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 50: Stories Sell Using Personal Narratives to Build Trust in Business
When Radhika Rastogi purchased her first condo in Long Beach a decade ago, she never imagined it would spark a journey toward a multimillion-dollar senior living portfolio. Today, as co-founder and managing partner of Relik Capital Group, she oversees 300 senior housing units with more than $17 million under management—all while balancing a Fortune 20 corporate career and motherhood.
The turning point came during her maternity leave with her second child. While her wife bonded with their newborn, Radhika dove deep into real estate, moving from fix-and-flip projects into commercial properties. That exploration ultimately led her to the overlooked but rewarding niche of senior living.
Central to her success is her “P-Execute” framework—a disciplined system for evaluating investments based on execution probability. She learned early that deals themselves aren’t the real challenge; operators are. After interviewing forty operators, she selected just one trusted partner for her Texas and Arizona markets.
Radhika also reveals how she connects with investors through storytelling, documenting small daily moments that later build powerful trust. Her viral LinkedIn journey began with a simple three-word post: “testing 123.” Today, her authentic stories about family and purpose consistently outperform technical real estate content—proving that relationships drive results.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, Radhika’s advice is clear: “Start by building a personal brand. Action beats sitting still any day of the week.”
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:What's going on, ladies and gentlemen? How are we doing today? I am your host, nate Farmreeden, and today is going to be an exciting episode. We are going to be joined by Radhika Rastogi, and she is a phenomenal young woman. She's done a ton. She's worked a W2 job well, handling that, still balancing starting a whole startup when it comes to real estate. So before we bring her on, I just want to make sure that you guys are understanding the importance of going for your dreams. Don't try to get stuck in the bubble of doing just the nine to five. If you've got an idea, if you've got that spark in the back of your mind, take the leap, take the jump. The best time to start an idea, the best time to get to the start of, the best time to be able to act on those dreams and some of those thoughts that you guys have, was yesterday. Second best time is right now. So, without further ado, let me go ahead and bring this amazing woman on. How are we doing today?
Speaker 3:Hey, Nate, Great to meet you and thanks for having me here.
Speaker 2:Oh, the pleasure is all ours. Thank you, it's an honor, pleasure and a privilege to have you here. So please, before we fully dive in, tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you here? What brought you here?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. I am the co-founder and managing partner at Relic Capital Group. We're a private equity firm where we specialize in senior living real estate syndications. My journey started 10 years ago in real estate and I think, like most people, my dream was just to buy my first home. I started by buying a condo with my partner, and I also have a 12-year experience in healthcare consulting, so focusing primarily in Medicaid programs. What I didn't realize was when I started my journey 10 years ago in real estate was it was going to transition from residential to commercial and, even more importantly, get into this very, very narrow niche of senior living. Even more importantly, get into this very, very narrow niche of senior living. Currently, I'm overseeing a portfolio of 300 senior housing units and we manage a little over $17 million. Our approach is like super disciplined. We focus on underwriting, just focusing on data-driven market selection, and our primary kind of forte is asset management with our operator. So our goal is to prioritize investor returns and, of course, make sure that the asset and the residents are happy.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So many kudos, first off, kudos to you, hats off and salute. That is amazing and no easy feat From one syndicator to another. I think that this is extremely amazing. Our bread and butter. We do syndication, but just like multifamily value add strategy. So that's our niche, that's our bread and butter. So we have not dived or dove into senior living at all. So that's like an aspect that I would love to be able to hear more about. But before we do, there are so many things that you sped past that I've got to ask you questions on right. Number one coming from hey, let's just go ahead and buy a condo. To now, 300 units and probably multi-million AUM or assets under management. For those that are tuning in for the very first time, what was some of the challenges, some of the hurdles, some of the trials and tribulations? Going from hey, let's just buy this condo, and was a strategy kind of just regular, buy it turnkey. And then, what was it like going from residential to commercial?
