't as settled yet. I am not ready to commit to that one place and then lose all of my network if I were to decide to move right. So brokerage would have been a great career path for me. Now, therefore, I have to do something that I can do remotely, which is either running a service company or now transitioning into a service and software company hybrid, right? So this is another point that I've been trying to reinforce is don't just look at what are the you know 10 career paths or 10 businesses that you can start in commercial real estate, but really understand the context that you have for yourself and what are your requirements, what works for you and what doesn't work for you, and then try to create your own path out of that instead of just blindly taking the existing templates of what other people has outlined.
Speaker 3:The other thing that I have is what it was like working internationally. I would say I take all clients from across the United States. Occasionally I take clients that are based in Europe as well. I have worked on deals that are in the United Kingdom and in Switzerland, both of which I have lived long and short term, but overall I prefer taking on deals in the United States. And then, because now I'm not the person who is boots on the ground knows everything about the local market, I work with the developers who are experts on the ground, knows everything about the local market. I work with the developers who are experts in their own market. And then I come in more as a financial person who helps them understand how the financials work, so then they can focus on what they're really good at, which is making deals happen in their own markets.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that and I don't know if you want to give us a specific and you don't have to name drop or anything, but can you tell us maybe one or two examples of a time rather be of recent or of late that you've worked with a client and what it looked like from start to finish and how you sort of advise on the transaction?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I have a wide range of different clients. I'll give you something at the ends of each right, so I'll tell you about my least most beginner clients and then I'll tell you about my most institutional clients. So let's start with the institutional client. They tend to be more easy where they would come to me and say hey, we need somebody to run the financial analysis, this is the financial model, can you build it? And I would just build it for them, right? So they know exactly what they wanted already. They just wanted somebody to translate their business idea and vision into paper and into a financial model that they can use to raise money and present to investors.
Speaker 3:Now, on the other side of the spectrum, it gets a little bit more interesting because a lot of times I would get people who are investing in real estate for the first time and they know that they want to do this. They don't have a lot of confidence. They definitely don't understand the numbers. Maybe they understand the basics, but they don't have a lot of confidence in making sure that all the numbers are working properly. And they don't understand the numbers. Maybe they understand the basics, but they don't have a lot of confidence in making sure that all of the numbers are working properly, and they don't know a lot of financial concepts or they have even worse misunderstandings about what different financial concepts mean.
Speaker 3:So this is where I come in. I ask them the right questions. I basically hold their hand and say, ok, let's look at this decision, let's look at that, let's look at this risk factor or that risk factor and then, given with all the information that we have, let's understand what, realistically, we're going to make from this and how much it's going to cost. And these are the returns. And here are the main areas that you should be concerned about or you should bring up during an investor meeting, and then I coach them through how to talk to investors.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, okay, so you really go in depth with each one of your clients, both institutionally and somebody that's more of a hey, help me out, because I have no idea what I'm doing Exactly. Talk to me a little bit about kind of future outlook. I don't know if you want to go three to five years out, but what is your plan? Not saying everybody has to have one, but what would you like to see in the next upcoming years? How do you want to grow the business? Or maybe pivot, or I don't know. Fill us in, because you clearly have a lot of things figured out and I want to enter into your world. So let us know.
Speaker 3:I have a lot of things figured out. I also have a lot of things not figured out. So I think that's where the adventure is, is, you have an idea of where you want to go, but you are always open for surprises and sometimes they may be good or bad, but that's part of the journey. So I would say, over the next five years, I want to make financial analysis and education available to the everyday developer, which is why I'm building the 10x real estate analyst. So then you don't have to just work with me anymore, right, you can go online, you can ask a software, you can work with the software and be able to get the same level of expertise that I have been offering to people, but in a much more accessible way.
Speaker 3:So the motivation of why I ended up building this was I worked with a very wide range of clients, right? Some of them are first-time investors. Others, I've built proprietary financial models for companies with billion dollar AUM and whatnot. So it really starts to make me think I am one of the few people who specialize in real estate and who can do this level of financial modeling. I can build lots of models from scratch, but the problem that I've had was when I first started. I started on my own right and then I turned it into an agency model where I was hiring other people to do financial modeling for me. But then I quickly realized financial analysis is not something that you can easily turn into an agency model, because the requirement for the expertise is too high, right, which is the same reason as you can maybe have a marketing agency and you can say, okay, well, I'm going to get people to do this and this, and this and we'll just hire more people to do.
