The Shift Most Owners Are Missing

There are two kinds of business owners reading this in 2026.

The first kind still runs their business the way it ran in 2018. They hire people through indeed, train them with documents nobody reads, manage them through Slack messages and check-in meetings, and pay full-time salaries for work that isn’t actually full-time. They use software, but they use it the way you’d use a typewriter. The AI revolution is happening on their phone screens during commute and lunch, and somehow not inside their own company.

The second kind has figured out something the first kind hasn’t: AI is not a tool you bolt onto a normal business. It’s a different way of building the business in the first place. Done right, you end up with a company that needs a third of the headcount, runs three times faster, and costs a fraction of what your competitors spend.

The gap between these two operators is widening every quarter. By 2027 it will be a chasm.

This guide is how to be the second kind.

The Reframe: Stop Hiring Humans for AI Work

Here’s the mental shift everything hinges on.

Before AI, the job of a business owner was to identify work that needed doing and hire humans to do it. The default was always: “What kind of person should I hire for this?”

In 2026, the right default is the opposite. The first question for any new task is: “Can software or an AI agent do this?” Only if the answer is genuinely no do you move to the next question: “Can a human assisted by AI do this in a tenth of the time?” And only if that answer is also no do you ask the old question: “What kind of full-time human do I need to hire?”

Most business owners have this hierarchy backwards. They hire a human first, then maybe later automate parts of the human’s job. By that point you’ve already paid six months of salary, locked in the wrong process, and trained someone whose job will partly disappear in a year.

The Sovereign Equation from the first guide still applies:

Sovereignty = (Passive Income × Purpose) ÷ Operational Friction

AI is the single most powerful lever ever invented for collapsing the denominator. Operational friction that used to require a $80,000/yr operations manager can now run on a $200/mo tech stack. The owner who internalizes this in 2026 ends up with a fundamentally different business than the owner who doesn’t.

Let’s get into how.

Part One: The Modern AI Stack

You can’t talk hiring and systems without first understanding what’s actually available. The tooling landscape in 2026 sorts into four layers, and a sovereign operator uses all of them.

Layer One: Foundation Models. These are the large language models themselves. Claude, GPT, Gemini, and the open-source models like Llama. They’re the engine. You don’t usually use them directly for business operations. You use them through other tools that call them via API.

The mental model: the foundation model is the brain. Everything else is the body that lets the brain do useful work.

Layer Two: Workflow Automation. This is the connective tissue that moves data between systems and triggers AI actions. The dominant tools here are n8n, Zapier, and Make. n8n has emerged as the #1 choice because it’s open-source, self-hostable, and handles complex logic that the others can’t. Zapier is easier for non-technical users. Make sits in between.

These tools don’t think…. they execute. They watch for triggers (a new email arrives, a form gets filled out, a deal closes) and run sequences of actions in response. With AI nodes built in, those sequences can include “ask the language model to do X with this data” as a step.

Layer Three: AI Agents. This is the layer that genuinely changed everything in the last 18 months. Agents are AI systems that can actually take actions in the world: send emails, schedule meetings, update CRMs, browse the web, write documents, make decisions within defined parameters. Tools like Lindy, Relevance AI, and the new generation of vertical agents from various startups let you deploy what amounts to a digital employee.

The agent layer is where most of the dramatic productivity gains come from. A well-configured agent can do the work of a junior employee at maybe 5% of the cost.

Layer Four: Vertical AI Tools. These are AI products built for specific business functions. AI-powered CRMs, AI sales coaching tools, AI bookkeeping, AI legal review, AI customer support. The list grows every week. They’re easier to deploy than building your own agents but less flexible.

A sovereign operator combines all four layers. Foundation models do the thinking. Workflow tools move data around. Agents take actions. Vertical tools handle the specialized functions where someone has already built a great product.

Part Two: The AI-Augmented Hiring Process

Hiring is the highest-leverage place to deploy AI in your business, because every bad hire costs you somewhere between $50,000 and $250,000 in real dollars and probably twice that in opportunity cost. Most owners hire badly because hiring is hard, time-consuming, and easy to rush. AI fixes most of those problems.

Here’s the modern hiring stack, end to end.

Step One: AI-Generated Job Descriptions That Actually Work.

The job description is where most hiring processes already break. Owners write generic descriptions full of corporate jargon, get flooded with low-quality applicants, and waste weeks filtering. The AI fix is two-part.

First, before writing anything, brain-dump everything you know about the role into a prompt. What does the person actually do day-to-day? What problems are they solving? What does success look like in 90 days? Who do they work with? What kind of person thrives in this role versus burns out? Then ask Claude or GPT to write three different versions of the description: one focused on the work itself, one focused on the kind of person who’d thrive in it, one focused on the outcomes the role is responsible for.

You’ll learn more about your own role from this exercise than you have in years. The model will surface assumptions you didn’t realize you were making, ask clarifying questions about contradictions, and generate language that’s actually clear instead of corporate sludge.

Second, run the final draft through the model again with the prompt: “Critique this job description. What kind of person is most likely to apply based on this language? Who would self-select out who shouldn’t? What’s vague? What’s overpromising?” The model is shockingly good at this. It will catch problems you’ve been blind to.

Step Two: AI-Powered Sourcing.

Once the description is sharp, the next problem is finding candidates. The traditional approach is post-and-pray: put it on LinkedIn or Indeed and wait. This is a passive strategy that gets you the candidates everyone else also gets.

The AI-augmented approach is active sourcing at scale. You use AI tools (or build your own with n8n + a model API) to scrape LinkedIn or other professional networks for people matching specific criteria, then use AI to write personalized outreach to each of them. The personalization is the key. A generic “we’re hiring, would you be interested?” gets ignored. A message that references the candidate’s specific background, recent project, or career trajectory gets responses.

A well-configured sourcing pipeline can identify and reach out to a hundred qualified passive candidates in the time it used to take to source ten. The hiring math changes completely. You’re no longer fishing in the small pond of active job-seekers. You’re choosing from the much bigger pond of people who could be persuaded to consider a great opportunity.

A note on this: respect candidates’ time and inbox. AI-generated outreach is only effective if it’s actually relevant and respectful. If you use this to spam people with mediocre opportunities, you’ll burn your reputation and stop getting responses. The point isn’t volume; it’s relevance at scale.

Step Three: AI Screening and Filtering.

When applications come in, traditional screening means a human reading every resume, which means most resumes get a fifteen-second scan and a snap judgment. The AI alternative is structured screening at depth.

Build a screening rubric that defines what you’re actually looking for. Not “the right experience” but specific, observable criteria: years in a comparable role, evidence of having owned a P&L, demonstrated skills in specific tools, signs of self-direction versus needing structure. Then feed each application to the model with the rubric and ask for a structured evaluation: which criteria are clearly met, which are unclear, what additional information would help, what concerns are visible.

The model gives you a consistent evaluation of every application against the same rubric. No fatigue, no recency bias, no skipping over the boring resumes. Then you, the human, focus your attention on the ten applications the model flags as most promising and the five it’s uncertain about.

This isn’t replacing your judgment. It’s freeing your judgment to focus on the hard cases instead of being burned out on the easy filtering.

Step Four: AI-Assisted Interviewing.

Interviewing is where most hiring breaks down most invisibly. Owners ask whatever questions come to mind, evaluate based on gut feel, and end up hiring people who interview well rather than people who’ll perform well. The data on this is brutal: unstructured interviews barely outperform random chance at predicting job performance. Structured interviews, where every candidate gets the same questions and is evaluated on the same rubric, are dramatically more predictive.

AI fixes the structure problem. Before any interview, generate a tailored interview guide based on the role and the specific candidate. The guide should include behavioral questions calibrated to the competencies you care about, technical questions if relevant, questions designed to surface red flags from the resume, and questions that explore the candidate’s actual interest in this specific role versus job-search desperation.

During the interview, take detailed notes (or record with permission and use AI transcription). Afterwards, feed the notes to the model along with your evaluation rubric and ask: “Based on these responses, score this candidate against each criterion with reasoning. What’s the strongest signal? What’s the biggest concern? What follow-up questions would you ask in the next round?”

This catches what your in-the-moment impressions miss. The candidate who charmed you may have given vague answers to every behavioral question. The candidate who seemed quiet may have given the most precise, specific answers. The model surfaces the actual content underneath the social dynamics.

Step Five: Reference Checks That Actually Work.

Most reference checks are theater. The candidate gives you the names of people who like them, you call those people, they say nice things, you check the box. Useless.

AI doesn’t fix the structural problem (people lie or soften the truth in references), but it does dramatically improve the questions you ask. Generate a reference-check script that’s tailored to the specific concerns about this candidate from earlier rounds. Include questions that are hard to dodge: “What was the candidate’s biggest weakness when you worked with them?” “Why did they leave?” “Would you hire them again, and for what kind of role?” “Describe a time they failed.”

Then transcribe the calls (with permission), feed them to the model, and ask for analysis: “What patterns emerge across these references? Where are references being evasive? What concerns are corroborated, and what concerns from earlier in the process aren’t showing up here?”

This won’t catch a determined liar, but it will dramatically reduce the number of bad hires that slip through because nobody asked the right follow-up questions.

Part Three: Onboarding and Training With AI

You hired well. Now don’t blow it in the first ninety days.

The mistake most owners make: they bring on a new hire, throw them into the deep end with vague instructions, and hope they figure it out. The good ones do. The mediocre ones don’t, and you blame the hire when the real problem was your onboarding.

AI lets you build an onboarding system that scales. Here’s the pattern.

Build a Living Knowledge Base.

Every time you explain something to a team member, ask yourself: “Will I have to explain this again to someone else?” If yes, the explanation goes into a knowledge base, immediately. Notion, a wiki, a structured Google Drive folder, doesn’t matter. What matters is that institutional knowledge stops living only in your head.

Then layer AI on top of the knowledge base. Tools like Glean, Mem, or even a custom RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) setup let employees ask questions in natural language and get answers pulled from your actual documentation. New hire wants to know how you handle vendor onboarding? They ask the knowledge base, not you. The system pulls the relevant doc, summarizes the answer, and links to the source.

This collapses your training time by an order of magnitude. The first time you explain something, you write it down. After that, it teaches itself.

Personalized Onboarding Plans.

For each new hire, generate a 30-60-90 day plan with the model. Inputs: the role description, the candidate’s background, the strategic priorities of the team, your standard onboarding milestones. Output: a detailed week-by-week plan customized to where this specific person needs the most ramp-up.

Review the plan, edit it, then make it the actual operating document for the first ninety days. The new hire knows exactly what they’re working toward each week. You know exactly what to evaluate them against. No ambiguity, no “I thought I was doing the right thing,” no surprises at the 90-day review.

AI as Training Partner.

For roles that involve judgment (sales, customer support, account management), AI is a phenomenal training partner. Build prompts that simulate the situations your new hires will face. The candidate practices handling a difficult customer, navigating an objection, writing a complex email. The model role-plays the other side and then provides feedback on what they did well and what they could improve.

This is the kind of practice that used to require senior people to spend hours role-playing with juniors. Now it can happen any time the new hire has thirty minutes to spare. The ramp-up acceleration is dramatic.

Part Four: Operationalizing With AI Agents

This is where the math really shifts.

An AI agent, configured correctly, can replace or augment most of the operational work in a small-to-mid-sized business. Not “in the future.” Right now. The owners who are deploying agents in 2026 are running businesses that would have required teams of ten in 2022.

Here are the categories where agents are working well today.

Customer Service Agents. A well-configured customer service agent can handle the first response to most support inquiries, resolve straightforward questions on its own, and escalate complex cases to a human with a clean summary of what’s been tried and what the customer is actually asking. The cost: a few hundred dollars a month versus a $50,000-$80,000 customer service hire. The quality, if you build it right, is comparable for routine inquiries and worse only at the edge cases that should have been escalated anyway.

Sales Development Agents. Outbound prospecting, initial qualification, meeting scheduling. An agent can do hundreds of personalized outreaches a day, follow up on a defined cadence, and book meetings directly into a sales rep’s calendar. Your human salespeople then spend their time on the actual conversations that close deals, not the grinding work of getting those conversations scheduled.

Operations and Coordination Agents. Vendor management, scheduling, basic project coordination, document preparation, data entry. The boring middle of every business. Agents are very good at this work because it’s structured, rule-based, and benefits from never getting tired or distracted.

Research and Analysis Agents. Market research, competitor monitoring, document analysis, due diligence support. An agent can produce in twenty minutes what used to take a junior analyst a week. The output isn’t always at the level a senior analyst would produce, but for 80% of business research needs, it’s more than sufficient.

Internal Knowledge Agents. This is the one most underrated by people who haven’t deployed it yet. An agent connected to your company’s internal documents, communications, and data becomes the institutional memory of the business. Anyone can ask it questions and get accurate answers based on your actual operations. This eliminates an enormous amount of “let me check on that and get back to you” friction.