Speaker 3:Yes. So initially the dream was just around getting to some level of passive income and I think 10 years ago the number was very different, the goals were very different. Because it was I was single, I was dating, you know, my now wife, and we just wanted to get to a nice little cushion. There was nothing super extravagant about it, and we bought the condo because it was cheaper at the time to buy than it was to rent. So we bought it, lived in it and then eventually, you know, we got married, we wanted to have a bigger home, ended up selling that one, so we got a tiny bit of equity by selling that one, moved into a single family home and again, there was no strategy. We just wanted to be in a nice place and we wanted nice schools, because we knew we were going to have a family. And I think that's when, as I was looking at more and more homes, that's really when the real estate bug bit me. And even after buying that single family home, I was just always looking at the market, always thinking about what's happening. And I live in Long Beach, by the way, in California, so you know, regardless of where you buy, the houses are always expensive, and quickly we were. You know, I think we were very lucky that we bought pre COVID so we were able to take advantage of the interest rates at the time.
Speaker 3:And what really kind of switched for me mentally and kind of the mindset around really building something bigger, was we had our second child, so I went on maternity, my wife also went on maternity and we just had time. This was the first time in our careers where we had time to stop and think and spend time with our family and while she was very much attached to our son because she gave birth, I decided I'm going to spend those four or five months looking at real estate and we ended up putting tons of offers on fix and flips. We had already done a big renovation project by then and I quickly realized that, gosh, I love just being every day in real estate but I can't be fixing and flipping because I still have a W-2 and it's too much active management. So we needed a way to scale from buying single family homes or doing a fix and flip into something that was scalable and larger and, frankly, would give us greater output for the time that we were committing to it.
Speaker 3:And that's when I got into commercial real estate and I joined a mastermind. That was where I got started. I needed to be around people who had done this before, where I could get educated, because when you make a mistake in residential it's a personal mistake, but when you make a mistake in commercial there's a lot of zeros and a lot of people on the line and I couldn't I just couldn't bear to like do that alone. So joined the mastermind, learned a ton and it was very much focused on multifamily. But you know, at the time multifamily just wasn't penciling out for me or for most people in the group. So I started venturing into other asset classes, just researching, and I had no idea that my W2 background 12 years of healthcare consulting, focusing in Medicaid was going to come back and help me in real estate.
Speaker 3:And I started looking at senior living and I was like, holy shit, there is so much domain knowledge that I have because I've spent years working with regulators and the government entities, learning how to license long-term care facilities, learning about state regulations, staffing rates, like all this stuff that I was like, oh, I actually can leverage all of this and I still need an operator. But it's always good to have some context to what you're buying and building. And so we went all in. We only do senior living, my business partner and I. This is the only niche we focus on. We work with operators and we've been in it now a year and I'm very proud of where we've come in in a year.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh, okay, I am notorious, infamous, whatever you want to call me for this. At this moment and this is very early in the episode for all of our listeners pause, stop, rewind. You need to play this entire episode all the way back. There have been so many golden nuggets that have just been dropped. One that I need to highlight, one that I want to make sure that I'm driving home for all of our listeners, is did you hear what she just said? She realized, after 12 years of being in an industry, that there was a way to be able to bridge the gap. There was a way to take some of the tools that were already inside of her toolbox to be able to say, hey, I can make this applicable, which is going to give me that leverage, that upper hand, that extra little push that's going to make me very competitive inside of this market. Hats off to you for being able to figure that out. That is awesome.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you, I was so blown away too.
Speaker 2:So okay, before we get so we are so close to fully getting into the commercial side I've got to ask one more question, Probably probably a couple of questions. But what was it like going from the condo to the single family to now, before you got into the mastermind, trying to undergo a huge renovation? Was this a renovation that you guys were doing in a house that you were living in? Was this one that you guys were doing for like a random fix and flip? Talk to me and walk me through that process.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we were still living in that single family the first one I mentioned and we ended up buying another home and we were trying to get into like a particular school district. So we bought this home knowing like we bought the shittiest house we could find in this neighborhood we wanted and our goal was okay, we're just gonna fix it, we're just gonna figure out how to make this home livable for us. How to make this home livable for us? Well, we still had the other home, but we were doing all the work and we hired a contractor to do it. But, as I think most people know, who've done any sort of renovations, you really have to manage the general contractor and you have to kind of be on top of them. And so I was essentially project managing this whole thing and I was at the site every single day, sometimes multiple hours, trying to figure out, like, what's going on, Because we were also on a time crunch, right, we were paying two different mortgages and you know, in California that's not easy, and I think it was just like we just needed to get this going. I didn't have time to waste, so we ended up taking five months to do the entire renovation, moved in and then we ran into so many other issues in the house that we didn't foresee, and so there was a lot of like we had to redo our plumbing at the end of the day, after we fixed everything, we had to like redo our HVAC at the end, Like there was insane stuff that we were like, holy shit, why are we doing this? Should we just sell this house? Like we just get it, get it out of our portfolio, let's just be done with that. And we want to deal with it.