Speaker 3:you know different tasks, right, and they follow a standard procedure of how to deliver these tasks and then voila, it's done. But with financial analysis there is a much steeper training requirement and learning curve in the beginning. So it means that every time somebody hires a financial analyst, you probably would expect they would need to train them for six to nine months before they start yielding a net positive and before they start having the ability to do things without breaking models all the time or just running around completely clueless. So what I figured out was okay, well, most small companies, myself included, cannot have a financial analyst upfront in the beginning stages of the companies, right? So like, how are you supposed to start a real estate company if you don't have someone on board and if you don't know the financials well enough?
Speaker 3:You can go on Upwork and you can hire somebody, but how do you know that they're good if you also don't have the knowledge, that strong financial knowledge, that people usually learn from working in institutional environment or from more sophisticated financial training? So what I figured out was if you can't scale it with people, you need to just scale it with software, which is why I'm building the software now and I want to make sure that with this then more people would be able to do more strategic thinking and what humans are good at. And let machine automate the more routine task and lower the barrier so that you don't have to go to school and get an economics degree and work in corporate for two years to be able to build these financial models.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I just love this so much on so many different levels. First and foremost, what I want to dive into is actually bring you guys all of our listeners back on this journey to where we were still talking about you doing the corporate working for two years and you didn't feel fulfilled. But now, not only are you running your own practice, not only are you doing all this, but you're building out softwares. You said something that really I want to make sure that we're driving home. You looked at it and you said, okay, which one of these can we scale? Are we scaling on the client side? Are we going to scale on the software side? And one of these we can make sure that we can become the best at? And then this will help me be able to feel fulfilled, because we're still helping, in the grand scheme of things, to be able to make sure that we are helping all of our clients, and I'm excited to watch this journey happen over the next five years. Hats off to you. This is awesome.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I'm really looking forward to it myself and hopefully, if you're listening to this I don't know when people listen to this and how far back they listen to it but I hope we'll stay in touch and maybe I can create something that makes your life a little bit easier.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's great. Ok, so before, before we go into the whole whole, whole next segment, I got something for you. We call this like it's not like our fast five. Whatever you want to call it, it's like a fire round, doesn't matter, you're going to do great, it's a surprise round. I'm going to ask you questions back to back to back, to back, and I'm going to do the best I can to not interrupt, not say anything. I fail every time, but we're going to try it again anyway.
Speaker 3:Okay, sounds good and I'll try to give pretty concise answers. I'll get to the point.
Speaker 2:You know what you answer, how you want to answer.
Speaker 3:You know what? Okay Sounds good, I will do that.
Speaker 2:What separates top performing entrepreneurs from the rest of the crowd?
Speaker 3:I think top performing entrepreneurs execute. The rest of the crowd doesn't execute and I'm not going to say that, you know, intelligence doesn't play a role, but they have. They're just smart enough to understand. You know what needs to be done and they go and do it. But they're not too smart where they get trapped in their own thinking. So it's just about going out and doing reps and trusting the process.
Speaker 3:So I would say the ability to deal with uncertainty is a part of that execution as well, because you need to be able to do things without knowing for sure that it's going to work. And the people who I've seen are extremely smart. They understand the risks and possibilities a little bit too well, which doesn't make sense for them to start entrepreneurship. And I'm going to say something controversial here, which is I don't think most people should be entrepreneurs. And in fact, in America we over glamorize the idea of becoming entrepreneurs because we look at the people who become entrepreneurs and have been successful, but we don't look at the people who have become entrepreneurs and have been unsuccessful, right.
Speaker 3:So if you want to be a really good entrepreneur, you need to know I am going into something that's going to be quite difficult, quite uncertain, quite risky, but I know what my bottom line is and I'm going to do it anyway. And I think those are people who continue to grow their business and build their business despite when things become difficult, because at the end of the day, everyone sucks in the beginning and the only way to get good is if you just last long enough. It's more like a marathon than it is like a sprint. Nobody is an overnight success and if you quit, you lose. So, to simplify, it really boils down to if you don't quit, you can't fail.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, mic drop moments. Okay, for those that are listening, for those that are out there, this is again one of those moments where Nate's like stop, pause, rewind. So many nuggets were just dropped, the mic jump, hit the floor. So many amazing points have just come through and I'm so glad that you decided that you wanted to be against the grain and tell people straight like it is and say, hey, you know what? I don't think everybody should do it because not everybody's got what it takes, and you only will fail if you decide that you're going to stop. You've got to fucking push through. This shit is not easy. It's not sexy at all the times.