The deployment pattern that works: don’t try to replace whole jobs with agents on day one. Start with specific, bounded tasks. Get those working reliably. Expand the agent’s scope incrementally. Within six months, you’ll have agents handling significant chunks of work that used to require human time, and the humans on your team are doing higher-leverage work as a result.

Part Five: Building With n8n and Workflow Automation

If agents are the brains and the foundation models are the engine, n8n is the nervous system that connects everything.

For most operators, n8n is the right choice over Zapier or Make for three reasons. It’s self-hostable, which matters when you’re routing sensitive business data through workflows. It’s significantly more flexible for complex logic, conditional branches, and AI integration. And it’s open source, which means no vendor lock-in and a community of operators sharing workflows.

Here’s how to think about deploying n8n in your business.

Start With the Friction Audit.

Go back to the bucket exercise from the first guide. Look at every task in the “operator,” “specialist,” and “friction” buckets. For each one, ask: is this task essentially “when X happens, do Y”? If yes, it’s an n8n candidate.

Most businesses have dozens of these workflows running through human hands when they shouldn’t be. New lead comes in, someone copies it to the CRM, sends a welcome email, schedules a follow-up, notifies the sales team. Five minutes of human work, ten times a day, fifty hours a month. n8n does this in zero seconds, with zero errors, for the cost of the n8n instance.

Build in Layers.

The trap with workflow automation is trying to build the perfect end-to-end system on day one. You build it, it breaks somewhere, debugging is a nightmare because everything is interconnected. The better approach is to build small, isolated workflows first, get each one working reliably, then connect them.

Start with one workflow. Lead intake, for example. Get it working perfectly. Run it for two weeks. Watch where it fails or produces unexpected outputs. Fix those. Then build the next workflow, and the next, with each one designed to work both standalone and connected to the others.

Within six months a serious operator can have twenty to fifty workflows running, and the cumulative time savings is the equivalent of one to two full-time employees.

Layer AI Into the Workflows.

n8n has native nodes for calling AI models. This is where workflows get genuinely powerful. The pattern: a deterministic workflow handles the “move data from A to B” mechanics, and an AI node handles any step that requires actual judgment.

Example. New customer signs up. Deterministic workflow grabs the data, formats it, and pulls in their company’s information from a public source. AI node analyzes the company and writes a personalized welcome email. Deterministic workflow sends the email and adds the contact to the CRM with appropriate tags based on the AI analysis. The whole thing runs in seconds, costs essentially nothing, and produces a better customer experience than most companies’ human-driven onboarding.

The deterministic-plus-AI pattern is the sweet spot. Pure deterministic workflows can’t handle nuance. Pure AI agents are unpredictable. The combination gives you both.

Part Six: The Money Math

Let’s get to the part most owners care about most: what does this actually save you?

Take a real example. A typical $2M-$5M revenue business in 2024 ran on a team of, say, 15 people: founder, ops manager, a few salespeople, a couple of customer service reps, an admin, a marketing person, a bookkeeper, and a handful of specialists. Total payroll plus overhead: roughly $1.2M-$1.8M annually depending on geography and roles.

The same business, built or rebuilt with AI in 2026, looks dramatically different. Founder, one operations lead, two senior salespeople (no SDRs, those are agents now), one customer service lead overseeing the AI customer service system, and a couple of fractional specialists. Maybe 6-7 humans total. The work is getting done by a stack of agents, workflows, and AI tools costing somewhere between $2,000 and $8,000 a month.

Total payroll plus overhead drops to maybe $600K-$900K. Plus the tooling stack, call it $50K-$100K annually all in. You’ve cut your operational costs roughly in half while maintaining or improving output.

That’s the headline number. But the bigger story is what happens when you reinvest those savings. The AI-augmented business is now running at gross margins five to fifteen percentage points higher than its competitors. That margin advantage compounds. It funds product development, marketing investment, talent acquisition, and acquisitions. Within a few years, the gap between AI-native operators and traditional operators is going to be massive.

This is why I keep saying that 2026 is the inflection point. The operators who reorganize their businesses around AI now will have a five-year head start by 2030. The ones who don’t will be competing against businesses with structurally lower costs and they won’t be able to figure out how their competitors are doing it.

Part Seven: What Not to Do

A few warnings before you start.

Don’t replace people you shouldn’t replace. The human element matters in some roles. High-trust client relationships, creative judgment, strategic thinking, leadership of other humans. Don’t use AI to gut these functions. Use AI to free the humans in these roles from administrative work so they can focus on what humans do best.

Don’t deploy agents you can’t monitor. An AI agent that’s making decisions or taking actions in your business needs oversight. Build dashboards. Spot-check outputs. Have humans review samples. The agent that quietly goes off the rails for two weeks before anyone notices can do real damage.

Don’t over-automate prematurely. If you’re a $500K business, you don’t need a twenty-workflow n8n deployment. Start with the highest-leverage automations and build out from there. Tooling complexity that exceeds your business’s complexity is just expensive overhead.

Don’t ignore data security and privacy. When you route business data through AI tools, you’re sharing that data with third parties. Read the terms. Understand which tools store your data, train on your data, or share with subprocessors. For sensitive industries, self-hosted solutions like local n8n + private model deployments are worth the additional effort.

Don’t use AI to be a worse boss. AI lets you scale your impact, but it also makes it easier to treat humans on your team like cogs. Resist this. The leverage AI gives you should translate into giving your team more meaningful work, not less. Owners who use AI to squeeze their humans harder will lose them to owners who use AI to make work better.

The Sovereign AI Operator

Put it all together and here’s what the picture looks like.

You hire less often, hire better, and onboard faster. The roles you do hire are senior, judgment-heavy roles where humans add real value. The operational and administrative work runs on a stack of AI agents and automated workflows that you built deliberately, in layers, over time. Your costs are a fraction of what your competitors spend. Your speed is multiples of theirs. Your team is small, senior, and high-leverage. Your business runs whether you’re in the office or not, because the systems do the work the systems are good at, and the humans do the work humans are good at.

That’s the AI-augmented operator. That’s the math working in your favor in 2026.

It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen by reading one guide. It happens because you decided to take this seriously, started with the friction audit, deployed your first workflow, built your first agent, and kept iterating. Six months in, you’ll be in a different position than you are today. Two years in, you’ll be running a business your 2024 self wouldn’t recognize.

Start small. Start now. The leverage compounds.

The Trap Nobody Warned You About

You started your business to get free.

You wanted to be your own boss, control your time, and build something that paid you what you were actually worth. You succeeded. The business grew. Revenue climbed. You hired people. You won.

And somewhere along the way, you became the most overworked, lowest-paid, least-replaceable person in your own company.

You can’t take a vacation without your phone going off every twenty minutes. Every important decision still flows through you. Your team is “great” but somehow nothing closes without your involvement. You’re making more money than you’ve ever made and you have less of your life than you did when you were broke.

This is the Golden Cage. And it’s the most common ending for successful business owners.

I built one. Then I figured out how to dismantle it. This guide is how.

My Story, Briefly

I’m Jason Lee. I’m 29. By 28 I had a net worth north of $12M and a real estate portfolio with partners worth over $300M. I sold over $500M in real estate, built and exited a brokerage called Nara Advisors, scaling it from zero to 42 employees across five cities in four years before it was acquired.

That sounds clean on paper. The reality was that I spent most of my mid-twenties running a business that consumed me. I was the bottleneck on every important decision. I told myself this was leadership. It was actually a prison I’d built and stocked with my own time.

After Nara, I rebuilt around a different model. I now manage a $300M+ real estate portfolio at Trellis Equity essentially solo, with a small team of A+ players and one VA. I work fewer hours than I did at $1M in revenue. The portfolio generates more than the brokerage ever did. I have my life back.

The difference between the two versions of me wasn’t talent or luck. It was a deliberate decision to stop building a business that needed me and start building one that didn’t.

That’s what this guide is about.

The Sovereignty Equation

Before any of the tactics, you need a way to think about what you’re actually trying to build. Most business owners measure the wrong things. They obsess over revenue, headcount, square footage, social media followers. None of that tells you whether you’re winning the actual game.

The actual game is sovereignty; It’s the math of how much your business serves your life versus how much your life serves your business.

Here’s the equation:

Sovereignty = (Passive Income × Purpose) ÷ Operational Friction

Three variables:

Passive Income is the money your business generates that doesn’t require your direct hourly involvement. Not all revenue is passive. Revenue that requires you to show up, perform, sell, deliver, or babysit is active income. Revenue that flows whether you’re at the desk or on a beach is passive. The number you care about isn’t gross revenue. It’s the percentage of revenue that doesn’t require your hours.

Purpose is whether the business is aligned with what you actually want to be doing with your life. This sounds soft until you realize what happens when it’s missing. A business with high passive income and zero purpose is a wealthy hollow life. You’ll have the money and the time and you’ll fill both with distraction because the underlying engine isn’t connected to anything you care about. Purpose is the multiplier. If it’s zero, the whole top of the equation collapses to zero.

Operational Friction is the denominator. This is everything in your business that creates drag on your time, attention, and energy. Meetings you have to attend. Decisions only you can make. Fires only you can put out. Employees who can’t function without you. Clients who demand you specifically. The more friction, the lower your sovereignty, no matter how high the income.

When operational friction is high, sovereignty is low. This is the Golden Cage. You’re rich and miserable. You can’t leave because the entire machine collapses without you.

When purpose is zero, your wealth is hollow. You have time and money and no direction. This is the post-exit founder who can’t figure out what to do with himself.

The goal is to maximize the top and minimize the bottom. Build passive income, align with purpose, and ruthlessly cut friction. That’s the entire job of a sovereign operator.

The rest of this guide is the tactical work of how to do that.

Part One: Audit the Friction

You can’t cut what you can’t see. Before you change anything, you need an honest inventory of where your time and attention actually go.

For two weeks, track everything you do in your business in fifteen-minute increments. Use a notebook, a spreadsheet, a notes app, doesn’t matter. Write down what you did and how long it took. Be honest. Include the doomscrolling, the Slack-checking, the “quick” calls that ran an hour.

At the end of two weeks, sort every entry into one of four buckets.

Bucket One: Owner Work. These are the things only you can do. Capital allocation. High-level strategy. Key relationships. The handful of decisions that genuinely require your judgment. For most business owners, this is between two and six hours a week.

Bucket Two: Operator Work. These are the things that need to happen but don’t need you specifically. Reviewing financials. Approving expenses. Hiring decisions below the executive level. Vendor management. This is work a competent operator could do.

Bucket Three: Specialist Work. These are the technical tasks that require a specific skill. Writing contracts. Building financial models. Bookkeeping. Marketing execution. Legal review. Each of these wants a specialist, not a generalist, and definitely not you.

Bucket Four: Friction. This is everything else. Email triage. Scheduling. Status meetings that should have been emails. The “quick check-ins” that consume your morning. The reactive work that fills time without producing anything.

When most owners do this exercise, they discover something brutal: they spend somewhere between five and fifteen percent of their time on actual Owner Work. The other 85% is operator, specialist, or friction work that they’ve been doing themselves out of habit, control issues, or because nobody else is set up to handle it.

This is your starting line. Everything in the rest of this guide is about systematically moving your hours out of buckets two, three, and four and into bucket one.

Part Two: The Delegation Hierarchy

Most owners think delegation means hiring an assistant. That’s the smallest version of it. Real delegation is a layered system, and you build it in a specific order.

Layer One: Software replaces work. Before you hire a human to do something, ask whether software can do it instead. Scheduling tools, automated bookkeeping, AI-powered email triage, contract templates, CRM automation. In 2026 the gap between what software can do and what people think it can do is enormous. Most owners are paying humans to do work that a forty-dollar-a-month tool could handle.

Audit your operator and specialist work. For every task, ask: is there a tool for this? Usually there is. Spend a weekend setting it up. You’ll free more hours doing this than from your first hire.

Layer Two: A great VA replaces volume. Once software handles the systematic work, you need a human for the judgment calls. A high-quality virtual assistant in the $1,500 to $4,000 a month range can handle email triage, calendar management, travel logistics, vendor coordination, basic research, and most of what kills your day-to-day. I have one based in the Philippines who runs my inbox, manages my comments and DMs, and handles enough volume that my “office hours” are essentially eliminated.

The mistake people make: they hire a VA and then don’t trust them with anything real. Your VA is only as useful as your willingness to actually let go. If you’re still copying yourself on every email they send, you’ve hired a very expensive observer.

Layer Three: Fractional specialists replace expertise. You don’t need a full-time CFO. You need ten hours a month of CFO-level thinking. You don’t need a full-time marketing director. You need a fractional one who works with three other businesses and brings you the playbook. Fractional executives are the cheat code of the modern operator. They’re senior people who used to demand $300K salaries, now available for $3K-$10K a month part-time. Hire them for the judgment, not the hours.

