Finding deals that pencil in San Diego has felt impossible for the past 2 years. We have acquired six properties in the last couple of years, but they have mostly been ground up ADU development opportunities.

I always look for a minimum of a 15% IRR (annual return for the life of the investment) to our investors and achieving this by buying existing multifamily properties in San Diego has been nearly impossible.

The housing supply increased dramatically causing rents to soften in most submarkets of the county, interest rates have held steady in the high 5s, low 6s, and most sellers have no distress here.

A significant portion of the investment properties in San Diego are owned by multi-generational families who have no debt on these assets. Whether the market goes up or down, they are still cash flowing.

That being said, there have been significant challenges in the past couple of years for every apartment owner in San Diego:

1. Insurance costs have risen rapidly (although the chaos seems to be over).

2. Utility costs have increased significantly while rent prices came down.

3. Tenants have held the power and landlords have had to offer significant concessions to get their places rented.

4. Construction costs have gone up.

In summary, expenses went up, while revenue went down. It has been a less and less profitable business as time has passed since 2022.

This is making more and more long time apartment owners sick of owning real estate while the stock market has been pumping. I know a few owners who have allocated a much higher portion of their wealth to the stock market and taken a lot of chips out of their real estate holdings.

Everyone wants to own SpaceX; no one wants to own apartments.

As you read the first part of this memo, you might be asking yourself:

“This sounds terrible, why would anyone want to own an apartment building in San Diego right now?”

Your feelings are valid, but remember this quote from the greatest investor of all time:

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

- Warren Buffet

How does this quote translate for me in 2026? - I am afraid of investing in AI stocks and the stock market in general. That’s where all of the capital is flowing to right now.

The bubble is eventually going to burst.

There is significantly less investment capital going into Class B apartments in the US right now, and almost zero capital going into Class C apartments. We want to be greedy here at bargain prices.

If you have read “The Art of War,” you’ll remember this quote from Sun Tzu:

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

The apartment market in San Diego and several other parts of the world have been experiencing chaos since the interest rates rapidly rose in the summer of 2022.

This down market cycle has been a slow burn with banks extending all of their loans and pretending everything is okay, but the shit is finally starting to hit the fan.

We are underwriting opportunities and talking to brokers everyday because we do not want to miss out on the best buying opportunity since 2010.

During my few weeks learning at Harvard last month, I asked the most intelligent and well connected professor there about where they are investing their capital in the next 3-5 years:

“The smartest investors I know and myself are betting on real estate in the near and long term future.”

This conversation confirmed my thesis and got me even more excited about the opportunity that we can create for our investors.

In terms of San Diego specifically, there isn’t a city I’d bet on more than San Diego.

If you get off the plane here in January at 4 pm, it’s 68 degrees and sunny.

The job market is extremely diverse and stable. The US Navy and the medical field in San Diego County accounts for 32% of the job market.

New apartment housing supply is falling off a cliff in 2027. Fewer than 1,000 units are expected to be delivered. 6,200 units were delivered in 2025 (a 25 year high) and roughly 4,000 units are expected to be delivered this year.

The units being delivered in 2025 and 2026 are the developers who acquired those opportunities in 2021 and 2022 before interest rates went up.

With construction costs continually rising and interest rates holding steady, the ground up development business for institutional scale developers is not a profitable business anymore.

This is bad news for tenants, but great news for landlords.

Finally, look at the geography of San Diego:

You have the US / Mexico border to the south, the ocean to the west, the desert and mountains to the east, and a massive Marine Corps base to the north.

San Diego’s precious land with the best weather in the country is land locked and they aren’t making more of it.

People are making new AI companies every day, they’re not making more land with 70 degree weather year round.

Last, but not least, let’s talk about the specific opportunity I have right now.

The opportunity I have is an off market 81 unit apartment building in La Mesa, CA.

We sourced the deal through a broker relationship and the property never hit the open market.

We are in escrow right now for $15,700,000 ($193,827 per unit).

1 bedroom, 1 bathroom condos in the same location are selling for almost $400,000.

Every property that has sold in La Mesa has sold for under a 5.63% cap rate in the past 5 years. This property is a 6.3% cap rate going in with over an 8% cap rate upside in rents.

The property was also fully renovated from 2017 to 2019. There are no major repairs needed.

We will be increasing the gross rental income by adding amenities: washer and dryer in units, dishwashers, new outdoor common areas, a dog wash, and Tesla EV chargers.