Speaker 3:It's not. It's masochistic as well. People don't realize Sometimes. Look, a normal person would look at a marathon runner and think what the heck is wrong with this person? Why would they go through that trouble of running so much? And that's exactly what entrepreneurship is right. It's why the hell would anyone be an entrepreneur and put them through, you know, so much pain with very little certainty of ever getting a payback? It's masochism, oh yes I love it okay, amazing.
Speaker 2:Now I've completely failed, because I was not supposed to say anything.
Speaker 3:My bad.
Speaker 2:My bad as well. We are now going into question number two what is a daily habit that's contributed to your success?
Speaker 3:Prioritization Very, very simple, which is Uh, prioritization Very, very simple, which is most people that I've seen are really bad at saying no, right, they're. They're used to saying okay, well, if somebody gives me a task, then I do it. If other people ask me to do this, then I do it, and then I have to do this and I have to do this and I have to do this. Uh, being an entrepreneur is hard because nobody is telling you what to do things, and a lot of times people need something from you but it's not really contributing towards the growth of your own business. So you have to say no, and saying no to people can be a little bit uncomfortable because you don't want to make other people upset, and in this society that we grow up in, we are often taught to be nice to other people.
Speaker 3:But to be an entrepreneur, I think you need to have the courage to be disliked, and not everyone's going to like what you do, and some people want to take advantage of the fact that you do a lot of things for them. Others will be grateful, right? So it's being able to make that judgment constantly to say is this going to contribute to my greater vision and mission right, and it's not necessarily from a selfish perspective of what do I get out of this, but rather, look, is there anything that is stopping me from achieving my goal to be able to deliver my mission to the customers that I serve, my goal to be able to deliver my mission to the customers that I serve, and that, I think, is a more powerful way to reframe it to stay focused, rewind, play the whole thing.
Speaker 2:What we like to refer to on this show is moving the needle forward. It's one of those situations and being able to have the courage to be able to be disliked. If people don't like an answer that you've got and you're still going to be a straight shooter, you're still going to be transparent, it's okay to say no. If this is not going to move my business forward, not move the needle, not be able to continue to help me with progression, then unfortunately I have to stay laser focused and that's exactly what it is that you're talking about and I love that. I love it, love it. Okay. Next, if you were to start again, what is a piece of advice that you would give yourself?
Speaker 3:Have more confidence in myself, that's for sure. When I first started, I was again 24 years old and I was consulting clients that were decades older than me, who are all multi-millionaires real estate developers. They're so experienced, they know so much about their deals, back and forth inside out, and they hired me to do financial analysis for them. And for the first time I didn't have a manager, I didn't have an associate to check my work, so I had to check my own work, and the pressure was so intense because I knew that even if I just messed up one symbol in a formula, it could potentially throw off the returns completely and then make a deal that is not palatable a success, or make a really good deal, a terrible deal, right. So financial modeling is very, very unforgiving and I needed to make sure that it's 100 all the time, and what I realized over time is okay. So if I do make a mistake, generally when we review it with somebody else, uh, we will eventually catch it one way or another because we have to completely understand the deal.
Speaker 3:So small mistakes. You know I'm pretty harsh on myself when it comes to things like this because of the nature of the work, but I will survive it. To make a lot of mistakes along the way, inevitably, but most of the time you will survive the mistakes, and very, very few mistakes are existential mistakes that will take you out and take your entire business out. And what I've also realized is that I know a lot more than I thought and my knowledge was able to benefit a lot of people who didn't have a traditional financial training, even though there was so much more experience than me from a real estate perspective. So I think the key takeaway is you don't really know what your knowledge or skills is worth until you put it to the test.
Speaker 2:So good, so good. What is your favorite business book?
Speaker 3:Oh, this is hard. I have so many and I know most of your viewers probably already read all of the you know key ones, so I'm going to go for something that is a little bit more unconventional. It is how to Talk to Anyone by I think I don't even remember the author's name, but it was so good. It's a bright yellow book on how to talk to anyone, and in this book it's very interesting because it teaches you the soft skills of business instead of the hard skills.