I use this model across legal, accounting, financial structuring, and acquisitions support. None of it is full-time. All of it is senior-level. The total cost is a fraction of what one full-time hire would run.

Layer Four: An operator replaces you. This is the big one. At a certain scale, you need someone who isn’t you to run the business day-to-day. A general manager. A COO. A president. Someone who owns the operating responsibility so you can focus exclusively on owner work.

This is also where most owners fail. They either never hire this person, or they hire them and then refuse to let them actually run anything. If your operator can’t make a decision without checking with you, you don’t have an operator. You have an expensive secretary.

The test: can you leave for two weeks without checking in? If no, your operator isn’t really running the business. You are. Fix that before anything else.

Part Three: The Systems That Run Without You

Sovereignty isn’t built on willpower. It’s built on systems that don’t require willpower because they execute on their own.

Here are the four systems every Low-Ops business needs.

The Decision System. Most owner-bottlenecks are actually decision-bottlenecks. Your team brings you everything because they don’t know what they’re allowed to decide on their own. Fix this with a written decision framework. For every category of recurring decision, define who decides, what the threshold is, and when it escalates. Hires under $X are the operator’s call. Expenses under $Y don’t need approval. Vendor changes follow this protocol. Write it down. Now your team stops asking and starts deciding.

When I shifted my team to a written decision framework, my “approval requests” dropped by something like 80% in a month. The decisions weren’t actually any worse. I was just no longer the bottleneck on a hundred small things.

The Reporting System. You don’t need to be in the work to know what’s happening. You need a reporting system that brings the relevant information to you on a schedule. A weekly dashboard with the five numbers that matter. A monthly P&L review. A quarterly strategy update. If you’re getting your information from being in the meetings and reading every email, you’re inside the machine. If you’re getting it from a one-page report you read on Sunday night, you’re operating it.

Build the dashboard once. Make your team responsible for keeping it current. Read it on a schedule. The number of meetings you can eliminate this way is staggering.

The Communication System. Default to async. Slack, Loom, written documents. Synchronous meetings only when async genuinely won’t work. Most companies do this backward and pay an enormous time tax for the privilege.

I have one fixed weekly meeting with my team. Everything else is async. It works because we have written norms about response times, which channels are for what, and what requires real-time discussion versus what doesn’t. The norms took an afternoon to write and have saved me thousands of hours.

The Hiring System. Hiring is where most owners self-sabotage. They hire reactively, in a panic, when they’re already drowning. They hire generalists when they need specialists, full-timers when they need fractionals, and fast when they should hire slow.

The system: every role gets a written job description before you start interviewing. Every candidate goes through a structured process with the same questions. Every offer is benchmarked against market data. Every hire has a 90-day plan written before they start. This sounds bureaucratic. It’s actually freedom. The bureaucracy on the front end is what lets you stop micromanaging on the back end.

Part Four: Protecting the Asset

The asset you’re protecting in a Low-Ops business isn’t the business. It’s you.

Your time, your attention, your judgment, your energy. These are the inputs that make everything else work. The moment you start treating them like infinite resources, the whole system breaks down and you’re back in the cage.

Here’s how to protect them.

Calendar discipline. Your calendar is the single most honest document about your priorities. If your calendar is full of meetings about other people’s priorities, you don’t actually have priorities of your own. Block time for owner work first. Then operator work. Everything else fits in what’s left, or it doesn’t fit at all.

I block my mornings for thinking, writing, and the highest-leverage work. I don’t take meetings before 11 AM. This isn’t a preference, it’s a policy, and it’s enforced by my calendar being closed during those hours. The number of “urgent” things that turned out to be not urgent once people couldn’t get to me immediately is, again, staggering.

Energy management. Time is finite. Energy is also finite, and most owners ignore it entirely. Pay attention to which work drains you and which work energizes you. Build the day around your actual cognitive rhythms instead of against them. The owner who spends his peak hours on his most important work outproduces the owner who spends his peak hours on email by an order of magnitude.

Your most important work, whatever it is, gets your best hours. Not the leftover hours after you’ve cleared your inbox.

The “no” muscle. Sovereignty is built more by what you decline than by what you accept. Most owners say yes by default and then wonder why they have no time. Reverse the default. Say no by default. Make people earn the yes. The opportunities you turn down are what make space for the ones you take seriously.

I turn down most things now. Most podcasts. Most coffee meetings. Most deals. Most “quick calls.” This isn’t arrogance, it’s math. Every yes is a no to something else, and the something else is usually the actual work.

Part Five: Reconnecting with Purpose

This is the part most business guides skip and it’s the most important.

You can build a perfectly Low-Ops business and still be miserable if it isn’t connected to anything you actually care about. Sovereignty without purpose is just well-organized boredom.

After Nara, I spent a stretch in exactly this state. I had time. I had money. I had no idea what I wanted to do with either. I’d been chasing goals I’d absorbed from other people, and once those were achieved, the engine stopped running. Nothing replaced it.

What pulled me out of it was a slow process of figuring out what was actually mine. Not what I should want. What I actually wanted. This is harder than it sounds because most successful people have spent years building lives around imported goals and have lost the muscle for asking the question honestly.

Here’s the exercise that worked for me. It’s deceptively simple.

Ask yourself why, repeatedly, until the answer changes.

Pick something you’re working on. A goal. A project. A direction. Ask yourself why you want it. Write down the answer. Then ask why you want that. Write down the answer. Then ask why again. And again. Five or six layers deep.

Most goals dissolve under this scrutiny. You wanted to hit eight figures because you wanted respect because you wanted your dad’s approval because you wanted to feel like you mattered. The goal wasn’t really the goal. The goal was a proxy for something else, and once you see the something else, the proxy loses its grip.

What’s left after the proxies fall away is the actual stuff. The work you’d do if nobody was watching. The relationships you actually want. The way you actually want to spend your hours. This is the purpose variable in the equation. It can’t be assigned. It has to be uncovered.

Most operators skip this work because it’s uncomfortable. They’d rather optimize the business than examine the life the business is supposed to be serving. Don’t make that mistake. The business is downstream of the life. If the life isn’t aligned, no amount of operational excellence will fix it.

The Sovereign Operator

Put it all together and here’s what the picture looks like.

You spend your time on owner work, the small set of decisions and relationships only you can handle. The operator and specialist work is delegated to a layered team of software, VAs, fractionals, and a real operator who runs the day-to-day. Your systems for decisions, reporting, communication, and hiring run without your moment-to-moment involvement. Your calendar protects your best hours for your most important work. Your business generates passive income that doesn’t require your hours. And the whole thing is connected to a purpose you’ve actually examined and chosen.

That’s a sovereign operator. That’s the math working in your favor.

It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you decided to build it deliberately, audited the friction, did the delegation work, set up the systems, protected the asset, and got honest about what you actually want.

It also doesn’t happen overnight. The owners I know who’ve made this transition took somewhere between one and three years to fully execute. There’s no shortcut. But every step compounds, and the difference between year one of this work and year three is the difference between a Golden Cage and an actual life.

You built the business. You can build the freedom too.

Start with the audit. Track your hours for two weeks. Sort them into buckets. See what’s actually true about how you spend your time. Then start cutting.

Your sovereignty equation is solvable. Most people just never sit down to solve it.

If this guide hit, the next step is the Founder Board. Ten owners, $500k+ in revenue, monthly peer board meetings, confidential conversations about exactly this work. Send me a message and I’ll send you the application.

— Jason

It was extremely nerve wracking making this video, but it’s one of the biggest inflection points of my life.

If it weren’t for this night, I wouldn’t be here today. I hope you enjoy one of the most interesting stories I have to tell about my journey thus far.

Full Video Here:

If you are on the move, you can listen on Spotify:

Look, I’ll never charge you for this content. I share the strategies that made me $10M+ because I want to see you win. But I do have one ‘tax’ for the free game:

If I have given you even one ‘unlock’ or saved you from one bad business move, do me a quick favor and leave a 5-star review & subscribe.

It takes exactly 20 seconds, and it’s the fuel that keeps this show running. If I’m providing value, let me know here:

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Finally, shoutout to my friends in Entrepreneur’s Organization for pushing me to put myself out there! Amazing organization for business owners!

“Los Angeles used to be paradise in the 1980’s, and now it’s a dumpster fire!”

“There is so much traffic in San Diego now, the city is ruined!”

“San Francisco used to be such an amazing city until the liberals ruined the state!”

“California taxes are the worst and everything is so damn expensive!”

“Get me the f**k out of this state, I am sick of it!”

I scratched my head and asked myself: “if you hate it so much here, why don’t you leave?”

What I realized is that most of the hate is not coming from people who live here.

A lot of the people who hate California are people who left the state because they couldn’t afford to stay here anymore or because they got way too fed up with the politics.

But, I know several people who fled to Tennessee, Arizona, and Texas during the pandemic, hated it, and returned back to San Diego.

California is the BEST state in the US, and it’s not even close.

Some of the nicest people I have met in CA are from Texas, Oklahoma, Portland, Washington, and Arizona.

They are all elated to be living in California.

How can you be mad and angry at the world when you walk outside your house and it’s 75 degrees without a cloud in the sky in January?

People who come from tough climates are the ones who are the most grateful people living in California. I love meeting out of state people who moved here.

People from all over the world dream of coming to California, and here we are complaining about first world problems.

Where else can you go surfing, paddle boarding, snowboarding, and hiking all in one to two days with some of the most beautiful sceneries in the world?

I got a lot of hate on X from people out of state for talking about skiing and surfing in one day, and then a bunch of fellow San Diegan’s backed me up saying that they have done this multiple times in their lives.

If I wasn’t so terrible at surfing, I would try this as well.

California isn’t perfect. We have some major issues with people who have been running this state.

The housing crisis is only getting worse, things are only getting more expensive here, and the state / local governments are ran like total dog sh*t.

Governor Newsom granted $50,000,000 in 2020 that came from us (the taxpayers) and gave them to animal shelters to give them the resources to make them “no kill” shelters.

But, in 2024 over 50,000 cats and dogs were euthanized in California... That $50 Million turned into fairy dust.

Fact: Los Angeles County is the worst run county in the US.

There are still people waiting to get their permits to build in Malibu, The Palisades, and Altadena to rebuild their homes that were destroyed from the fires.

The politicians do nothing to try to resolve the rampant homeless problem and drug problem. They should be ashamed of themselves, especially Karen Bass.

Their animal shelters are run extremely poorly, and instead of trying to solve problems, their logical solution is to euthanize dogs to create more space.

I have tried calling and emailing them multiple times with no response back. It’s a joke.

Rent control has also been a massive failure and is the most ironic law, because the tenants who voted to pass it, are the ones feeling the most pain from this law that was enacted in 2019.

There is extensive research that was done in New York about how rent control only made housing more expensive, and created a lot of slumlords.

I am fortunate to know a lot of landlords in Southern CA, and most of them never raised rents on their tenants until rent control was passed.

Why?

Because they didn’t want to fall behind, now that rent increases are capped every year.

To make matters worse, California is still the hardest state to build new housing in.

The fees are extremely expensive and the amount of time it takes to get a permit from the cities should be illegal.

If you try to build something near the ocean, good luck getting a permit to build it in under three years.

A lack of new development and rent control is the perfect storm for landlords to get even richer and renters to get even poorer.

Housing is everyone’s biggest expense, and what happens when the cost of housing goes up? Everything else you buy on a weekly basis goes up with it.

Your favorite coffee shop or restaurant needs to pay a higher rent? They need to raise their prices.

Your local gym, grocery store, and hair salon is getting their rent increased? They’re going to raise their prices. It’s a domino effect.

Another domino effect from real estate: Let’s say the owner of the coffee shop buys a house nearby and their housing expense goes up from $5,000/mo to $15,000/mo. More upward pressure in pricing to the customer to pay their bills.

It’s all connected, and I didn’t realize that until I learned the real estate game.

No one in Los Angeles is incentivized to remodel and upgrade their properties because of how strict their rent control laws are. It’s MUCH worse than the state laws.

There has to be change that comes from we the people if we want to see serious change happen in such a beautiful part of the world.

Instead of Complaining, Let’s Create Change.

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I see a lot of people complaining about the issues in California, but I don’t see many people helping to create positive change.

Complaining only makes you and I more angry, and makes us feel like we have even less control over the situation.

Taking action is what makes us feel more fulfilled and empowered.

Let’s take a look at a man named Ron Finley as an example.

Ron Finley lived in South Central Los Angeles, one of the worst food deserts in America. The nearest grocery store was miles away. Fast food was everywhere. Diabetes and obesity were killing his neighbors.

He wasn’t a politician and he wasn’t an activist. He just liked to grow food.

So in 2010, he planted a vegetable garden in the parkway strip between the sidewalk and the street in front of his house. He started giving the food away to anyone who walked by.