In summary, we are buying a great asset in a solid location of San Diego County for a discount.

This is the playbook we used to consistently generate over 20% year over year returns on our portfolio since 2020. Keep in mind that we have been in a down market since 2023 and there are a lot more losers than winners in real estate right now.

It’s simple: Buy great, low-risk properties in good locations that are supply constrained and operate them at a high level.

Almost impossible to lose when our strategy is executed correctly.

If you are interested in learning more about this investment opportunity, reply to this email, and I will send you the investment memorandum.

Have a great week ahead,

Jason Lee

trellisequity.com

186 People, ~30 Americans, and 156 business owners from around the world.

I lived with seven other people on campus for 3 weeks. In our living group alone: France, United Arab Emirates, Spain, India, Mexico, and the US were the countries represented.

I was the smallest fish in almost every conversation I had with people from the cohort.

People with billion dollar businesses were at this program, and you would never know it. They were so humble and welcoming.

As I sit here in my office back in San Diego and I reflect on this life changing experience, the #1 learning from this experience was that no matter where you’re from, I don’t care if you live in Brazil or Japan, US or China, Russia or Ukraine, everyone has several things in common.

WAY more than you think.

We live in a world today where we are extremely quick to judge others. Especially people who on the surface seem very different from who we identify ourselves as.

Someone’s language they speak, what they wear, and what ideologies they believe in are just the tip of the iceberg.

In the end, everyone is a human being who is longing for deep connection, fun conversations, vulnerability, community, and memories they can cherish at their death bed.

I think people who run businesses are some of the loneliest people in the world who push most of their feelings and true emotions under the rug because they have no choice.

There’s so much external pressure and you have to always show your best face, even if you feel like hiding away that day and talking to nobody.

The genuine connections and vulnerable conversations with people so “different” than me is something I will cherish for the rest of my life. Lucky for me, I get to see these amazing people again in 2027 and 2028 for units 2 and 3.

The second biggest thing I learned from the program is the power of artificial intelligence.

I never understood the power of AI until some of the best professors and brightest business owners in the world showed me what is possible.

I became so inspired by others leveraging AI, that after the 3rd day at the program, I put up an ad on Indeed to hire an in-house AI software engineer and worked with a partner of mine to start building a product that would dramatically improve my business.

It’s been only 3 weeks since I started this process and the real world application to my investment company has been staggering.

I have AI agents underwriting complicated deals for me by ingesting broker OM’s and financial statements.

AI agents are acting as my CFO and compiling all of my expenses and financial statements in order to create a clean dashboard so that we can make quicker decisions at ease.

Agents are reading contracts from vendors, contacting other vendors to bid against that vendor, and negotiating on our behalf over email.

They are reaching out to brokers asking if they are working on anything new, project managing ongoing construction projects, and inputting expenses into the P&L automatically.

And.. the most important thing: When you have your own proprietary AI systems, you protect your company Data!

You should never be putting company documents or company information into Chat GPT or Claude.

If you manage your own properties or are the owner of a business, feel free to reply to this email. I think I could give you some great ideas to implement AI yourself and protect your data!

Lastly, AI isn’t going to replace your employees, but they will make your employees 10x more productive. Only fire employees who reject the implementation of AI in your business.

The third most important thing I learned from my 3 weeks at Harvard was the underrated power of feedback.

So many business owners and managers lack consistent feedback systems for their employees to buy into the company culture, understand the vision, and how things are supposed to be done at your company.

We hire someone, train them, and expect to be autonomous until something goes wrong. Then we give them negative feedback only and kill their confidence.

Confidence slowly dies, morale keeps getting worse, and eventually their production goes to crap. Then, you fire them wondering why there are so many incapable people out there.

This used to be me. My perspective has changed immensely on this subject after the program.

I am the problem, not the employee. People like me think that 1 on 1 meetings with employees is a waste of time when it’s the probably the highest ROI on my time that I can implement right now.

Constant positive feedback, while also giving constructive feedback daily is vital to successful growth in a company.

No matter what business you’re in, we are all in the people business.

When our people become happier and evolve, our businesses create more revenue.

Something I am making sure to implement immediately is a better schedule for giving consistent feedback as quickly as possible.

What does quickly as possible mean? Here’s an example:

When someone at your company does something the wrong way, don’t let it marinate over a few days in your head. We always do this as business owners.

When something is done wrong, tell them immediately, but start with something positive first.