Speaker 3:But we decided we were just by then we'd already fixed everything. So I was like, okay, there's, you know, there's probably hopefully nothing left to fix at this point. We ended up staying and I mean we love our home now. It's perfect. It's perfect. But it was. It was a very, very stressful journey to get here. But what I realized about my mindset was we were all in and I think like we were so far in financially that we had kind of burned the boats, right. You know that analogy of like just let give up on your plan B. There was no plan B. This was it. We were going to follow through because we didn't have a choice, and I'm glad we did and I think it worked out for us.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I love it. I love it Not the series of unfortunate events, of fixing the whole house, getting into it plumbing issues and whatever else came up, not that one. But I love the fact that you were like. You know what it's an all or nothing kind of mentality. You know what Burn the boats. We're going to figure this out. We've got it. We're going to do this for the family. We're going to handle this. We're already here. Now we no choice. We're gonna make it happen. Hats off to you, kudos. That's got to be stressful at the moment, but looking back on it, that's got to be, for one, a hell of a story, for two, great experience yes, yeah, I.
Speaker 3:I think it's actually what prepared me mentally to get into commercial real estate and like, learn how to deal with everything from rejection to just, I think, building the confidence in talking to brokers, right. I think when you're switching from residential to commercial, it's very different because you're going from like okay, I had some personal investment property to I have now built a company around it, and building a company means you need to have partners and making sure not you have to feel confident in yourself, I think, to bring people on. And I think, like having that experience of our personal renovation project goes so difficult, stressful, but we figured it out was exactly what I needed to start something by myself and feel like I can really do this because I've done this ridiculous project.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love it, and this resonates with me so heavily. Any of our repeat listeners, you guys, have heard me talk time and time again. When I got into real estate back in 2017, I thought it was like a me, me, me, I, I, I kind of situation. Oh, I was so wrong. I lost tens of thousands of dollars trying to house hack my first duplex no processes, no policies, no structure. There was nothing going on. I'm just like winging it by the boys flying off the seat of my pants, whatever the saying is. And so that's really what helped inform me to realize that, hey, this is a team sport. Real estate's a team sport. We need to figure out how to go ahead and do it.
Speaker 2:But you had mentioned something a little bit ago that I kind of want to dive in just a little bit about, especially in between where it comes from residential to commercial, and when you were talking residential, it sounded a lot like not using OPM For those that are first-time listeners other people's money. You guys were utilizing your own funds and, at one point, paying two different mortgages, which, in California, has got to be a hefty penny. But then you've got to switch mindsets, then you've got to go into the whole OPM and tapping into raising capital and being able to see what it's like to have that credibility, get people to know, like and trust you to be able to say, hey, I want to invest with you. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then the second piece to that is why senior living for you right now, like what makes you want to stick with it? So those two questions, I'm dying to know the answer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think again, going back to our goal was scaling and I I quickly realized, like how many mortgages can I personally bear right there? That had a limit and I knew at some point I would have to go out, either find partnerships with other people just bringing in equity and doing joint ventures, or we were going to have to use the syndicated model where we pull money from other people and we essentially give fractional ownership for purchasing the asset. I think the mindset shift helped because I knew, not just personally, but I had talked to so many friends and eventually people who became investors and they were all in the same place. Like these are again people who are living in California. They were making good money in their W-2s but they also didn't want to spend $200,000 on a down payment for a mortgage in California and they were too scared to invest out of state because you really don't know what you're doing if you're doing it for the first time. So for them it was pretty interesting to say, hey, I can invest 50K or 100K and by fractional ownership and my returns could actually be higher than they would be in buying a single family. That is absurd and people just don't know that.