The City of Los Angeles responded by sending him a citation and threatening him with arrest if he didn’t remove it.

Ron Finley could have pulled up the plants and gone back inside, like most people would have.

Instead, he filed a petition. He gathered signatures, showed up to city meetings, and brought his neighbors with him. He got loud... not online, but in rooms, in front of the people who made the rules.

The city backed down and the ordinance was changed. The people of LA won the legal right to grow food in their parkways. He then founded the Ron Finley Project, turning vacant lots in South LA into community gardens and training young people to grow and cook their own food.

Any law that exists today can be amended or changed by you creating the movement or being a contributor to a movement that you believe in.

Most people who create the laws are not smarter than you anyway.

In conclusion, there are a lot of systemic issues that need to be addressed, but nothing will get fixed by us pointing the finger at the left or the right.

If you are a conservative, you are my friend. If you are a liberal, you are my friend. Social media and the major news channels want us divided. Don’t let them win.

Being positive even when we’re having a bad day, building relationships, and helping others even when no one is watching is how we can make a difference every day.

What is one change in California that you would like to see today?

P.S. - The reason why I started this newsletter was to help raise money for non-profits (the good ones, not the corrupt ones) who rescue dogs from kill shelters.

If you have been enjoying my newsletter for free, I would greatly appreciate it if you just donated $9/mo to these rescues by clicking the link below.

100% of your donation go toward saving animals. I’ve made over $10 Million from real estate. I don’t need your money or want it. But animals in need do.

I’ve donated $15,000 of my own money this year, and I’ve only raised $30 from this newsletter. Animals without a voice need your help.

Save a life today

(If you own a house and are not a millennial or Gen-Z, then considering sharing this with your kids or a friend, I promise it will help them).

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The Hard Truth: Most millennials and Gen Z will never buy a house in California.

But it’s not because home prices are too high. It’s because of a lack of knowledge.

Right now home prices are actually going down in California. So what I’m about to share is more relevant than ever.

And if you’re wondering why you should listen to me... I’m 29 years old. The house I’m sitting in right now is a $2.2 million custom home and I spent $600,000 renovating it. I bought it with my own money. Not my parents’ money.

I used the strategies I’m about to give you to buy this beautiful 1930 Spanish home in one of the best neighborhoods in San Diego.

Here are five things I wish someone told me earlier.

Video version if you prefer to watch, listen, and see my new house!

1. You Can Buy a House With $0 Down

The program is called the VA Loan (Veterans Administration Loan). It lets you buy a house with 0% down if you or someone you know served in the military.

Here’s how it works. If someone in your network (a friend, roommate, spouse, whoever) is active military or has served, they can go on the loan with you. You buy a house together and start building equity as partners.

If you don’t know anyone who has served in the military, then either find one on Hinge or you can use the FHA loan to put 3.5% down on your first property that you buy.

Putting $20,000 down for a $500,000 house or condo, is much less daunting than saving up $100,000 to buy a home. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details of each loan for the sake of your time, but if you talk to any local lender in your area, they will give you the ins and outs on how to qualify for these loans.

One of the best deals I ever did in San Diego was a four plex I bought for $1.2 million. We put 0% down because my friend had VA eligibility. A year later, after we renovated it, we sold it for $1.6 million. Our profit was a little over $300,000.

We didn’t put that money into a home. We put it into more investment properties and kept building equity. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Stop Giving Your Money to Flippers

Home flippers are your enemy.

I know it’s tempting. When you’re shopping for houses, it’s easy to look at the ones with the nice finishes. Most people don’t want the house with the ugly kitchen, the ugly bathroom, the ugly shower.

But that’s where the money is made.

Flippers have literally built a business on profiting from people who are too scared to renovate. People who fall for the trap of wanting a turnkey home the day they buy the house. People who feel like they don’t have the experience. So they pay someone else for the privilege of avoiding a little discomfort.

I’ve renovated over 200 apartment units and a couple of homes. It’s not as scary as you think. Yes, you’ll deal with some stress. Yes, you have to learn budgeting and how to manage people. But you’re going to grow from the experience.

You’ll make money AND you’ll learn skills that pay you back for the rest of your life. If you do this a couple of times, by your third house you’ll be in your dream home.

Why would you give those profits to someone else when you can take them for yourself?

Look, if you have a big inheritance or a family that can buy your house for you, this advice doesn’t matter. Skip ahead. But if you are in my situation 7 years ago, you have to get your hands dirty.

Buy the ugliest house in the neighborhood and go make some money.

3. Your First House Is Never Your Forever House

The biggest mistake I see with people in their twenties and thirties? They expect their first house to be their dream home.

A $4 million, 5,000 square foot mansion up in the hills in La Jolla with an ocean view. That’s just not realistic.

What IS realistic? Buying a $500,000 condo. Fixing it up. Putting in a new kitchen, a new bathroom, some cool finishes and lighting. Spending $35,000 to $50,000 to build significant equity.

And please stop listening to the doom and gloomers online who say the market is going to crash. They’re just trying to get your attention because doom and gloom gets clicks.

It’s 2026. Interest rates shot up in 2022. If there was going to be a crash, it would have already happened. Rates went from 3% to 7% and home prices in California were STILL going up the past 4 years. Yes, prices are softening right now, but it’s nothing near a crash.

The numbers tell the story. The average home price in San Diego last year was $1,013,000. Right now it’s $989,000. That’s a small dip, not a 20% or 30% crash, and it’s not like 2008 because we haven’t built many homes in California since then. Supply and demand is the biggest driver of real estate.

They’re not making any more homes in my neighborhood. We have custom Spanish style homes that were built in the 1920s and 30s. Every time a house hits the market, there are multiple offers. Even today.

My fiancee is showing a $2.2 million house right now that’s 1,500 square feet with older finishes. There are going to be multiple offers on it. That’s how tight the market is.

You have to get in the game ASAP. There are condos on the market in San Diego right now for under $400,000 in decent locations, most people reading this can afford to buy that property 3-4 years into your career.

I have an attorney friend who’s 26 years old. He bought a house in a Class C neighborhood for $800,000 (not the safest area).

He renovated it and the house is already worth at least a million dollars. He’s single with no kids, he doesn’t care about the schools or having the best amenities right now. It’s his first house and je just built a lot of equity to prepare him for his future “dream home”.

And in two or three years when he sells, that house will be worth at least $1.2 million.

4. Sell Your First House ASAP

You want to sell your first house as soon as you can. But not before 2 years.

Here’s why. If you live in a house for at least two tax years, you get a $250,000 tax exemption when you sell. And if you’re married (this is why you should try to get married as soon as possible), the first $500,000 in profit is tax free.

Let me give you the simple math.

You buy a house for $700,000. You put in $100,000 worth of renovations. You’re into the house for a cost basis of $800,000. Three years later, you sell for $1.3 million. After commissions, your profit is a little under $500,000.

That entire profit is tax free.

So if you put down $100,000 to buy that house and made $500,000 in profit, you now have $600,000 to redeploy into a bigger property in a better neighborhood.

Do this twice and by the time you get to your third house, it’s probably going to be your dream home. Because after two flips, you’ll have at least a million dollars of equity to play with. You can do this in less than 5 years. That is not a long time…

In order to grow fast, you have to sell. Don’t get stuck on the interest rates. Don’t get too emotional. It’s an investment. The smartest real estate investors I’ve learned from all say the same thing: you have to capture your profits and keep reinvesting in the market.

5. Build Equity Outside Your Home

You also have to be building equity where you work.

If you’re at a job right now where they’re not giving you shares, not giving you stock options, the company’s not growing, it’s a dead end... you have to leave.

I have an acquaintance from college who started at Nvidia 5-6 years ago. He’s an average guy. Just a sales guy. Nothing crazy. But he worked for the right company. He became a multi-millionaire and can probably afford pretty much any house he wants.

He didn’t do anything different than you. He might just be at a better company.

If you’re at a company that’s not giving you stock options or shares, you’re missing out on the most tax advantageous way to build wealth in America. The IRS can’t tax you on capital gains you haven’t taken yet.

But when you get a W2 paycheck every two weeks? California and the IRS take almost half.

That’s why it feels so hard to get ahead in this state if you don’t own anything.

Look at any rich person in America. They got wealthy through owning things. Not through getting a paycheck from a boss.

And if you’re a high-earning W2 worker (an attorney, a surgeon, a nurse, an engineer) paying a ton in taxes, you have to learn how to get into investments that are tax advantaged. Real estate is one of the best ways to do that.

If all you do is collect a paycheck your whole life, you’re basically working for the government. You have to take control of your future by buying properties, buying stocks, and buying a house. Getting into things you actually own.

One Last Thing

I want to be honest with you.

I used to be a hater of buying a primary home. I bought over 40 investment properties before buying this house. I was taught to rent where you live and own as many properties as possible. I can’t tell you how much I regret following that advice.

The return on enjoyment is so much different than return on investment.

The return on pride and enjoyment of owning where you live is infinity. Having your own backyard, your personal space to raise your dog and your kids without a landlord telling you when you have to move out.

Hosting guests. Having dinner parties. Customizing your home the way you want it. It’s a totally different ball game.

That’s why I wanted to write this. I’ve gotten so much enjoyment out of this beautiful home in this amazing neighborhood, in the best state in America.

I don’t care what people say: everyone who hates on California just hates us because they don’t live here.

I was in Chicago in February and it was freezing cold. Negative wind chill weather. And February here in sunny San Diego? Every day it’s 75 degrees and sunny.

Rescue Dog of the week - Murphy:

Murphy was a senior dog that was scheduled for euthanasia. He was sick, scared, wouldn’t eat, and terrified of the shelter.

We were able to sponsor him to get treated by a vet, high quality, and now he is safe with a foster!

With a small donation of $9/month, you can help rescue more animals who don’t have a voice, and are stuck in hell.

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See you next Sunday. Happy Easter!

Video version of this article if you prefer to watch vs read:

In 2017, I went to a music festival in San Bernardino with my friend group back home in the bay area.

One of my friend’s brothers that I started becoming close with that summer decided to come with us that year. I will call him “John” for this story.

It was one of the best weekends of my life. Everyone was having a great time.

John gave me a lot of great life advice because he was older than me, and we really connected on a deeper level. We basically hung out and chatted the entire time.

Then after the summer ended, I went back to San Diego state in the fall when school was back in session.

We still kept in touch for a little while, but eventually stopped talking because life gets busy, and it’s tough to maintain relationships 500 miles away.

Then in the summer of 2019, we all went back to the same music festival.

There was one major change that happened in my life between 2017 and 2019.

In 2018, I started my real estate career and closed my first few deals before this concert.

I posted about the deals on my instagram and linkedin to start building my personal brand online to generate more business.

John was a totally different person to me this time around.

I was excited to see him, and joyfully said hi to him, but I could tell from his facial expression and tone of voice that he wasn’t stoked to see me.

When we went to the concert, he never started conversations with me, he would only talk to our other friends, and he even made some nasty racial jokes about my nationality.

He made fun of me multiple times about my looks and my identity as an Asian American. I laughed it off, because everyone else laughed, but it was extremely hurtful.

I remember one of the girls, who was also half Asian, looking absolutely disgusted at what he was saying to me.

All of my guy friends and I had VIP passes, and the girls did not get VIP passes for the festival.

When all of the guys went to the VIP section, I felt bad for the women, so I paid a few hundred dollars to upgrade them to VIP.

On the car ride home with everyone, John made a joke about how I was a simp and a loser for paying for those ticket upgrades.

At the time, I was so confused…

Because it wasn’t just John. All of my friends acted more distant towards me. I felt alone that entire weekend, and wanted to go home as soon as I could.

Where was this hate coming from? It wasn’t until recently when I really reflected on what happened during therapy.

I didn’t do anything wrong. It was John’s fragile ego bursting out in flames because it felt threatened by a younger kid who was having more success than him.

In early adulthood, everything seems like a competition. It’s a big ego show off.

Competition about who’s making more money, who can drink the most alcohol without passing out or throwing up, who’s going on the most vacations, who has the hottest women, blah blah blah.

All surface level bull shit that no one should even think about.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

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Everyone is on their own journey. I make a conscious effort to never judge people on a different path or get angry at people ahead of me.

Don’t get me wrong, I am human too, I have those lingering thoughts, but being conscious of them and redirecting them to productive action is a super power.

If status and competition with others is your primary motivation and driver, you will burn out before you even get to the starting line.

You’ll burn out the 2nd week of practice.

I’ll never forget one of my old coworkers at the commercial real estate company I started at.

When I first started, I thought this guy was the absolute man. I thought he was the guy to look up to and saw him as one of my role models.

Everyone said he was young and crushing it, and he became a senior broker very quickly.

He was a nice guy and I liked him a lot. I have nothing bad to say about him, but I could tell that his motivation for working was much different than mine.

He would shop for cars all the time at work, look at fancy watches, talk about his $1,000 dinners, and was a very materialistic person.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seemed like his work ethic had dwindled when he had all of the nice things.