Speaker 3:It's not about you need to grind. You need to do this. You need to wake up and do a coat plunge. It's more about how do you deal with people, what are the right things to say? What are the bad things that you shouldn't say to people when you do this. This is how other people will react.
Speaker 3:When you do that is how others will react, and I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there who treat business like a scorecard or a video game, and there's always a right answer right To a video game If you're good at it, then you're going to succeed. But I think in reality, business is far from that. In business, you have to work with a lot of people. You can't succeed by yourself, which means that your interpersonal skills is going to have a tremendous impact on whether or not you're going to be able to run a successful business. And if most entrepreneurs are spending so much time and energy into understanding how their business works, but they don't spend enough time working on their interpersonal skills, it doesn't matter how good you are, because other people aren't going to help you and you can't succeed on your own.
Speaker 2:So good.
Speaker 3:So many things.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, oh listeners. I've talked about it, I've preached about it, it's. Oh, let me just keep going. You are nailing this. Uh, what is your favorite part of owning your own business?
Speaker 3:my favorite part? Um, I think my favorite part is it feels like I am going on an adventure and I get to meet people and bring other people along with me the entire time, and that feels almost like a game for me, right, it's like a video game that is multiplayer, that you get to meet people and make friends, and a lot of times I feel like I'm not really working. So you know, for example, me giving this podcast right now. I'm having so much fun and I hope you are too right and I just met you. But if I didn't have this business, I wouldn't have met you and we wouldn't be having this conversation. And I have no idea who this is going to reach, but whoever is listening to this, I would love to meet you as well.
Speaker 3:And when you have a very strong mission on top of that and other people want to be a part of it, or if other people have interesting things that they're passionate about and you get to be a part of it, that they're passionate about and you get to be a part of it, that's really fun, right. It's yes, you know, making money and all that, that's great. And financial passive income, that's great, right. But at the end of the day, you've got to have a business that you love, because otherwise you're just buying yourself another job.
Speaker 2:To answer your question. I'm having a ball. This is amazing. Thank you so much. This is awesome. So my next question what is something new that you've implemented that's helped drive your success in your business?
Speaker 3:There's a lot of things, so, okay, you know what I'll do. Does it have to be something new, or can it be just something that I've always done?
Speaker 2:You and I just met. I don't rather it's new or old, I wouldn't be able to tell. So you can't wait on this.
Speaker 3:New or old. You know what? I will give you one of the things, which is put yourself out there. And I recently started LinkedIn, and by recently I mean probably half a year ago. Interestingly, for the first two years of business I never did any marketing, and I mean it. I didn't do any marketing. So I would go on Upwork, I would find clients, the clients would keep coming back or they would refer me to their other friends. I had more than enough clients to keep myself busy. And again, the hard part was in scaling the fulfillment of the business that I'm starting to solve, the fulfillment side of the business. I can go out and get more clients and I started posting thought leadership articles on LinkedIn and I'll do these case studies right on.
Speaker 3:One of the things I did was how did Singapore build the most successful public housing system in the entire world? Right? How does that contrast to the American public housing system and Singapore? What they did was they had these forced retirement account where they force people to save, and they build these public housings that people get to own, not just rent. So Singapore has an incredibly high ownership rate and their housing is, all you know, multicultural and they force the culture, like ethnicity quotas as well, so they don't don't just have public housing that becomes predominantly, you know, a single race and whatnot.
Speaker 3:So I post a lot of articles like that, and other times it would just be me posting contrarian ideas about real estate. I found those tend to do pretty well, because these are things that the more experienced operators are thinking anyway, but people don't really say and there's just so much noise out there. So I post those a lot. The point that I'm trying to make is well, first, it was incredibly fun and second, I got a lot of clients and you know that's great and whatnot.
Speaker 3:But I think, third is it really opened me up to so many opportunities, this podcast being one of them. If I wasn't going out and posting, I wouldn't have found, you know, matthew shout out to Code and Concrete podcast and he wouldn't have introduced us and I wouldn't have been invited to different programs and I wouldn't have been invited to opportunities and collaborations. So, yeah, I would say, don't just build in silence. You can build in silence for certain aspects, but at the end of the day, the more that you can bring people along with you in your journey, the more likely they're going to want to be a part of it and vouch for you and help you along the way.