Speaker 3:So I think when we started, you know, building the company, we had to really figure out who again, who's our target audience. But a big portion of that we were going to syndicate we're doing direct to ownership. And the other aspect that I really had to lean into was, again, I came from consulting, so a big part of my background was I worked with clients. We were managing hundreds of millions of dollars for them, and so I always had this fiduciary responsibility that we were spending the money wisely and we were reliable for what we were doing and there was outcomes that we were needed, you know needed to produce because we were obviously taking in all this money.
Speaker 3:I think, coming from that mindset, I'd already spent 12 years talking to clients. I'd already spent 12 years, you know, learning how to influence people and talk about projects and investments and that sort of thing. So, again, it was transferable skills that helped me. When I talk to investors now, it's more about what's the pain point, what's their pain point, and is this even the right vehicle for you, right? The second question that you asked about um, actually, what was your second?
Speaker 2:question yeah, no, no. So the second question you can take this in whatever direction you'd like. Why? Are you sticking with senior living? Yeah, at this moment.
Speaker 3:At this moment yeah, uh, three primary reasons. One is the demand is insane. So we've 10,000 people who turn 65 years every single day in the US and if you look at like a demand graph for senior living and then the senior population 65 and over, it's a hockey stick For the next 10 years. It's a hockey stick. So that's one. The second reason is the supply is significantly constrained. So we're actually seeing that the current development would have to increase almost four times to meet today's demand, let alone the hockey stick that's coming.
Speaker 3:And then the third is, I think, as everybody knows, right, cost of living has increased.
Speaker 3:More and more families in the US I think 56% of families in the US are dual income and we're seeing people are living longer. So more than likely people are having to either take care of their elderly parents, friends, family, uncles, whatever they might be and having to figure out how to work. And a big portion of that tends to fall on the women in our society. And that's really resonates with me because I've learned how to do that. I see my parents do that with my grandparents and I think it's really difficult to take care of our elderly in the society that we're living in now. So I think more and more people need to learn to plan for elder care, not just for their parents, but also for themselves. So a big portion of it is the need for having professional services is actually increasing and we see that there's going to continue increasing as the cost of living continues to rise and you know, people are unfortunately paying more just to live know people are unfortunately paying more just to live.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. So many things. But to continue on this trend of what we're talking about, what does it look like in terms of what you invest now to grow your portfolio for senior living and without spilling all of the secret sauce or, my son, I think they call it like gatekeeping, where you are trying to hold out all the information and trying to I don't know, I'm not super cool anymore but without giving out all the secrets? What are some of the indicators that make it look like a great deal? Or that you can take from an opportunity and say you know what I can extract an opportunity from this and I can make it amazing returns for our investors, and say you know what I can extract an opportunity from this and I can make it amazing returns for our investors.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we. So at Relic, we actually came up with this internal metric that we track. It's called P-execute it's really the probability of a successful execution. Okay, okay, we. It's essentially a risk management indicator, and so we use this for every deal that we seriously analyze, and it covers six basic categories or areas. So the first is market and location. We tend to focus on secondary and tertiary cities, because we have noticed that the migration pattern of Syria for seniors is actually they work in the metros, but then when they get older they tend to move out into the suburbs because it's cheaper but it's close enough to, usually, their friends or family that are still nearby, where employment is higher. So secondary cities are growing across almost every city in the US.
Speaker 3:So markets one Second big area that we look at is operators. So when we look at a market or an asset, our bigger problem is not usually the asset. It's usually who is going to manage this day to day, because they carry the biggest risk. For us, the operator in senior living is the biggest risk. The biggest risk for us, the operator in senior living is the biggest risk. And so we spend months and months and months before, like vetting different kinds of operators before we go all in on a market. I'll give you an example Like we were trying to scale right now in Texas and in Arizona and we ended up interviewing some 40 different operators for these two markets before we found one that we were comfortable moving forward with. There was no deal, there was no nothing. This was just find the right partner before you find the right deal. And I think in senior living right now, the challenge is that almost every deal is penciling out. The deal is not the problem. The operator is the problem is the challenge that we have to get through.