I haven’t seen him do a lot of business in a long time.

Again, I am not judging, but this is one of multiple instances where I have seen someone work really hard for status and nice things, and the motivation eventually fades.

It’s really hard for a person to come into work every day and grind when that person’s only motivation to work is to get the new Porsche or the house that has 1 more bedroom a little bit higher up on the hill.

When I made my first stupid purchase in 2022, a brand new Mercedes coupe, I felt like the absolute man at first as well.

But after a week, it became just a car. The ego high faded and I felt like an idiot for wasting so much money on a car.

Not only that, but it put a target on my back. My old career was selling apartment complexes in rougher neighborhoods around town.

When people see you pull up in a nice car, they take another look at you.

Drawing attention in these areas is not fun, trust me.

Not only that, but I thought my clients would think more highly of me for driving a nice car.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I walked into my second appointment with the new car, my prospective client who was one of the wealthiest landlords in San Diego drove up in an old Jeep.

After the meeting, he saw me open my car door and he had a dirty look on his face.

I should have just gotten the Toyota Camry.

People will root for you if you are the young and hungry person that just took a risk to start your own business or go into a new career.

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People want you to succeed, but not more than them.

This becomes an incredibly difficult concept to navigate when you become more successful than your best friend, and now he or she starts acting differently towards you.

My advice: He or she was never a real friend.

A true best friend will root for you no matter what the circumstances and be on your side.

My best friends that I still keep in touch with have always been there for me and we barely ever talk about work. We catch up about what’s happening in our personal lives.

Work is only 25% of our life. Family, friends, and faith are much more important than our work life, but it’s the only way we measure success in modern day society.

When I was hyper scaling my last company, you could say I was a success work wise, but I was a failure in all other aspects of my life.

I was a 75% failure, and a 25% success.

I do believe that work success is unhealthy when you sacrifice every other aspect of your life that brings you joy.

But, on the flip side, never settle and lower your goals and dreams because your mom or your best friend expressed their fears to you by saying you’re making a “big mistake” or taking a “huge risk.”

The biggest risk in life is settling and never becoming the best version of yourself that you knew you could become, instead you let others decide for you to stay average to maintain surface level relationships.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to know if you have ever experienced something similar in your life.

I always love reading and responding to your comments / thoughts. I hope you have an amazing week ahead.

For the month of March, I committed to donating $10,000 to a couple of different rescues who are 100% volunteer run, and saving “hard-to-adopt” dogs in high kill shelters in Los Angeles County.

They are truly doing God’s work.

I was skeptical about donating at first, but they built my trust immediately.

The first dog we saved together was Scarlett:

When Scarlet arrived at the shelter, her intake form read like a list of everything that had been taken from her. Abandoned in a field. No microchip. No one looking for her.

The vet notes said: crouched, stiff, flattened, avoids eye contact, terrified. They offered her food. She wouldn’t eat. They examined her. She didn’t flinch, didn’t growl, didn’t move. The notes said: no aggression, let alone emotion, shown.

This dog was so shut down that she couldn’t even feel anymore. She had patches of hair missing on her stomach. A respiratory infection that made her sneeze through the entire exam. They couldn’t even spay her because her body was too run down to survive the surgery.

That’s who Scarlet was the day I decided to fund her vet bills and foster support. A broken, silent dog who had decided the safest thing to do in this world was not feel at all from being hurt so many times.

I am happy to announce that she is now recovering and 100% safe with a great foster taking care of her. She is available for adoption if you know anyone!

Then I partnered with another rescue: Hollywood Huskies to save a mom and her litter of husky puppies!

I have a soft spot in my heart for Husky puppies now that I have a husky mix of my own that I saved from being euthanized.

Here they are all eating together. They were starving! :(

Finally, I want to highlight one more dog who has a special place in my heart: Oso.

When Oso arrived at the vet, he was screaming as loudly as he could through most of the exam, even when no one was touching him or standing near him. His tail was tucked, his pupils were dilated, and he kept cycling between whining, crying, and growling like he couldn’t figure out which sound would make the world stop being so terrifying.

They had to muzzle him just to get close, and he couldn’t walk on a leash at all so they wheeled him through the building on a cart like a dog who had given up on his own legs.

His skin was flaking, he had a mass on his right elbow, and he was coughing with discharge running from his nose. They tried twice to get him into surgery and both times his body was too sick to go under, so they sent him out on a health waiver with antibiotics and a note that said if his condition worsens, whoever takes him is paying out of pocket.

That’s who Oso was when I decided to fund his care. Not an aggressive dog, a terrified one, and there’s a massive difference between the two that most people never learn because dogs like Oso get overlooked or sent back before anyone takes the time to find out who they actually are underneath all that noise.

I’m happy to share that Oso is now safe in a foster home where he is healing, eating, and slowly learning that not every person who walks toward him is someone he needs to scream at. He is available for adoption if you know anyone who has the patience and heart to show a 74-pound dog that the world isn’t as scary as everything in his life has taught him it is.

I love you Oso.

There are always some shady non-profit organizations out there in every sector, but I have already seen some really bad ones in the animal welfare space.

There are rescues that will take money from donors, rescue the dog, give it to a foster, and then go dark…

Then, the foster with no financial support or education will of course surrender the dog back to the shelter. Worst possible scenario.

The worst non-profit I have seen so far is @rocknpawzrescue on instagram.

This lady hoarded hundreds of dogs and cats in her home and several neighbors were complaining about the most foul smell coming from her yard.

People also supposedly reported seeing dead dogs on the property as well.

A massive hoarding case that disguised themselves as a non-profit. Sickening to even think of..

The best non-profit I have seen is 3 Eye Blind Rescue. They are extremely active in saving the lives of innocent dogs who had no control of their destiny because of irresponsible and inhumane people.

The 200+ dogs from the Rock n Pawz hoarding case are flooding the LA shelters as we speak!

We need your help!

You can either donate directly to 3 Eye Blind Rescue here: https://3eyeblindrescue.org/donate

And/Or you can subscribe to this newsletter, and 100% of proceeds will go directly to funding non-profit rescues to help stop the animal shelter crisis.

Even $10 goes a long way. I believe that we were put on this Earth to help others in need. People and animals.

And when we help those in need, we feel more fulfilled, joyful, and connected because our subconscious knows that we are making a positive difference together in this world.

Please consider joining the community and the mission :)

You can save a life today.

Donate & Join Community

Here are the properties that I invested in, re-developed, and exited:

Here is a snapshot of my google sheet with all of my 341 brokerage closings:

I have been getting a lot of hate on X lately from people saying I’m making up my story. Fair enough. I’m 29 years old and I look like I’m 19. I get it.

I will be sharing a timeline of my career, my most important lessons, and what’s next for me.

If you’re building something right now and you feel stuck, burnt out, or lost, I hope this article shows you what’s possible when you don’t quit.

The Beginning

At 20 years old, I was a money hungry kid starving for success and recognition. I never had either growing up.

I was the perfect formula for an overachiever: somebody who grew up in a blue collar family, but had friends who were in the upper class.

All of my hardest working hires shared a similar background. If you are hiring, look for this in your interviews.

At night, my parents were arguing about the mortgage payment. Earlier that day, I was at my friend’s house playing basketball in the nicest neighborhood in town.

When I got to San Diego State, I realized I didn’t even know what real wealth looked like growing up.

I met people whose parents owned massive corporations, real estate portfolios, and liquid assets I couldn’t even comprehend. I was surrounded by a whole new level of money, and I felt more inadequate than ever.

Everyone I knew was a business major and I was Pre-Med. Why? Because I was never exposed to business growing up. My family and I didn’t understand the possibilities here in America.

So we chose the “safe” route. Go to school for half your life, become a doctor who pays half their income to the government, and graduate with $500,000+ in student loans.

Then in my 5th semester, something clicked. I gained the confidence to switch my major and found my first real estate internship within a couple of months.

I started at a boutique commercial real estate firm in San Diego in March of 2018. I would come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 2 hours a day and didn’t learn much. The owners had better things to do before I proved myself.

I would cold call property owners off an Excel spreadsheet asking if they needed property management services for their buildings.

That summer I stayed in San Diego and worked at the Sheraton as a poolside server full time while still interning at the office.

Walking six miles a day in the hot sun serving drinks five days a week and making cold calls two days a week. I hated my life as a server. Living paycheck to paycheck and going to a job I despised only fueled my motivation even more.

By the end of that summer, I passed my real estate license test.

I don’t know why, but walking to my car and opening that envelope gave me a bigger adrenaline rush than closing my largest deal ever for $24,460,000 a few months ago.

Probably because I was a young, ignorant kid dreaming about all the possibilities ahead of me.

Can you blame me for being numb to closings now? I’ve closed 341 transactions as a broker and 47 as an investor. Every deal is stressful. It gets old.

August 2018

This is when I got my RE license. My last year of college starts. I stack all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can work at the office Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

I cold called my face off. 150+ dials per day. 35 conversations per day.

For 3 months I got zero leads. Just a bunch of angry people hanging up on me.

I was broke and I maxed out my credit card. To pay my bills, I started a side business running Facebook ads for a couple of musicians and coffee shops.

November 2018: My Big Break (That Almost Wasn’t)

I get my first listing. A fourplex on 3776-78 47th St, San Diego, CA 92105 for $800,000. My big break. Finally.

Three days later, the property owner dies. The property goes into probate. We can’t sell it until their attorney gets it out.

Imagine this….

You are broke. You are going to school full time taking 15 units. Your mom is texting you links to apply for a “real job.” Your first listing feels like it just got cancelled, and you are still making 600+ cold calls per week.

I thought about quitting every single day for three months straight. Felt like there was no light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

February 2019

The property finally gets out of probate. A colleague finds a buyer, and I FINALLY close my first deal.

Guess what?

The commission check was under $2,000. The seller grinded us down significantly on commission when the buyer asked for a price reduction.

I had been working since June of 2018 for this??? $2,000?????????

I probably would have quit if I had no other traction, but by this point I had built a solid pipeline from all my prospecting efforts.

May 2019

I graduate from San Diego State. By graduation, I had closed 4 more deals, made $65,000, and paid off my student loans before leaving campus.

I couldn’t believe it. The struggle was finally starting to pay off.

June 2019 to December 2019

I moved into a 250 square foot studio three minutes from the office. Best decision of my early career. No commute. I would get there at 8am and come home at 9pm.

Living below my means was more important to me than a highrise in Downtown.

I close 8 more deals for $12 million in volume. I finish the year at over $200,000 in net income as a 22 year old kid who looks like he could be 16.

December 2019 is also when I met Kristyna, my fiancee. She taught me that when you have the right partner with the same vision and values, you achieve your goals 10x faster.

I see a lot of young guys preaching on social media nowadays saying women are a distraction and a waste of money. That comes from a lack of experience and a few bad dates they couldn’t afford.

The right partner will skyrocket whatever you’re building. Warren Buffet said his biggest reason for success was choosing the right woman.

2020: COVID Changes Everything

Up until March, I had an incredible start to the year. Over 6 transactions under contract and a pipeline larger than ever.

Then the world shut down.

When COVID hit, every trigger from my childhood fired at once. I thought my business was going to end. I thought I was going back to being broke. The market was going to crash. I was going to lose everything.

After a week, I snapped out of it.

I couldn’t control what was happening in the world. But I could control how I spent my time every day.

I could sit on the couch and watch the news, or I could go to the office. I chose the office.

Most of my competition stopped working. This is when I separated myself from the pack.

The government was handing out stimulus checks to everyone. Interest rates were at 0%. Investors were rich, bored, and borrowing money was cheaper than it had ever been.

I could see the bull market coming before anyone else acted on it.

I ended 2020 bringing in over $1,200,000 in gross commission income to the firm. I took home $600,000 after splits.

Then I put 90% of that money into real estate.

I bought a duplex in Normal Heights for $630,000 and a fourplex in Imperial Beach for $975,000. Both were full gut renovations.

I sold the Imperial Beach fourplex for $1,885,000. Over $600,000 in profit. Reinvested all of it into a larger 8 unit property.

The Normal Heights duplex I still own. I bought it for $630,000, converted the garages into two new units, and the property appraised at $2,100,000.

I refinanced out $700,000 in cash, tax free, and reinvested it into a 6 unit building in National City that I flipped for another $575,000 profit.

April 2021: I Start My Own Company

At my old brokerage, there were 25+ people doing the same thing. Prospecting investors in the multifamily market. It was a mess. People constantly calling each other’s clients. No organization & No territories.

I kept getting called into the principal’s office because senior agents claimed my clients were theirs. The last time some of these guys did a deal was 5+ years ago. But somehow the client was still “theirs.”

This happened four times in six months. I was done.

The timing was funny. I had just been promoted to senior associate with my own private office and better compensation. On paper, I should have stayed.

