September 15, 2022

JF2933: 7 Ways to Start Scaling Your Business Today ft. Hemal Badiani


Hemal Badiani spent two decades traveling between three continents as he provided management consulting services to several fortune 100 companies. Several years ago, he decided to hang up his traveling boots and join the financial world, which led him to real estate. 

 

Today, Hemal is the CEO and founder of Exponential Equity, which builds and buys large commercial assets in the Carolinas. He is a GP of 744 units and $60M of ongoing construction projects that include self-storage and build-to-rent communities. In this episode, Hemal discusses the strategies that helped him rapidly scale his business over the last 16 months since leaving his W-2 job. 

 

1. Be clear about what you do well — and what you don’t.

When Hemal was new to the business and looking to educate himself, he insisted on being authentic about what he did and didn’t know. His specialty is in helping others improve their businesses, backed by two decades of corporate experience. However, he makes it clear that construction isn’t his forte. “People are attracted to that authenticity and the competency that I bring to the table,” he says.

 

2. Focus on what works in your market.

One of the reasons Hemal says he has been able to scale successfully so quickly is that he stays disciplined when it comes to what works in his chosen market. He avoids attaching numbers to his goals — whether he does $100M or $10M, he is happy if he, his partners, and his employees can make a good living. 

“We just continue the momentum and expansion of business, and the way we’re building each project is more important to us than having a fancy target,” he says. “That philosophy has allowed us for the most part … to stay in a very disciplined lane in terms of what we’re trying to do.”

 

3. Manage your emotions.

Last year, Hemal and his team walked away from a $45M deal and lost $385K in due diligence money. The sellers said they did due diligence, and because Hemal trusted them, his team didn’t follow their typical process. They later found out that there was a misleading set of financial information once they got into the contract and the deposit had already been made. “The biggest lesson was … if you let your excitement let you diverge from that process, you can get knocked down pretty quickly,” he says. 

 

4. Hire people who genuinely subscribe to your vision.

A major fundamental that has helped Hemal to scale is finding the right people who have the right values, integrity, hunger, and drive that he carries. He determines who these people are through a genuine conversation about how they view success and what they truly want out of their careers. 

“Once I find the right person, I trust them so much they get uncomfortable sleeping at night,” he says. “I look at them and I’m like, ‘I know you got this.’ And they just do magic and they go above and beyond.”

 

5. Stay nimble. 

Because the market has been so dynamic over the last two years, Hemal and his team assess and alter their strategies each quarter. By refusing to stay married to any one idea for a long period of time, they are able to adapt to market changes as they continue to build out their business both horizontally and vertically. 

 

6. Ask the experts. 

When Hemal was just starting out, the most valuable education he received came from established operators. “We asked these owner-operators to basically open up the books on how they manage properties, how they do reporting, and how they do communication,” he says. After reviewing five other operators’ playbooks, he was able to distill down his own version and buy his first property in September 2020.

 

7. Take action. 

“When you’re trying to climb a mountain, if you’re thinking about what shoes you want to wear and what pack you want to bring and what kind of filtered water you want to bring, I’m telling you — folks like myself are going to go barefoot and be halfway there before you decide to take action,” Hemal says. Even if you make mistakes, he believes those experiences only help to build credibility and good judgment.

 

Hemal Badiani | Real Estate Background

  • CEO and founder of Exponential Equity, which builds and buys large commercial assets (mainly multifamily) in the Carolinas.
  • Previous episode: JF2418: Using Diverse Background and Personal Superpowers in Real Estate
  • Portfolio:
    • GP of:
      • 744 units
      • $60M of ongoing construction projects that include self-storage and build-to-rent communities
    • LP of:
      • 2,000 units
  • Based in: Charlotte, NC
  • Say hi to him at:
  • Greatest lesson: Do your best every day, but remember that your best is different on different days.

 

 

Click here to know more about our sponsors:

 

dlp capital

DLPCapital_Horizontal-2

 

Cornell Capital Holdings

 

PassiveInvesting.com

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Ash Patel: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Ash Patel and I'm with today's guest, Hemal Badiani. Hemal is joining us from North Carolina. He is the CEO and founder of Exponential Equity, which builds and buys assets in the Carolinas, most of which are multifamily. Hemal is a GP on 744 units, and has $60 million dollars of ongoing construction projects; that includes self-storage and build to rent. He is also an LP on 2,000 units. Hemal, thank you for joining us, and how are you today?

Hemal Badiani: I'm doing phenomenal. Thanks for inviting me here, Ash.

Ash Patel: It's our pleasure, man. Before we get started, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now?