“Hey John, you’re working really hard and I love that, but I just noticed that you just hung up on a potential customer a little too early. Here at our company, we always let the customer hang up the phone first, can you remember that next time? Keep up the good work!”

Feedback is the most powerful when done immediately. The longer you wait, the less effective it becomes.

There was an amazing case study that our professor presented where an old manager was doing a horrible job of giving feedback to a high performing producer who was causing problems with other employees at the firm.

Once the new manager took over, he moved his desk right next to the problematic employee and consistently gave him immediate feedback every time he did something wrong.

This was the most powerful lecture for me during the program.

For the sake of time, I will end this with a quick list of my 5 other top takeaways from the program.

If you want to chat more about business and/or the most effective use of AI, send me a note. See you again soon.

Five More Takeaways:

1. Strategy is not about what you do. It’s about what you choose NOT to do.

2. Marketing is simple. Make your customers feel like a hero to their customers, their friends, and their families.

3. When going up against the Fortune 500 giants in your industry, don’t go right at them and get squashed. Go around them. Go where they aren’t looking. There’s always room for penetration in a market.

4. Bad news in a crisis does not age well at your company. You need to be a lead communicator to your employees and your customers. Never let your people hear bad news from a different source. This can make or break your company in a time of crisis.

5. Collaboration and communication across departments in a company is mandatory. The quarterback needs to know who’s blocking for them and who’s running the route. Companies cannot operate in silos. A crisis is waiting to happen at your company if you work in silos.

1. You cannot outrun a bad market. You can have a great product, great sales skills, great systems, and a great customer base and still lose revenue in a dying market.

2. If no one has ever done it successfully before, there is a reason why. Instead of wasting money trying to see if your “new” and “innovative” idea will work, save your money and don’t reinvent the wheel.

3. If you think someone on your team is a B player, you realize that they are actually a C player, once you hire your first A player.

4. Fire all C players on your team ASAP.

5. You will know within the first week whether you hired an A player or a B player. You can’t change them. They will always stay a B player. Cut your small losses and fire them, so that it doesn’t become a huge loss for you (money & time wasted).

6. If someone on your team is good at selling, it probably means they aren’t good at anything else. Keep letting them make commissions and revenue for your company. Don’t level them up into a leadership or management position. You’ll be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

7. When your company grows to $5 Million in Revenue and 20+ employees, you can no longer be a rainmaker and a CEO. You have to choose one, and then hire the other.

8. Business becomes 10x more complicated and sucks up way more of your time once you have two office locations. Make sure the business is worth your time to grow it.

9. Life is too short to spend time with employees you don’t get along with. If you can’t see yourself getting lunch with a potential hire, don’t hire them.

10. You will feel paralyzed, guilty, and trapped when the business is not doing well. It’s daunting to tell your team, but you have to leave your ego at the door, and tell them you f**ked up. If they are truly a ride or die, they will do whatever they can to help get the business back to normal again.

11. Unfortunately ride or die’s are extremely rare in business. When I had 42 employees at my peak, I probably had 2 ride or die’s, and they turned on my real quick when I decided to sell the business.

12. Employees only care about themselves and their future, no matter how much you do for them. It’s about them, and their satisfaction, not the company.

13. Don’t spend too much money on your employees. I wasted way too much money on making sure my employees were happy and satisfied with the culture.

14. Managing expectations is the #1 most important factor in business. How you manage your client’s expectations and your staff’s expectations will determine the success of your company. This is why you shouldn’t pamper your employees or clients too much when the market is good or when your company is extremely profitable. Because as soon as things turn, and you take things away, they will leave.

15. Find someone cheap to manage your email ASAP. I wasted SO much time on email. Email is the biggest time waster for a founder and can be easily outsourced by an assistant VA. Upwork is a great website to find cheap VA’s to help manage your email and calendar.

16. Never build a business for material or external reasons. Building a business has to satisfy you internally in order to keep you going through the immense amount of struggle you will face.

17. Don’t increase your expenses unless you have predictable, recurring revenue. Increasing monthly expenses while having unpredictable, up and down revenue was mentally jarring for me. If your business right now doesn’t have recurring revenue, then you need to find a way to implement it.

18. Pay for 2-3 mentors in order to get their perspective on all major decisions that you make. Peer mentors through Entrepreneur Organization and paying $500/mo for a seasoned business mentor saved me so much money and headaches.

19. Don’t rely on mentors or anyone else to make decisions for you. Pay to get perspective, but always make your own decisions after hearing different perspectives and insights.