But my instinct was to leave and level up.

I weighed my options and boiled it down to two paths: join the biggest company in our space, or start my own.

I was 24 years old. Three years of experience. Every person I asked for advice told me starting my own firm was a terrible mistake.

Here’s what I learned: The people giving me advice had never started a business before. Of course they thought it was stupid and risky. It was a mistake for me to seek advice from people who wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, but I didn’t have many business owners in my network at the time.

Get other people’s perspectives. But do NOT let another person make decisions for YOUR life.

I hired three people fresh out of college and JLM Real Estate was born.

July 2021: Business is Booming.

22 escrows in contract. 6 active listings. Over $1,200,000 in commissions in my pipeline.

People asked me all the time how I was creating that kind of volume at my age.

My best answer: real estate sales is about connecting dots.

Matching the right buyer to the right seller. I was thinking about my buyers and sellers 24 hours a day.

That’s a skill, not a talent. I learned it. I wasn’t born with it.

December 2021: The Peak

I ran the numbers on what I made that year between my 10+ investment properties and my brokerage commissions.

I added almost $4,000,000 to my net worth and made over $2,000,000 in net commissions after all expenses.

In the fall of 2018, a friend visited me in San Diego. I told him I was going to make $5,000,000 in a year one day. He thought I was insane.

Three years later, I was past that.

January 2022 to May 2022: The Strongest Stretch of My Career

40 properties closed and under contract. I expanded my team to six agents. I bought more apartment complexes.

Business had never been better.

I also partnered with a colleague and started a syndication business. We syndicated 7 or 8 properties in the first year. Great for business. Not so good for my personal life.

June 2022: The Market Starts to Shift

Interest rates rise fast. Transaction volume drops.

Then the news starts hitting. Large, reputable companies are losing properties to banks across the sunbelt. 95% of people who bought during the 2021-2022 boom are in trouble.

We were fortunate. We bought in San Diego at a low basis. We hit our projections on every deal and never lost a dollar of investor capital.

But I could see the glory days ending right in front of me.

December 2022: $10M Net Worth at 25

Despite the slowdown, 2022 was my best year financially. My brokerage netted over $2.5 million and closed $106 million in total transactions. I owned over 100 units across San Diego County.

My net worth in real estate alone crossed $10 million.

$10M at 25 coming from a blue collar family. I felt like the coolest person in the world. And my ego got way too big.

I wanted to keep scaling as fast as possible. I thought nothing could stop me.

I was so wrong.

2023: The Most Humbling Year of My Life

My brokerage income dropped 50% from the prior year. And I burned over $350,000 on marketing.

I got scammed by a marketing company out of New York City. They convinced me that launching a book and a TV show would make me the Ryan Serhant of commercial real estate. My dumbass believed them.

They charged me over $200,000 and delivered on almost nothing. Their social media team was awful. The book deal was way worse than they promised. They never even released the edited content for the first season of the “TV show” my team filmed.

The worst part? A guest on my podcast warned me about this company before I went all in. I brought it up to the company’s owner and he pressured the guest into taking it back.

I should have trusted the guest. That mistake cost me over $200,000.

The real gut punch: All of the marketing they did for me generated $0 in business. Zero. I got more business from posting on social media myself, which costs nothing but my time.

2023 taught me lessons that still sting to write about today.

2024: Scaling a House of Cards

At the end of 2023, I announced at our team retreat in Joshua Tree that we were going to become a national company.

In the first 3 months of 2024, I doubled the team from 9 to 18.

In September, I opened a second office in Irvine, CA. Got four brokers in there quickly. One of my San Diego agents said he needed to relocate to Orange County for personal reasons. I believed in his skills. I signed a 3 year lease on expensive 1,500 square foot office space for him and one more sales person.

In 2025, he left the company. Claimed that he was tired of fixing the printer and doing managerial tasks. He’s still doing the same thing in Orange County at a different firm.

I still don’t think he told me the real reason he left. That one hurt, and broke my trust in people for a while.

Our revenue almost doubled to $3.25 million in 2024, but the net profit was less than $500,000 because everything went back into growth.

Meanwhile, my investment properties were making me 3x what the brokerage was paying me. And I was spending only 5% of my time on them.

My biggest mistake was not going all in on the investment side years earlier.

2025: The Most Insane Year of My Life

I opened three more offices in six months. Long Beach. Inland Empire. Chicago. Signed 3 year leases on all of them, except Long Beach.

Then two of my original employees decided to leave. They left with a high producer who was good at making money but terrible for the culture of the company.

The worst six months of my career.

Right after I opened the Chicago office, I knew I had gone over my skis.

My expenses were too high. The issues were endless and the stress was unbearable. I had no consistent recurring revenue to support the overhead I had built.

I had to sell while the numbers still looked good. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was out of fumes.

November 2025: The Exit

Nara Advisors (formerly JLM) gets acquired by The Greysteel Company.

Most people think this was a huge win. For me, it was a failure. I fell way short of the vision I set at that retreat in Joshua Tree.

But here’s what I know now. If I hadn’t scaled, if I hadn’t made every mistake in this article, I wouldn’t have learned the lessons that I’m now building my entire next business on.

It was an insane ride. I don’t regret it. I just wish I had been more honest with myself about why I was doing it.

Where I Am Now

Here are the final numbers.

Current Portfolio:

• 23 properties

• 271 total units (once all development is completed)

• $63.2 million in current value

• $10.58 million net worth in real estate / $2 Million in liquid assets

Exited Deals:

• 24 properties bought and sold

• 113.5% avg weighted IRR

• 2.53x blended multiple on invested capital (net to investors)

Lifetime:

• 47 properties acquired

• $46 million in deals exited (realized)

• 341 transactions closed as a broker for $550M

• 3 companies started (brokerage, syndication, investment partnership)

I’m slowing down in real estate. I’ll manage my portfolio and buy a deal here and there, but the brokerage grind is behind me.

My focus now is on building something that matters more to me than money. Money will just be a byproduct of the problems that I am solving - that others aren’t willing to.

If you are building right now and something doesn’t feel right, pay attention to that feeling. I ignored it for years. Don’t make the same mistake.

Here are my list of “secrets” and biggest lessons learned:

Stop chasing scale for the sake of scale. I was netting $2.5 million a year with one office and six employees. Then I decided to become a “national company” and my income dropped 75% while my stress went up 10x. Bigger is not always better. It’s okay to be lean and mean.

Focus on assets, not revenue. My investments made me 4x what my brokerage did, and I barely paid attention to them. Every dollar I put into real estate compounded. Every dollar I put into marketing and office leases disappeared.

Don’t chase shiny objects. Focus is your secret weapon in a world filled with distraction. If you try to build two companies at once, your competitor who is focused on only one company will kick your ass.

Don’t trust marketing companies with big promises. If someone tells you they’ll make you the next Ryan Serhant for $200,000, run. The best marketing I ever did was free. I just told my story on social media.

Listen to your gut over other people’s advice. Starting my own company was the best decision I ever made, and every single person told me not to do it. Get perspective from others, but don’t let them sway your decisions.

Find your ride or die. Kristyna has been with me through every single moment in this article. The wins and the disasters. The right partner doesn’t slow you down. They speed you up and keep you sane while everything else is chaos.

Don’t grow a business that doesn’t have recurring revenue. Inconsistent revenue and steadily rising expenses skyrocketed my stress and anxiety. Start a business that has steady monthly income from the start!

It’s only considered a failure if you quit. It’s just lessons learned if you keep going. I “failed” thousands of conversations before I got my first deal closed. I failed to create a large company, but I’m still alive and ready to take my next swing.

Don’t take risks on your own. I was the sole founder and risk taker of my business. I should have made other people sign leases with me in exchange for equity. I should have recruited a true COO and given them a stock option or phantom equity plan. Take risks on your own is stupid and lonely. I’ll have partners in all of my future companies.

Money doesn’t matter over $500,000 per year. I have never spent over $500,000 a year on personal expenses, and I was a big spender when I was on my bull run.

First class flights, fancy dinners, and the nicest hotels.

Anyone reading this can build a career or a business that generates $500,000/year without killing themselves.

I know several people that make well over that, and work less than 20 hours per week. Balance is everything. Work. Family. Friends. Faith. Health.

What’s Next

I’m not done building. I’m just done building things that don’t matter to me.

If you know me personally or follow me on Instagram, you know that dogs are my greatest passion in life. I have three rescue doggos. They changed my life:

Over 100 dogs get euthanized every single day in California because our shelters are too full. During COVID, everyone got a dog. Then a lot of selfish, irresponsible people gave them back.

My next company is centered around solving this problem. I’m building a platform to make adopting more popular, connect shelter dogs with adopters, educate new dog parents, and give these animals a real chance at life.

I will be documenting the entire journey of building this company from scratch on this newsletter. Every win, every failure, and every big decision we make.

The same transparency you just read in this article, but in real time as it happens.

If you want to follow that journey, get involved, or if you have experience in the animal space and want to connect, reach out to me. I want to hear from you.

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The darkest chapters.

The stuff I buried.

I'm not writing this for sympathy.

I'm writing it because putting words to these moments helps me make sense of who I am.

And if even one piece of this resonates with how you were raised or what you've been through, maybe it does the same for you.

Our traumas shape who we are, and the more we understand how they shaped us, the better off we will be and our loved ones around you and me.

So when I finally sat down with a therapist for the first time, I didn't know where to start or how it was going to go…

Therapist: “Today I’m going to fill out your intake form and ask you a few questions about your past.”

Me: “Okay great, this is going to be easy!”

“So… Tell me about your childhood.”

“Never mind..”

I was born in a US Army base in South Korea in January 1997.

My dad met my mom when he was stationed in Seoul.

Growing up, I never saw my parents show any affection.

They never even told me the story of how they met until I asked them when I was 21 years old.

They never said “I love you” to each other, and they never said “I love you” to my brother and me. Never complimented us. Never said they were proud of us.

When I cried, they’d yell: “you don’t deserve to cry!”

When I complained about my chronic migraines, they used to say I was just making excuses.

In Korean culture, it used to be okay to hit your kids when they acted out.

And I was a very rebellious kid. So you can guess what happened.

I thought of running away several times and I ended up sleeping at my friends’ houses a lot because I was worried about being home.

I used to hold a deep grudge against my parents, but now I give them a lot of grace.

I was not an easy kid to raise. I was very troublesome.

They are not bad people, and they were not bad parents. They did a lot of things right. I’m just highlighting one reason why I am so messed up today.

They were going through life for the first time, just like you and me, and they were raising me just like how they were raised by their parents.

It’s extremely hard to break the toxic patterns of parenting that are passed down from generations.

Home was hard. School was worse.

Bullying and Racism.

My troubled home life, bullying, and racism caused me to act out in school and get into a lot of fights.

Middle school was my worst years.

I got into over a dozen fights and got suspended several times. Almost expelled at one point.

In middle school, everyone was white. I felt like the only asian kid in school.

The racism was brutal. I was called the “chink” and the kid “with the slanted eyes.”

They’d always visibly slant their eyes with their hands while calling me their favorite racial slurs.

6th grade was the worst. I wanted to disappear during this time of my life.

7th and 8th grade got a little better, but I still had a really hard time in school and always felt like an outsider.

Reflecting back at this time of my life, I now know why I am always seeking positive affirmation from people.

I’ve always worked hard for rewards, worked hard for my old boss to give me a pat on the back, and worked hard for my employees to tell me how great of a job I was doing.

It was an unhealthy way to live, but who doesn’t love attention right?

High School Era:

Everything started to get better in high school.

High school was the first time I started playing football.

I was one of the worst kids on the team, but during the offseason after my freshman year, I worked on my skills everyday to get better.

I wrestled to get tougher and stronger.

I lifted weights to build muscle.

I ran track to get faster.

During sophomore year football try outs, I was an entirely different person.

I was in the starting lineup for the first time, and this was the first time in my life that I learned that hard work really pays off.

But, then I was immediately humbled my junior year. I barely saw the field, and in my senior year I started only a few games.

Sitting on the bench was miserable. I felt small again. It made my hard work and dedication seem like it wasn’t worth it.

I told myself that I would never feel like this again.

A part of my insanely high drive to work and beat other people definitely comes from this time in my life.

One of my best friends in high school convinced me into playing rugby my sophomore year, and I fell in love with it.

I actually became really good at this sport. I remember my last summer before moving to San Diego, I scored 9 times and led our team to 1st place.

When I look back at my high school years, I hate to admit…

I think those were the best years of my life.

If we spoke a year ago, I would have lied to you (and myself) and said that my working years in real estate was the best time of my life.

But, if I’m really being honest with you and myself… high school was the best.

Why?

Because I had the best friend group during that time of my life.

We didn’t argue about politics, we didn’t talk about work, we weren’t addicted to social media, we went on adventures, and hung out all the time.

That’s the beauty of being a kid that you don’t appreciate until it’s gone.