Hemal Badiani: Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. So I think I was on this podcast about 16 months back, and I announced to the world I quit my job back then. And suffice to say, I've been full-time since about a year now, so it came about true. So I'm hoping that whatever I say on this podcast will come true over the next year or so. But a little bit about my background - I was in management consulting for about 15 years, I lived on three continents, I worked with everybody from Disney theme parks to the Vatican, so amazing, amazing Fortune 100 companies that I could stand in front of the CEOs and CFOs of the ,world and really give them advice, even as a 22 year old. It was just fascinating to me... But help them pivot their businesses, whether it's scaling new products, innovation, cost cutting, mergers and acquisitions, what have you.

So I did that for about 15 years, then I had a twin event, so-called, twin babies; now almost seven year olds, so I decided to define work-life balance differently than the consulting life, which is traveling pretty much every week, Monday through Friday, going to the client side, as you know... So I hung up my traveling boots, shifted to the financial world; I was a senior vice-president with Wells Fargo for a bit... And that was a nice, cushy job, with an assistant, a small team, and it allowed me to get sufficiently bored and introspect what I wanted to do. So I figured out very clearly that I'm not a new ideas guy, but if I find an idea, I can scale it up pretty nicely. So I started the experimentation of the side hustle while I was at the job in my corporate world. So I started an outsourcing company, scaled that and exited, then a private lending company, then in 2019 residential real estate, mostly flips, and paper wholesale, and I had a team of 10-15 employees there. I wasn't enjoying just the transactional nature of it, and it didn't feel like I was building a proper company, even though I had employees, and systems, and processes, and everything in place... So I exited that two months before COVID hit, and right when COVID started I found this amazing world of multifamily and commercial in general... And that's what started the last 24-month journey for us, which has been amazing, and I'm very grateful for that.

Ash Patel: How did you find this world?

Hemal Badiani: I stumbled upon it. I went to a local meetup and I was just learning about what else is out there; and some newish - they had done three to five deals - type of operators were just doing elbow grease and they were working, and just the general structure of the project, the way they were thinking in terms of scale, the way it was a team sport versus what I was doing - all that just somehow clicked in my head. So I took that knowledge over a glass of whiskey with a few of my friends, and then we sat down and I'm like "Guys I've found this zen meditation in the world of investments." And I was not thinking about building a business around it or anything, I was just wanting to passively invest initially. So I found out of the five, six people, we were talking over a few drinks, one of the guys who was a great friend of mine, now my business partner and COO, he raised his hand and he's like, "Hey, let's invest in some education, go to a couple of boot camps... Not subscribe to any big $30,000 courses, but at least go meet people. Let's see if this is really the magic that you envision." And then we set upon this journey of education, and that led to passive investments, and then actively, very consciously figuring out what do we want to build as a company, and that started the journey.

Ash Patel: A side question... When you were new, looking to educate yourself and going to meetups, how did you get people to take you seriously?

Hemal Badiani: I told him about my business history. And I was very authentic about what I don't know and what I know. And I said, "Hey, guys, I have two decades of corporate world experience. I've stood in front of people and sold them 500 million [unintelligible 00:06:08.01] consulting world to improve their businesses, so I'm good at something. This is completely new, and I don't intend to learn any specific competency. My wife doesn't even trust me with a nail gun in my house, so I'm not a construction guy. I don't know about [unintelligible 00:06:25.00] or anything of that sort. I know how to build teams, I know how to figure out this is a good idea, and find competent, very experienced people to surround myself with, and then just build a company around it." And that's what I was intending to do. So people were attracted to that authenticity, and on the competency that I bring to the table, which many of them don't, when they're just operating in a very specific world of detail-oriented, whether it's acquisitions, or underwriting, or anything of that sort.

Ash Patel: And Hemal, did you start out as a passive investor? Or did you start taking down deals first?

Hemal Badiani: No, we did five passive investments from April 2020, right when COVID hit, on our own money, down to August 2020. And after the first or second, my partner and I, we sat down and we're like, "We could do this 15-20 times, cycle our money, and this could be a good, nice long-term cash flow gig, and somebody else is managing the business... Or do we really want to build a company around it? And that's elbow grease, that's going to be hard work... Are we really set up for that?" So we made the decision that we want to be owner-operators, so then from the second or third passive investment, we started asking for a little bit more, and we started getting five different playbooks, essentially, for up and coming operators... And that was our training; rather than subscribing to long boot-camps or anything, we asked these owner-operators to basically open up the books on how they manage properties, how they do reporting, how they do communication, what sort of materials they're buying, from where, all of that. And we were like, "Alright, we have five different playbooks. What is our playbook?" We distilled down our own version and started evolving. I think we bought our first property in September of 2020.

Ash Patel: So six months after you started passive investing.

Hemal Badiani: Pretty much.

Ash Patel: What was that first property?