Speaker 2:Yes, I say this so silly For us. We do real estate all day long and real estate, when I initially got started, I failed miserably because I thought it was a me, me, me, I, I, I kind of situation and I was doing this. I was doingably because I thought it was a me, me, me, I, I, I kind of situation and I was doing this. I was doing that and I was the one that ultimately suffered and what I realized was that real estate was a team sport and this is exactly what it is. From the last two things that we were just talking about with realizing and understanding this kind of like a video game to, where you're going on an adventure and it's one of those kind of MMOs to. I'm a huge nerd yeah, don't check me out. I definitely like World of Warcraft and all those things. It's fine.
Speaker 2:We don't have to talk about it with Steve Hess, but it's like being able to talk to all these other folks and bringing them along on that journey. And that's exactly what you did within the last six months of using LinkedIn and saying, hey, you know what, going back to what we talked about about earlier, hey, there's no shame in my game, I have no fear of failing, we're just going to go ahead and go for it anyway. And that's what you did. You put yourself out there and that was awesome and I'm so glad that it worked out. And it's weird how the universe always kind of has its weird ways to be able to bring everybody together. So, again, thank you so much for being here, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:It's a pleasure to be here and I hope this has been helpful for your followers and if anyone is also going through the journey of wanting to do real estate or not, there's only one way to find out right. So go and find out and know that this is not an irreversible decision. You can always become self-employed and then go back to corporate if things don't work out, or you can always start a business while you're in your corporate job, which is what I recommend. Right and test the waters and go out and see if it works. You don't have to burn the boat. I disagree with the people who say, oh, you have to just cut off all your resources and put yourself in service. No, you don't have to do that right, just gradually test one step at a time and manage your risk the long way and see what works for you and what doesn't work for you. And to anyone who is listening to this, I wish you the best of luck and I'm rooting for you. All that's so awesome.
Speaker 2:Okay, so with that last piece of advice that you just gave and I'm hoping everybody's taking notes One thing that we have not yet talked about is where can people find you? And for all of our listeners that are out there that would like to get in contact with you and I hope that they do where's the best way to reach you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the best way to reach me is through LinkedIn. I post a lot of thought leadership articles and posts, so I read every single comment. If you do comment on them, you can also send me a message. If you need anything and as of now, I don't know how long this is going to last but I'm also offering one-on-one consultation, so if you just want to hop on the call with me and then talk about your business, you can do that by going to my website as well.
Speaker 2:Lillian. This has been amazing For all of our listeners that are out there. I'm really hoping that a lot of the points that Lillian was talking about and referred to really struck a nerve. I'm really hoping that a lot of the points that Lena was talking about and referred to really struck a nerve. I'm hoping that you guys are going to drive this home, because so many gems have just been dropped If you made it this far. First off, thank you so much for listening all the way down here. Secondly, rewind, play this whole thing all the way back. Get back down here again, because I want to make sure that you guys are able to get the most from this.
Speaker 2:This has been a very fruitful conversation with a lot of great business advice and a lot of life advice just in general, from not only just talking about running from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but also what it looks like from let's just call it a social perspective of being able to network and connect and putting yourself out there. So, if you're listening and you're driving, get home safely. If you guys are on your daily commute awesome, make sure you make it to your destination, please. All we ask is that you guys leave us a review. It helps us grow. Hit that like button, hit that subscribe button. That's fine, but if you're only going to do one action, let's just leave us a review, let us know, so that way we can continue to bring on amazing guests, just like Lillian and Lillian, our house is your house. We want you back in the next three to five years, most definitely so we can talk more about the software system that you're developing. So hopefully you'd be honored to come on back.
Speaker 3:I would love to come back and I can't wait to see what you have to accomplish in the next three to five years, and I would love to be a part of that journey as well.
Speaker 2:I love it Sounds like a plan to me. Well, you guys out there, y'all, take care.
Speaker 1:We'll see you all on the next one. Take care, have a great day. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Forged in Fire. If you enjoyed today's raw, unfiltered stories, don't forget to like, subscribe and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us bring more real-world insights to entrepreneurs like you. Helps us bring more real-world insights to entrepreneurs like you. Be sure to join us next time for even more lessons, struggles and breakthroughs on the road to success. Keep forging ahead.