You can easily see your friends every day, and no one is busy.

I laugh to myself when I think about feeling “busy” in high school.

Now, everyone either has a wife, has kids, has a stressful job, or is too worried about what’s going on in the external world to be present.

Then I left for San Diego, and everything fell apart.

The reason why I became so addicted to work:

It was my escape from all my problems.

Ever since I moved to San Diego in 2015, I have felt like an outsider.

I have never had a solid friend group that I fully vibe and connect with.

People made me feel very small in college.

When I first came to the dorms at San Diego state, I bunked with two randoms, and they were the complete opposite of the people I would hang out with.

I joined the rugby team, but I never got cleared to play a game during the regular season after I told the trainers how many concussions I have had in high school.

Looking back, that was a blessing. I could have been dead right now, if I lied and kept playing.

I didn’t fit in with the culture of the rugby team anyway.

Everyone in college seemed like a binge drinker to me. The cool thing to do was to join a fraternity and binge drink with women.

I never loved the tradition, but I wanted to have a college experience, so I followed along like a sheep.

My confidence was at an all time high before I left for college and when I got there it slowly went down to an all time low.

I rushed one of the top fraternities on campus the 2nd semester of freshman year, and after I got in, I didn’t know that people who rush spring semester were looked down upon by my peers at the fraternity.

It was such a joke thinking back to it, but it made me so angry that it started to bring me back to my dark days in middle school.

During the first two weeks of getting hazed, I got in two fights and was one strike away from getting kicked out of the group.

I was miserable most of college.

I was too insecure about myself and my body to be with any women.

For the first 5 semesters, I was in a major and career path that I couldn’t stand (Pre-Med).

It wasn’t until my breaking point of taking Organic Chemistry & taking magic mushrooms at a concert during finals week that made me switch to communication.

When I changed majors, my parents were livid and didn’t speak to me for years. The only message I would get from my mom was job openings for “real careers.”

That story is for another article, but the message that I am trying to give in this long winded story is that:

I felt smaller than most of my peers in college and I wanted to make sure I won after we graduated.

I probably won financially and in business compared to most, but I lost in many other categories that make you successful in life as a whole.

My Traumatic Brain Injury:

I had a horrible concussion the summer going into my junior year. It was diagnosed as a concussion, but I think it was a TBI.

I had a terrible doctor.

I had the worst insurance growing up (Medi-Cal), so what do you expect?

The quick story:

I was at a 7 on 7 football tournament in Oakland.

During these tournaments, there are no pads and no gear.

I was playing slot receiver and I ran an out route.

The quarterback throws the ball high, and I jump up to catch it.

While I am mid air, the defender runs up and pushes me as hard as he could.

I land head first on the turf.

My vision went completely dark for about 15 seconds and felt like my brain was spinning in circles in my head.

I have never been the same person since that injury. Everything became more difficult.

My vision has never been the same, math became way harder in school, my ADHD got way worse, and I got terrible migraines all the time.

I probably should have stopped playing contact sports after that injury, but I was too young, too stupid, and too proud to quit.

I got at least five more concussions after that injury, and it has taken a huge toll on me to this day.

But, here’s why I think that I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that major injury.

That injury made me worse at everything immediately after.

It made me worse at football, in academics, at communicating, etc.

So what did that do?

It made my young self work even harder at everything I did.

I worked out on my own after group work outs, I started studying at the library, etc. This work ethic has built who I am today.

But, if I’m being completely honest, I wish I didn’t have this work ethic sometimes.

Most entrepreneurs are high functioning individuals with either diagnosed or undiagnosed ADHD.

This injury made my ADHD significantly worse. It made my mind wander more, think more about random things.

To this day, I am a wanderer and always thinking about what’s next.

Successful entrepreneurs need to see pathways and solutions that others can’t.

Before this injury, I couldn’t think past what I was going to eat for dinner that night.

All of these things, the childhood, the bullying, the injuries, the insecurity, they all fed the machine that built my career. Here's what that machine produced.

The Results Today

I have a lot of work to do in order to rebuild myself again, but I am extremely grateful for my life partner, Kristyna and my three rescue dogs.

She has been my rock through all of my ups and downs in the past 6 years, and I don’t know if I would be alive without her.

When I told my therapist everything that I had been through the past 8 years in my career, her jaw dropped to the floor, and I finally realized why I am so exhausted.

Saying it out loud is so much different. Here’s what I said in a nutshell to save you the time:

My senior year, I was in class from 8am to 7:40pm two days a week and working the other four days plus Saturdays, cold calling property owners 150 times a day.

I closed enough deals before graduating to pay off my student loans and more. By 24, I launched my own brokerage. By 26, I had built a portfolio worth over $60 million with a personal net worth over $10 million.

I felt invincible and kept trying to go bigger.

This is when I got my ass kicked.

From 2024-2025 I hired over 40 employees and grew to 5 major cities in California and in Chicago.

These were the hardest years of my life.

I sold some properties to keep growing the business, my stress was through the roof, I couldn’t stand managing this big of a company, and the liabilities were $115,000 to $150,000 depending on market costs.

Revenue was unpredictable. Up and down constantly.

I went through the most stressful decision of my life, which was to sell the business at the end of 2025.

At the same time, Kristyna and I went through the most stressful home remodel that ended up going 4x over budget with a lot of fighting during the whole time.

The stress made me ruin my syndication partnership which I will slowly be bought out of.

And then my childhood trauma, everything you just read about, kicked in harder than ever.

It told me to start another business. Get bigger again. Win again. Prove something again.

That voice has been running my life since middle school.

The little kid who wanted his mom to finally say that she was proud of him.

The kid who got called a chink wanted to prove he belonged.

The kid who sat on the bench wanted to prove he was good enough.

The college kid who felt small wanted to make sure he won after graduation.

And he did win. On paper.

But the version of winning I chased almost cost me my health, my relationship, and my sanity.

I burned out. Completely.

What I Want You To Take From This

I didn’t write this so you’d feel sorry for me.

I wrote it because I spent 28 years not understanding why I operated the way I did. Why I could never stop. Why enough was never enough. Why I kept chasing a feeling that never came.

It wasn’t until I sat down, looked back at every chapter, and connected the dots that it finally made sense.

The trauma didn’t just happen to me. It became me. It became my operating system. And I never questioned it because it produced results.

That’s the trap.

When your pain produces success, you never stop to ask if the pain is running your life.

If anything in this article felt familiar to you, I am not going to tell you what to do. I’m not a therapist and I’m not a guru.

But I will tell you this:

Sit down and write your story out. All of it. The stuff you haven’t told anyone.

Not to publish. Not to share. Just for yourself.

Because you can’t change a pattern you don’t understand.

And you can’t understand a pattern you’ve never looked at.

I don’t know what I am going to do next. But for the first time in my life, I’m not in a rush to figure it out.

If you enjoyed this read, and found it insightful, consider sharing it with a friend.

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I was sitting in my office at 7:30 PM staring at a lease agreement for $125,000 a year.

Three years. Personally guaranteed solely by me.

For an office in Chicago that I had no business opening.

I stared at it for what felt like an hour. My hand was hovering over the mouse. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to close the laptop and go home.

But I was building something. I was scaling. I was going to be the guy who grew a national brokerage and sold it to private equity for nine figures.

So I clicked “sign.”

My stomach immediately dropped to the floor.

I tried to convince myself it was going to work out. I had just landed two big-name brokers who ran the South Side Chicago market. This was the domino that would make everything fall into place. More recruitments would follow. The office would print money.

Except my gut knew the truth.

I was fucked.

When Small Felt Like Winning

Four years earlier, my company was me and four kids fresh out of college in one office in San Diego.

I was netting over $2 million a year from age 24-26. I loved what I did. I closed deals, I mentored agents, I built something that felt like mine.

My monthly expenses? $15,000.

Then I joined an entrepreneur peer group and everyone was talking about exits. Eight-figure acquisitions. Scaling nationally. Building something you could sell.

And just like that, I wasn’t a real estate guy anymore.

I was a guy who was supposed to be building something impressive.

The Nightmare of “Growth”

From 2024 to the end of 2025, I went from 9 employees in 1 office to 42 employees across 5 offices.

My monthly expenses exploded from $15,000 to $110,000.

And my income? It dropped from $2 million a year to less than $500,000.

Let me say that again: I was working five times harder and making 75% less money.

I wasn’t a broker anymore. I was a full-time recruiter, a content creator making videos I hated, and a babysitter for people who resented giving me a cut of their commissions.

The agents I trained would close a deal and think: “Why am I giving this guy 40% when I don’t even need him anymore?”

They weren’t wrong. The business model was broken. Low margins, high overhead, unpredictable revenue.

But I kept pushing because I had a story in my head about who I was supposed to become.

The Sleepless Nights

After I signed that Chicago lease, I couldn’t sleep.

Not for weeks.

I would lie in bed doing math in my head. Projections. Worst-case scenarios. The recruits we were counting on weren’t coming. The office was going to bleed money for several months.

My monthly expenses kept climbing and my revenue was a roller coaster. Some months we’d be way up. Other months we’d be deep in the red.

I kept everything bottled up inside. I didn’t tell my fiancée how scared I was. I couldn’t tell my leadership team. I’d just lay there in the dark, sleep-deprived and terrified, convinced I could somehow will my way through it.

Then right before I started negotiating to sell the company, three of my top producers walked into my office together.

People I considered close friends.

They told me they were leaving to start their own team. They were becoming my competitors.

No warning. No heads up. Just: “We’re out.”

That’s when I really knew it was over. I was heartbroken.

The Conversation With AI

For two weeks, I argued with ChatGPT about whether I should sell the business.

I told it everything. How I felt. How much I hated my life. How the Chicago lease was going to bankrupt me if I held on much longer.

It kept telling me to get rid of it.

I kept resisting.

Then I broke.

I reached out to the buyer. A mutual friend had connected us months earlier and they’d made me a lowball offer I’d dismissed immediately.

Now I was desperate, but I couldn’t let them see it.

I acted like the business was crushing it. And honestly, on paper it was. We were doing huge revenue numbers.

But revenue doesn’t mean jack shit. It just strokes your ego.

What matters is net profit. And mine had evaporated.

Three months of negotiation later, I took a deal that was the opposite of everything I’d dreamed about when I started scaling.

It wasn’t impressive. It wasn’t a Forbes headline. It was barely enough to feel good about.

But the second I signed, I felt lighter than I had in three years.

The Aftermath No One Talks About

You’d think selling would be the happy ending.

It wasn’t.

Right after I sold the brokerage, my real estate syndication partner asked me for the $500,000 capital contribution I’d promised after selling one of my properties.

I couldn’t do it.

Two years of investing cash to grow a business I hated had traumatized me. The thought of giving up half a million dollars sent me into a panic.

So I said no.

That started a two-week text war that ended our partnership.

And then my ego kicked in: “You don’t need him. Start your own syndication company. You deserve more of the fees!”

So I did.

I raised over $2 million from investors for a 28-unit property in San Diego.

Got it under contract.

And then I realized: I don’t want to do this either.

I was finally listening to my gut.

Real estate brings out the worst in me. The side that cares about money over people. Greedy Jason. Angry Jason. The guy who’s constantly pissed off because someone “wronged” him.

So right now, as I’m writing this, I’m canceling that deal. Returning $2 million to investors. Eating a $35,000 loss.

I’m in the biggest identity crisis of my life.

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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

The core lesson isn’t “don’t scale for money.”

It’s this: I ignored my gut to chase something that would impress other people.

That 7:30 PM moment in my office when my stomach dropped? That was my soul screaming at me to stop.

But I didn’t listen because I had a picture in my head of who I was supposed to be.

The guy who sold for nine figures. The guy on the Forbes list. The guy who “made it.”

I over-promised and over-delivered to everyone except myself.

I kept everything bottled up because successful people don’t complain, right?

All my mentors were successful business people. They supported my goal. They made me feel like I was doing the right thing.

No one said: “Get over yourself, you stupid fucking idiot. You’re destroying your life to impress people who don’t care about you.”

Where I Am Now

I have one employee. A virtual assistant in the Philippines who I probably hired too soon because my ego told me I was too wealthy to do my own scheduling.

I’m winding down my client work. Referring deals out. Selling off properties so I can manage less and think more.

I’m getting my health back. The stress gave me ulcers and IBS. My stomach was destroyed from two years of constant anxiety & stress.

I spend time with my three dogs and my fiancée, Kristyna. We’re getting married in March 2027.

And I’m writing. Creating. Trying to figure out who I actually am.

People tell me I’ve lived three lifetimes in the past eight years.

Maybe. But I spent most of those lifetimes ignoring the only voice that mattered.

The Question You Need to Ask Yourself

So here’s what I want you to sit with:

What decision are you making right now to impress others instead of serving yourself?

What are you building because it looks good on paper, not because it makes you come alive?