20. Find a partner who loves you and supports you through the hard times and the good times. Having a supportive spouse on your side makes everything 10x easier.

21. If good employees are leaving your company, it’s your fault, not theirs.

22. Company culture is the most important component of a successful company.

23. One cancer cell to your company culture can spread quickly to your entire company, if you don’t fire that cancer cell quickly.

24. Promote slowly. Fire fast. Most founders (including myself) did the opposite and paid for it for years.

25. Cash flow will kill you faster than any competitor. I had quarters doing 7-figures in revenue and still scrambling to make payroll because AR and AP were misaligned by 45 days.

26. Hire a fractional CFO before you think you need one. I waited until we had 30 employees and burned 6 figures on tax mistakes that a $3K/month CFO would have caught in 10 minutes.

27. Lawyers are expensive. Not having lawyers is more expensive. Find one before you need one.

28. Most founders don’t actually need a co-founder. They want one because being alone at the top is terrifying. A co-founder dilutes equity, decisions, and vision. Only take one if they bring a skill you genuinely cannot build or buy.

29. You will romanticize the broke and scrappy days. Don’t. Those days were brutal. What you actually miss is the clarity. Recreate the clarity, not the chaos.

30. The skills that got you from $0 to $1M will not get you to $5M. The skills that get you to $5M will not get you to $10M. You will fire and rehire yourself at every level.

31. Most founders cap out between $3M and $5M in revenue, and the reason is always the same. They refuse to let go. Still in sales. Still in ops. Still approving every hire. The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.

32. If you are working 80 hour weeks past year three, your business is broken or you are. There is no version of long-term success built on burnout.

33. The customers you bend over backwards for will leave first. The ones you set firm boundaries with will stay for a decade. Pricing and respect are the same conversation.

34. Fire your worst 10% of clients every year. They take 80% of your time and pay you 5% of your revenue. The math never works.

35. Niche down further than feels comfortable. “We work with everyone” is the fastest way to be hired by no one.

36. Your prices are too low. I have never met a founder whose prices were too high. Raise them 20% today and watch what actually happens (almost nothing).

37. You will lose friends as you grow. Some will get jealous. Some will get left behind. Some will leave because you changed. All of it is normal. Make peace with it.

38. The founder who started the company is not the founder who scales it. You have to grieve the old version of yourself before you can become the next one.

39. Therapy is not optional for founders. The pressure compounds. The weight gets heavier. If you don’t have someone to unload it on, you will dump it on the wrong people. Your spouse. Your team. Your kids.

40. Your physical health is part of your P&L. Skip the gym for six months and watch your decision-making fall off a cliff. Your body is the engine. Treat it like one.

41. Don’t take advice from people who have never built what you’re trying to build. 90% of the business book bestseller list is academics and consultants reverse engineering case studies. Read founders. Listen to founders. Talk to founders.

42. The best advice comes from people two steps ahead of you, not ten. The legends have forgotten what it was like. Someone who just did it remembers every painful detail.

43. Don’t ever sell or walk away from your business out of exhaustion. Exhaustion makes every offer look like a lifeline. Sleep, take a real vacation, then make the call with a clear head.

44. Exiting your business will not feel the way you imagined. The week after it’s done is one of the loneliest weeks of your life. No team. No fires to put out. Just you and a bunch of free time you don’t know what to do with.

45. Your identity will get wrapped up in the company whether you want it to or not. Build hobbies, friendships, and a life outside the business now, while you still have the company to anchor you. You will need them later.

46. The number you wrote on the napkin five years ago will not make you happy when you hit it. No number will. Hitting it just resets the goal. Figure out what you’re actually after before you sprint another five years for nothing.

47. Most “overnight successes” are 10 year stories where you only saw the last 6 months. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

48. The founders you follow on LinkedIn and X are lying to you. Not maliciously. They post the wins and hide the panic attacks, the tax debt, the marriage problems. Assume 90% of the iceberg is underwater.

49. You will not understand how much you actually learned until five years after you walk away. While you’re in it, it just feels like surviving. Looking back, you became a different person.

50. The point of building the business was never the business. It was who you became while building it. Don’t shortchange that lesson by skipping the reflection at the end.

51. One of the most important jobs as a founder and/or leader at your company is to control employee’s egos. If you let them get too big, they will become a problem for your culture.

Share this with a friend if this was helpful for you. Spread the knowledge:

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Thank you as always for reading.

Much Love,

-Jason

“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

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

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 :)