Speaker 3:So operators, number two. Number three is just expenses. So what are the types of expenses in that particular region? So payroll is always a really big expense in senior living Insurance and dietary or food costs are also another really big expense. Of course you look in Texas or you look in some of the Sunbelt regions. You have to think about the climate and what type of impact that will have on your insurance. So, based on again where you're looking in the country, having some of those like more nuanced expenses, just keeping those in mind, is another really big area that we look into and then the final thing that we really focus on are actually just macroeconomics, so things that we cannot control, things like what's happening with the tariffs, what's happening, you know, at kind of a larger scale, what's happening with immigration all of these things have an impact on cost of goods and we account for that and add in a buffer to make sure that, you know, we are again protecting our investors from downside protection.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love this. This is amazing. Can you give me the name of what you're calling those core things that you're looking for again, p-.
Speaker 3:P-Execution. It's the probability of successful execution.
Speaker 2:Genius. I love that, I love it. I love it. I love the approach it reminds me of, kind of similar to like a capital stack, to where you're able to be able to segment and then sort of risk management all the way down Order of operations, order of importance, and then just make sure that you're checking all the boxes all the way down to see, hey, if number two and number three don't seem right, it doesn't matter how good number one is, but it's not going to go down to number four.
Speaker 2:So I think that is amazing the way that you guys are able to do that. 40 to one, that is, I wouldn't even want to say, shocking ratio, but that is crazy that you interviewed 40 folks and decided to move forward with just one. But it's to me from our realm and the way that we look at it. It'd be similar to, or comparable to, what we do with property management. Before we became vertically integrated, we had to go through tons, dozens of different property managers to say, hey, which ones do we want to move forward with? And even then, our most recent deal, I had to get rid of a handful of them before we brought everything in.
Speaker 2:So it's one of those things where you hit it spot on, to where it doesn't matter how good the numbers are, doesn't matter how good the deal looks or what any of the performance can be. Who's running the deal, who's running the deal, who's running the team and who's going to do the day-to-day operations makes or breaks a deal 10 times out of 10, every day of the week, exactly, exactly so. With that being said, now talk to me a little bit about the team. See how I did that segue. I like that. Oh, I did it, not even intentionally. What does it look like in Relic? What does the team look like from when you initially started to where you're at now, and then maybe, if you want to touch on where you think it's going to be going in the next, let's call it one to three to five years. That'd be awesome.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. I started the company with my co-founder, so Viva Solgame. So her background is primarily in investor relations. She's actually a user experience researcher and designer by trade. So this is again where we're taking things that we have learned in industry and applying it to real estate. Because, again, coming from consulting and I've also had other startups in the past something I realized was if you don't have really, really strong and good onboarding experience for your investor, it's very easy to lose them.
Speaker 3:So a big portion of what we do is curate our experience for our investors as well as our partners, and Viva manages that entire aspect. My role is more on the asset management, supporting acquisition and due diligence. And then we have two other equity partners that we partner with on every deal. They're not part of Relic but we essentially do you know, we essentially come to terms on every deal. They support due diligence as well, as well as financial oversight and accounting. And then we have a KP that we use consistently on all of our deals and he brings tremendous you know experience in real estate. He's done everything from development to multifamily to senior living, so there's just so much knowledge in him and in his experience that, again, as someone who's newer to the space. We rely heavily, making sure we're following people who've done this at least a dozen times to again protect our investor capital. And then we've got our operations team, so our operator, and again that changes on every deal, but we are operators usually have anywhere between 25 to 40 years of experience in senior living doing the day to day management. So again, we focus more on have you done similar business plans Again, have you like?