What’s your version of that 7:30 PM lease signing?

Your gut already knows the answer.

The question is whether you’re going to listen to it or spend the next two years trying to prove it wrong.

I hope you choose better than I did.

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Never grow a business with the intent of selling it. Here’s my story of how I turned a business I loved.. into a prison.

I learned this the hard way. I actually loved owning and running my business, until I started to scale it in hopes of a big exit.

I got nowhere close to the deal I wanted, but I was going to die from stress & anxiety, if I didn’t sell my company.

So, let’s start from the beginning of the end...

I started my first company at 24 years old.

The funny thing is when I went out on my own to start my own commercial real estate brokerage, I thought I already knew everything.

I was 24 years old, making multiple seven figures per year. I had 20 properties under contract, and over $1,500,000 in commissions in the pipeline.

My ego was so big, I couldn’t fit through a door.

I felt invincible and got tired of paying a split to my old company, so I hired three kids out of college, and signed an office lease.

We were off to the races.

6 months before I started JLM Real Estate, an investor in San Diego and I had acquired seven properties throughout San Diego.

We made WAY more money on these properties than I ever did in a year running JLM Real Estate (the company that I never should have grown).

MISTAKE #1: I grew the wrong business.

I am very blessed to have had a strong start in my real estate career at age 21, and to have started buying properties since I was 23 years old.

And no, I am not a trust fund baby.

My mother was a maid and my father was a security guard growing up.

Money was an extremely sensitive topic in my family and that created a lot of fear around money for me.

I’ll never forget my mom crying about how we couldn’t pay the mortgage next month.

I think this is why I am so f**ked up and am always on overdrive. No matter how much I make, it feels like never enough, because of the trauma as a kid.

Anyways, I’ll save the sob story for another time, but the biggest mistake I made was focusing on the wrong business model.

The brokerage business model is horrible. If you’re not familiar with it, let me explain it extremely quick.

In order to sell real estate, you need to have a real estate agent license. In order for that agent to sell a property, they have to hang that license under a broker.

I was the broker.

The broker also hold all of the liability when a client sues the agent.

The agent also expects the broker to pay for most of their expenses and to teach them everything.

In exchange, the broker gets a portion of the total commission when an agent sells a property.

In the first couple of years, I was the broker and mentor to a small group of agents.

I was at every meeting handling 90% of the communications, and I answered every question about contracts and negotiations.

The major issue with the brokerage model, is that once your agents don’t need you anymore, they resent you for every deal that they close.

“I’m giving 30% of my commission to you and I barely need your help anymore!”

“Okay, but do you pay for E&O insurance, the office lease, software expenses, legal fees, marketing material, payroll, and administrative costs?”

When it boiled down to it, that 30-40% the company made on each deal, really was 4-8% after all of the expenses.

Mistake #2: I tried growing a business that is known for extremely low margins.

In the first 3 years, my margins were huge. I thought that I could scale the business, because the numbers looked great.

But, I was such a stupid business person, that I never calculated how much of the revenue came from my personal production from 2021-2023. It was 80% from my production.

All of the largest commercial brokerages are either not profitable or have extremely low profit margins.

I will never forget my lunch with the ex-president of Cushman & Wakefield. He said they did $100,000,000 in revenue and made less than $5,000,000 in profit their best year in 2022.

Cushman also had much higher commissions to the company than I did.

I knew I screwed after hearing this.

I made the deal to sell my company a month after.

Mistake #3: I didn’t meticulously review my financials, until it was too late.

From 2021-2023, the profits were extremely high.

I made the extremely stupid decision to waste all of that money on marketing, instead of just continuing to buy real estate.

I acquired almost 30 properties during those years, but I could have bought and sold a lot more, if I had just an ounce of focus at the time.

So, how did I blow over $500,000 on marketing?

Getting scammed by multiple marketing companies. But, this one specific really screwed me the hardest.

Here was their logic. It’s so embarrassing, I almost don’t want to share it.

They thought that if I created a TV show that was like “Million Dollar Listing” for commercial real estate, that I could turn our company into a nine-figure business.

I loved the idea and signed the contract to get started.

LOL... I wish someone slapped me across the face when I agreed to go along with this idiotic plan.

So, I ended up filming a whole season’s worth of episodes with my team.

Not only did I waste their time and my time, but we never even got the edited footage back from the company.

The CEO of the company just kept telling me that they were working on it, until I stopped reached out.

I had a demand letter prepared from an attorney, but never ended up going through with the lawsuit.

Oh, I almost forgot. The cherry on top is that the same company convinced me to write and publish a book. That was another $50,000 down the drain.

The thing that really haunts me, was that when I interviewed one of this company’s old clients on a podcast, they told me how bad they were.

I brought this up to the CEO, and he immediately made it sound like they were being crazy. My dumbass believed him and not the unhappy clients.

I should’ve listened to my gut and fired him right there.

Mistake #4: Never work with a marketing company that cold emails you.

The best marketers grow through word of mouth and reputation. If they have a team of people always doing cold outbound to people, be very weary of that company.

I will personally never hire a marketing company again. 99% of them are scams who don’t give a flying f**k about your business.

Okay, so 2024 is where it really gets juicy.

I joined a business peer group, called Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) at the end of 2023.

Joining EO is one of the best decisions I have ever made, but there was one extremely negative effect that made me eventually hate my company:

A lot of people in EO talk about how they can grow and exit their business.

My first sentence in this article was: Never grow a business with the intent of selling it.

We truly become who we spend the most time with.

Being around all of these high performing entrepreneurs inspired me to grow and scale my company.

Mistake #5: I didn’t grow & scale my company because I truly wanted to. I grew and scaled it because of others indirectly influencing me to do it.

I became a follower. Not a leader of my own life.

I did something because others were doing it.

Because it was the “cool thing to do.”

So, 2024 is when I made the decision to scale my business nationally.

I won’t bore you with the details, but from 2024 to 2025, I grew from 9 employees in 1 office, to 42 employees across 5 offices.

I went from a high producing sales person and a team leader, to a full time recruiter, content creator, and a manager of people.

I hated my day-to-day in those years.

Here is the biggest lesson that I really learned the hard way:

SCALING A BUSINESS KILLS YOUR CASH FLOW.

If you really want to be humbled in life, do what I did:

Netting $2,000,000 per year to netting less than $500,000 when you are now working 5x as hard.

I can’t explain to you the feeling of working 5x harder and making 75% less money.

It was awful.

I also really enjoy making content, but I hated making content for real estate agents.

It was an amazing recruiting funnel and my first marketing idea that actually worked, but I wish I spent all of that time making content for business owners and investors.

Mistake #6: If something you do on a daily basis feels forced and kills your energy. STOP. You are pushing in the wrong direction. Redirect.

The podcast with Hormozi and Tony Robbins really hit me hard on this topic...

I wish that podcast came out three years ago.

Here I was listening to Alex Hormozi like it was the gospel.

Telling me that suffering is good, that it’s supposed to be hard, that we have to endure the pain...

That we should be working all the time.

I was taking advice from someone who was in more pain than me and only more successful than me because of how severe his traumas are.

It’s sad that capitalism rewards the people who are the most broken and the most hurt.

Probably the reason why we have so billionaires who care about money more than people & animals...

Mistake #7: I only listened to broken business gurus, when I really should have been doing deep work in therapy.

What was really killing me at the end of this chapter were the monthly expenses.

My monthly expenses kept rising at a steady rate as I grew, but my revenue was so unpredictable.

Deals would fall apart, people would have slow quarters, we would be extremely negative, and some months we would be extremely positive.

The fluctuations in cash flow were destroying my mental health.

My monthly expenses when I was a small & nimble team of 4: $15,000 per month.

My monthly expenses when I was a medium sized company across multiple office by the end of 2025: $110,000 per month.

Mistake #8: Growing a business with unpredictable revenue.

I will never grow a business again without recurring revenue ever again.

Finally, my exit deal was okay... nothing to be super proud of.

But, I felt so much wealthier because the weight of the crazy monthly expenses were finally gone.

I felt free again.

But, I was also heartbroken.

A lot of people who I considered my close friends left our company and we haven’t talked since.

The one thing I really do miss about having that terrible business is the people.

I wish spent my 20s making more friends outside of work. All I did was work.

Work friend are work friends, especially when you’re the founder/CEO.

Once they don’t need you anymore and don’t see you anymore, you will grow apart.

My final mistake I will leave you with (even though I made a LOT more):

Never try to grow two companies at the same time.

I was growing & scaling a real estate sales business while I was growing a real estate syndication & development company.

Now that I am 100% focusing on the real estate investment company, I feel like I have my life back.

I really focused and refreshed on Monday mornings.

In 2024 & 2025, I felt dead on Monday mornings.

I hope this helps you make the right decisions in business. I have made so many poor ones in my career, that I now make better decisions because of the scars in my brain.

Hopefully you can learn from my pain, so that you don’t have to go through the pain yourself.

If you enjoyed the read, I would appreciate you sharing with others :)

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I grew a business from nothing to 40 employees, $5,000,000 in revenue, and $60,000,000 in property value in less than 5 years.

And I hated my life at the end.

I am still going through the transition phase, but I can’t stand who I am anymore.

Owning and growing a company with the primary goal of making money has made me depressed, lonely, and confused.

When I first started my grind in the real estate business 8 years ago, I thought that the more successful I got, the happier I would become.

I wish that narrative would have become a true story, but quite the opposite has happened.

With more success, I became more stressed and more depressed.

After selling my company and escaping the day to day grind, I realize why I kept myself in suffering and pain for so long.

I am sharing this with you, because if you are an ambitious person with an extreme hunger for money and a better life, I hope this helps. I know how you feel at the deepest level.

Biggest Reason: My Childhood Traumas.

Capitalism rewards the people with the most unresolved trauma.

How many times have you heard a rich person say they grew up poor? Probably a shit ton.

Growing up, I had some friends who came from wealthy families, and when I went to college I met people who came from REALLY wealthy families.

My dad was a security guard, my mom tried starting a business, but failed, and then became a maid.

There is an intense amount of childhood trauma around money for me.

I had never had it, so I was money crazy as soon as I turned 21.

The other major childhood trauma that I have never told anyone before is the amount that I got bullied from age 10-13.

These were extremely rough years for me. Got called “chink” and the kid with the slanted eyes at school. Even my friends were racist to me, and I laughed it off all the time, but each time a part of me died inside.

My entire life, I have felt like the underdog.

When I first started playing football, I was arguably the worst player on the team.

I was one of the shortest kids in school.

I always had to work my ass off in order to get anything I wanted since I was a kid.

I think for once in my life, I didn’t want to feel like the underdog anymore.

Business was my way out.

I was going to “show them what I was made of!”

Then, I did it. I worked every single minute I was awake from 21 until now.

I just turned 29 on Jan. 16th.

Yay... I did it. I’m a millionaire ten times over, and I don’t need to work ever again. I’m technically retired. “I showed them!” I showed all the people who bullied me or made me feel smaller that I am “better” than them!

Cool story bro... now what?

I am currently in the “now what” stage.

I am a classic case of someone who scratched & clawed their way through to “success” through brute force and suffering.

I have no agenda or anything to sell you doing this.

Writing this and getting this out in the open honestly gives me peace and helps me understand myself better.

Another thing I am going through right now is an Identity Crisis.

I have been “The Real Estate Guy” for almost a decade now.

I am trying to shed off that identity and create a new, healthier version of myself.

But, my ego makes that really hard for me.

The ego / prideful part of myself tells me that I will be depressed without striving for more and that I will regret not growing my real estate portfolio to a Billion Dollars.

A mindset shift that has helped me immensely:

If I didn’t make any money from it, would I keep doing this?

This is how I will reframe any business decision from now on.

If I think something is a great idea or a great new venture to start, I will always come back to this question.

Am I doing it just for money? If yes, I know that I will end up empty and unfulfilled again, like I do now.

One thing I cannot stand is making the same mistake twice.

“Would I still raise money from investors, buy run down investment properties, manage construction, and deal with all the accounts payable if I made no money doing it?”

F**K NO.

Okay, so I need to eventually wind that down.

Then, I had another bright idea yesterday...

Okay, so I need to eventually wind that down as well.

Then, I had another bright idea yesterday...

“What if I started a private equity company where I could raise money, invest in businesses, and help founders scale their business?”

Sounds amazing on the surface right? But, what I didn’t realize at the moment is the amount of brain damage it takes to grow and operate that business model.

Would I still want to cold call and market to businesses, solicit people for money, and take huge risks on failing companies for no money? Nah, I’m good.

So what do I really want to do? What am I happy doing even if I never make a dollar?

Inspiring others, helping people who are struggling, and saving dogs.

If this post inspired you or helped you at all, my cup is filled.

Now I just need to figure out how to save 1,000,000 dogs.

If this inspired or helped you in any way, can you please share it with others who might need to hear this? That’s my only ask.