Hemal Badiani: It was 208 units in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was distressed, 55% occupied, but it was an unbelievable price. That was a period when sellers were really scared, that last 100, 150 days of 2020, where the market was like -- we didn't have the Fed's injection of quantitative easing, or anything of that sort, macro-economically speaking, so sellers were willing to give us discounts. So we got that for $28,000 a door, which is unbelievable. We just refinanced it at 89k a door, and we got the seller to carry some note, gathered around some troops for operating it, and that was our first elbow grease property. I think the first week we went [unintelligible 00:09:06.00] was an awesome experience. And then we went from there.

Ash Patel: What was the purchase price on that?

Hemal Badiani: It was five and a half million.

Ash Patel: And did you raise capital for that?

Hemal Badiani: Yup. The total, all-in cost was 8 million, and we raised about two and a half million total. And we had to bring in a lot of cavalry, because we started the usual, "Hey, I've discovered this meditation technique that if I show it to everyone, they'll be like, "Oh, this is the best thing since sliced bread." Everybody, and their mother would want to invest with us, because that's the best thing to do. And we went out to our friends and family and we got a wide variety of responses. So we gathered a lot of capital from our friends and family, but it was quite an experience to understand just fundamentals of marketing, and branding, and funnel building, and all of the lovely stuff that we now think about when people were like "Yeah, I've got the money. I trust you guys completely. I know where you live, I know you won't screw things up, but I don't want to invest, because I know my stock market's going to come back, and I love it so much. I love watching the ticker go up", or whatever reason it is. So we did that, and we found other partners, we all chipped in together, and we then somehow closed the deal from that perspective.

Ash Patel: You're in North Carolina... Why buy in Tulsa?

Hemal Badiani: So that was, again, a very conscious effort, and that's since evolved in 2021-2022. The 2020 market, we were like, "We need to get unicorns and home runs really sorted out, because we're building our resume, so to speak." And for that, the markets didn't matter; the asset and the discipline mattered. If you can physically get something that's 55% occupied, just like you're doing with your triple net leases, if it's 50% vacant, I can get it to 100% vacant, versus just rejecting rent increases all the time. There is that value-add upside that is built into that additional [unintelligible 00:11:03.22] So that's what we believed in this asset; we got the seller to carry a note that allowed us to alleviate some of our capital raising abilities... And that's how we kind of procured the first one.

So the first three assets we bought in the last 100 days of 2020. They were all outside of North Carolina. And since then, everything has been going [unintelligible 00:11:23.19]

Ash Patel: Hemal, what were some of the pain points on remotely managing that property?

Hemal Badiani: It was finding the right property management company; to be honest, if you have the right resources, it's what we found out... We have a property an hour and a half from us that's more painful to manage than the Tulsa property, because the Tulsa property has a very local phenomenal property management company, and we just lucked out. In the second asset that we bought in Louisiana, the property management company wasn't great, and the occupancy dropped by 10%, 20%. So the pain point was a) believing, which was very short-lived, that this was a passive type of project; it's like my single family rentals, I can hire a property manager and they have one tenant, and unless the tenant screws up, I'm just getting my check. This was an active business. And even though we were very conscious about it, really building the dashboard, and KPIs, [unintelligible 00:12:21.00] my partner has done now, and we have a full-time asset manager and team kind of built around it to really systematize all those asks and checks and balances with any property management company... That was a learning curve and a pain point, so to speak.

Ash Patel: Your career seems to revolve around scaling.

Hemal Badiani: Yes.

Ash Patel: What is it that makes you so good at scaling, and how do you scale?

Hemal Badiani: I scale with two fundamentals. One, find the right person, who has the right values, alignment, integrity, hunger, and drive that I carry, or subscribes to my vision. So each employees, each partner that we bring to the table, strategically or otherwise, I want to work with people that I can bring to my family, and they can barbecue with us over the weekend etc. So that's fundamental number one. And two is just staying nimble and flexible. A lot of people -- even though we stay in our lane, the market was so dynamic over the last two years, as you very well know. We've changed so many times the way we want to operate, and that's what we decide every quarter. That allows us to continue to build the horizontal stuff, which is the marketing, the HR side, the technology side, all the things that we need. But then vertically, we're building different divisions of the companies where based on where the market is, I can accelerate it a little bit more, versus slow down... Purchase of multifamily - the cap rates are super compressed, we don't need to buy as many, versus we can do something else here on the land side, or the construction side etc, etc. So that nimble and flexibility side of things to just not marry to an idea for a long period of time, and then surrounding myself... You know, like 10 people standing at the traffic light, trying to cross the road, and some random stranger wants to ask for directions... They'll probably come to me. I just carry that vibe. People want to work with us, and they move towns... My acquisitions director moved there his whole family, my head of new development sold his firm to join us... It's just been amazing to see that.

Ash Patel: Hemal, the Carolinas are very competitive. How do you find deals today?