Speaker 3:Do you have proof? Right? I want to see other assets, I want to see the numbers, I want to see what was your business strategy. I want to. If you haven't done it, I don't want to like talk about it. So, um, our operators are very, very strong in the area, in this arena. Um, I think that's kind of our core team and I think where, where we'll be going in the next year to three years is probably, you know, getting some more either ad hoc staffing or part time staffing to support marketing a little bit more. I think we were starting to tap more into building those relationships with institutional capital and private equity. So we'll try to dive more into that and essentially figure out how to get more capital so we can do more deals and support our investors.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. I love it, I love it, I love it, and I think with that, it's got to be about time for us to move into what we call Super 6, or it's like what used to be something called a fast five. It's a surprise round for you where we've got six questions back to back to back. I'm going to do the best I can to not interject and not say anything. I fail every time, so don't be surprised when I do interject, but I'm going to try not to. And with that, you can answer as succinctly as you'd like to. You can be as long winded as you'd like, it doesn't matter to me, but I want the first thing that comes to mind Knee jerk reaction on these questions. You ready for this? Yeah, let's do it All right. Question number one what separates top performing entrepreneurs from the rest of the crowd?
Speaker 3:Execution.
Speaker 2:So good, so good. Okay, I can tell this is going to be amazing. All right, what are the daily habits that's contributed to your success?
Speaker 3:Writing every single day.
Speaker 3:Like journal writing or yes and no. So I started journaling but I so I started reading a book. So this one's going to be a long winded answer, but I started reading a book called Stories Sell again because I'm trying to focus more on our marketing. But anyway, something that's really interesting in this book is, more often than not, people remember stories than they remember data and presentations, right, slides and that sort of thing thing. So in the story, the author, matthew Dix.
Speaker 3:He essentially puts out a framework and one of the things he says is just start writing stories. Like, start writing two to three things that happened in your day that made you stop, that made you become aware of something, that made you react in a certain way. Doesn't have to be good, bad or ugly, it doesn't even have to have a business purpose, right, just write a story. And so I've started essentially tracking a story bank now of just random things that have happened, some that are so simple, like my kids, you know, fighting with each other to something that was more significant. And it's shocking how we can use stories as metaphors. So when I talk to investors now, I bring all of these random stories about my day or my experience with an investor or an operator or whatever into our conversations and I have found that that builds more trust quicker than just talking about the deal. In fact, most of the time we don't even talk about the deal until the very end. So, long story short, I write now. I write stories about what happened in my day.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, and this is the point where I fail. This is phenomenal. Anybody that's listening? Pause, rewind. You need to play this whole thing all the way back, and I just want to dive in just a little bit deeper, because it all clicks and it starts to make sense for you. And I just want to dive in just a little bit deeper because it all clicks and it starts to make sense for you, and I like to use stories in a lot of my things.
Speaker 2:Anybody that's listening, you guys, know this about me and what I've realized and what I've learned, especially when trying to connect with rather be investors or just other people, just natural humans, right? Instead of just throwing things out there, let's use this perfect analogy, right? When I first thought that it was about being able to connect to get to know, like and trust folks, I'm like you know what? I'm just going to write a post and just go ahead and do it and I'm just throwing numbers out there, like, hey, this is what I'm looking at. But it wasn't until I had that moment of realization where it's like, hey, people, like people, that they can actually get to literally know, like and trust, and they do that by being able to bridge the gap and know that you are relatable, your life story that is unique to you.
Speaker 2:Talk about it. My kids fight all the time. I'm going to put it out there and then being able to tie that back to experience and things that I've got going on when it comes to the properties that we take under management and the things that we're doing and how I can make that applicable and how we're able to overcome. So hats off to you. I've completely failed. I've dropped the ball, or only on questions, but thank you for going there. That is awesome.
Speaker 3:Yes, I, it's. It's kind of crazy because I, so I ended up like seeing this trend, cause I also write. I try to write daily on LinkedIn, and the posts that do so well are the posts about my kids. I have nothing to do with real estate, right. The posts that like people like reading about are when my kids did some weird stuff, or we're fighting, or I take them on a trip, like random things, and then, on contrast, I talk about syndications and like the waterfall structure, and people are like I don't care about this, like this is not resonating, this doesn't matter, and you can see that in numbers. And so I'm like, okay, I should just talk about stories, because it's just easier, people like it and people can resonate, and then they call me and then we eventually talk about the deal. So it happens. It's just a little different, different than I thought it would happen, than I thought it would happen.
Speaker 2:We are one in the same. I agree wholeheartedly. Oh my gosh, we could talk about that for hours, but I got to get us through these six questions. We're only on number three, number three for this. What piece of advice would you give yourself if you were starting over again?
Speaker 3:Be bolder, dream bigger, and I'll I'll kind of add a little bit, I'll try not to go as long on this one. I had a really great mentor tell me you can either chase a small goal, especially when you're starting your own company. You can either choose a small goal or a big goal. Either way, the work you put into it is going to be the same. So why would you not chase a bigger goal?
Speaker 3:And the context behind this was we were setting our goals for this year this year that just ended for us in July and we had said, okay, we were going to try to get to like $8 million assets under management for our first year, which for me was like massive to even think going from zero. And he goes no, I think you should aim for like 15 or 20. And I said, but like how, how are we going to go do that? And he was like it doesn't matter, you'll figure it out, because you're going to do the same things to get to eight that you're going to do to get to 15 or 16. Well, lo and behold, we're going to end, we end of the year at like 17. So it was. It was just about setting a more audacious goal oh, my gosh, hats off to you.
Speaker 2:So that is okay. Okay, nate, you gotta stop, you gotta stop. Okay, I'm telling myself. But let me just say like, let me just say this Congratulations, that is huge. You decided you wanted to try to go for eight. You got challenged, had some pushback. You're like no, I'll go for better. I think you're too excellent. You're like you know what? We got it Knocked out of the park. So hats off to you, congratulations, thank you. My next question what is your favorite business book? Doesn't have to be real estate related if you don't want to, but it is.
Speaker 3:So. My favorite book that I think really changed my mindset was was one of the ones in the rich dad Dad series. It's called cash flow quadrant and it really defines kind of the difference between an employee, small business owner, big business owner and an investor and it the book is all about how do you go from employee to these other quadrants, the benefits of being in these other quadrants and how you have to shape your business differently from being a small business to a big business, to an investor. So it was eye opening and it really I'm really glad I read this before like right as we were starting the company, because it set in motion how we thought about our systems and processes and the fact that we were building them even though we had zero investors. We were building them when we had zero leads, zero deals, like we built systems from the beginning and it makes it makes a huge difference now.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. I love that. I love the book. I love that so much. It's one of those old sayings that I used to hear, where it's one of those dig the well now, before you die of thirst, kind of situations. And I may have butchered it to where, when you're thinking about investors, you're thinking about trying to get these assets under management. You're thinking about how big your company can get. Start the process now, don't wait until it's too late. How big your company can get. Start the process now, don't wait until it's too late, begin it now. It makes it all the more easy and all the I guess you could say it makes it a little bit easier to be able to progress, kind of one of those fail fast, fail hard kind of situations to where you just get it going, get it moving, revamp it, make it a little bit better and keep tweaking it and go. So hats off to you I. And go so hats off to you. I love the book. What is?
Speaker 3:your favorite part about owning your own business? I think having the freedom to choose. So I think just having full control of my day, choosing like who I want to work with, what I want to work on, how hard I want to work. And I think some days, right, some days like I'll be honest, like I've been just beat dead and I'm like, okay, today I'm just gonna like not work and I'm gonna take a break because I need it, and the thing is like the next day you have to get back on the horse kind of twice as hard, but it's worth it. And I think just having that full control of whatever input I'm putting or whatever energy I'm putting into it is all mine and I'm getting not just like help and support for myself in terms of meeting my goals and my dreams, but I get to help other people, like I'm helping other people realize their financial potential and their financial goals, and that is so amazing. I love that part.
Speaker 2:Love it. What is something new that you've implemented that's helped drive your business's success?
Speaker 3:So I think this is probably a really small example, but kind of going back to how we design our investor experiences, we also design our partner experiences. So when we bring on, let's say, co-gps to a deal something that we curate is before they even onboard and we do like a kickoff call we put together what I call a gp playbook excuse me, gp playbook. It's a playbook that essentially dives into the weeds on the deal, the various decisions, assumptions that we've made in the entire underwriting. It dives into what our syndication structure is going to look like, especially if there's co-GPs that are newer to raising capital or to supporting the team. All of our details of you know, capex, like things that, like I think, are summarized in pitch decks.
Speaker 3:But we provide an extreme granular view so that when we have new people on board and they don't all on board on the same day, right, sometimes we bring in co-GPs a little later into the cycle they fully understand the decision making, the thinking that went behind every number that's on the pitch deck. And the reason we do this is because we want them to be super confident when they're talking about the deal to their investors. And if they're not confident, they're not going to be able to influence and get investors into the door, and I see it as my role, or our role to. If we don't build that trust first with our co-GPs and our partners, we have no business talking to investors. So we have to do that. They are our bridge to investors, is how I look at it, and the GP playbook is a mechanism for getting us there.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it. Okay, I won't even rebuttal on that one, because I told myself I wouldn't. But that is chef's kit Amazing. So you have survived all six of the questions. And before we get out of here, I just have two final questions. This has been amazing. I truly appreciate you so much for being here. My last two questions One, how can people find you? And two, do you have any other final advice? Maybe it's for anybody that's out there that is too chilling on the couch, too scared to be able to take that next step or that next leap of faith. Any words of encouragement?
Speaker 3:Yes, so first you can find me on either LinkedIn I'm very active on LinkedIn, so that would be a perfect place to find me. The second place to find me would be on our website, so wwwreliccapitalgroupcom, that's R-E-L-I-K capital, c-a-p-i-t-a-l groupcom, and you can schedule a call. I love taking calls from, from investors and partners alike. Uh, for your second question, if you are feeling stuck and not really sure what your next step should be, I think the best place for anybody to start is start by building a personal brand, because, regardless of what you decide to do, where you decide to go build your own company or not I think nowadays building a personal brand is so much more important than people give it credit for. So I'll actually give a quick story.
Speaker 3:The first LinkedIn post I ever wrote because I was scared out of my mind starting to post as well. It took me a very long time to begin posting on LinkedIn. The first post I did was testing 123. That was it. That was the post, but it was about just getting it done. It was about checking that first box and then starting to get more consistent, and I told myself I would post just once a week in the beginning, and now I'm doing it at least three to four times a day. I'd love to make it daily. I'm just not there yet. But I think start with something super small, just post something, just build a personal brand.
Speaker 2:Such amazing advice. I love it. And again, this has been amazing and I love the fact that here at the end we were able to tie it all the way back to the beginning and then loop through the middle, and what I mean by that is we were able to talk about the importance of stories. We were able to say, hey, you know what? My very first post. This is what I did, and I'm going to show you exactly why I needed to do it. Because I needed to check the box and you need to take that step.
Speaker 2:I infamously and notoriously always say moving the needle forward. And that's it. You took that first step by just getting it done and then you consistently grew and realized ways to fine tune it. Now you're doing three to four posts a week to where you're going to get to daily. And that's exactly it. Taking things inch by inch, foot by foot, is way better than not moving at all. A thousand percent Action beats sitting still any day of the week, and I want to say hats off to you on all the success thus far. I'm super excited for you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, nate, and thanks again for having me. This was amazing, great conversation.
Speaker 2:Pleasure is all ours, look, and our house is your house. So what I want to do is there's going to be a season two coming. I would love to have you back mid-season two to talk about what Relic's got going on, see what kind of new partnership opportunities have gotten over the horizon, and, for those that are listening, for those that are driving, get home safe. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Forest and Fire. Make sure, make sure, make sure you check out the bio information. If you're driving, don't do it till you stop, but check out the bio information. It's got a link. Make sure that you have a conversation with her. Tell her that you heard or hear from Nate and you want to go and talk to her about senior living, talk about how you can get into investing. Talk about how you can start your idea when it comes to entrepreneurship. Just get active, get going, get moving. We truly appreciate y'all tuning in and we'll see y'all on the next episode of Forged in Fire. Take care, y'all. Peace.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Forged in Fire. 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. Be sure to join us next time for even more lessons, struggles and breakthroughs on the road to success. Keep forging ahead.