Hemal Badiani: That's a great question. First quarter of 2021 we bought a very large anchor asset, an hour and a half from us, in Winston Salem, North Carolina. So that allowed us to build the credibility and resume with the brokers to kind of send us deals. But then we started getting pushed out of, because of the compressed cap rates and people were just buying silly stuff from our vantage point... So we started pivoting and saying "Well, do we really need to thump our chest and buy big stuff? Or can we just buy smaller deals, where there are not 50 people bidding on it, and the broker can still confidently say "Same street seven-unit, $70,000 a door. 100-unit plus is 130k, 140k a door. Same vintage, same look, everything." We would rather buy a seven-unit and stitch together an assemblage of portfolio that we can then self-manage, because self-management and vertical integration was our goal.

So we pivoted in 2021 to get to smaller deals, and we also expanded in the construction space, because we knew that we can find land, we know the paths of progress, we can talk to the economic development groups, we can go here, understand the political landscape where the growth is coming in the Charlotte MSA, where capacity is there, etc, etc. And that allows us to put strategic bets on the construction side. So we built that business, and then in 2022 we built the land business; we hired two retired guys who had 60+ years of land experience because they were in the utility side or the planning side of different counties here in the Charlotte market... So now we can go to each mayor of the county and say, "Well, where do you want to grow?" And then we start backwards and say, "Okay, this is the pocket they want to see growth next." So they're very open... And now we go and find land there, we buy land, rezone it, sell it to ourselves, or someone else... If we sell it to ourselves, we'll build on it; maybe sell it to ourselves on the existing site, and then manage it with a property management company.

So that's kind of the lifecycle and vertical integration we're creating. So it's a very different structure to buying stuff than typical syndications who need to buy 300 units every quarter. We don't do that.

Break: [00:16:47.26] to [00:18:45.07]

Ash Patel: You whimsically said "We hired these two guys." Explain that to me. Did you try them out? Did you just hire them to scale, and just hoped for the best?

Hemal Badiani: Again, it's magic, man... We find people. We had a very large tract of land, 155 acres of land that we could build 300 homes on. We had a contract with a national developer to sell it; basically, rezone and be able to sell it at 3x what we were buying, so an amazing transaction. Amazing profitability. We hit a snag politically, where we were starting to get no votes for growth. The counting wasn't that comfortable, or seemingly so, for that land to be rezoned and annexed into the county. They didn't want to see 300 homes come there, for whatever reason.

So we just randomly searched for a fixer that knew that county and could help us navigate and orchestrate a much better, much crisper presentation on why this is the best thing to happen to the county, and why they should say yes to it. So we basically dated before we married this one person, and he brought the second person they came as a team... And then we started talking - again, the same conversation happens in [unintelligible 00:19:59.10] "We love the vision that you have, the way you're building the company, the humility that you possess. How do we work together?" And I'm like, "Let's bring you on board, and let's find 2,000 acres of land in the next 12 months, and let's get all of them rezoned, and just fill out the pipeline." And so that's how they joined us after a few months.

Ash Patel: Interesting. You hired people, and they were not able to pay for themselves initially.

Hemal Badiani: Yes.

Ash Patel: Is that a big secret to scaling?

Hemal Badiani: It is. It's aligning their interest. It's having a genuine conversation. Everybody sees success differently, and that evolves. So it's having a conversation, putting yourself in their shoes, and saying, "What do you really want to be?" If you say, "I want to be Hemal in 12 months", well, I'm not ready to give up my seat yet; maybe 10 years. But if you say, "Hey, I want to double my income. I want to make sure my family's okay. I want to stay flexible in my hours, or my college kids are coming of age, and we have this gap in the nest egg." Structuring something that allows us to have now vision plus long-term reliance, and the symbiotic nature with us, allows them to work with us much more flexibly, and be with us for a longer time.

And then the second thing is I look people in the eye -- I'm a very trusting guy, so once I find the right person, I trust them so much they get uncomfortable sleeping at night. I look at them and I'm like, "I know you've got this." And they just do magic and they go above and beyond. So there's just factors and leadership 101 that I think everybody intrinsically who are good leaders, who have people surrounded, and provide that kind of support to teams, however small or large they are, they kind of know intrinsically... But I love talking about it, because that's what I did for 20 years, essentially, in the corporate world.

Ash Patel: What's one of the hardest lessons you've learned in real estate?

Hemal Badiani: It's a slow game. It's not like the tech world; you have to really bake it. To spend years and years and years in terms of getting there.

Ash Patel: I'm talking about a lesson that just kicked your teeth in, and gave you a pit in your stomach...

Hemal Badiani: Yeah... If that's the case, last year we had a huge, huge $45 million dollar deal that we walked away from after losing due diligence money on it... Which we contested. And it was a significant amount of money that we lost. And the biggest lesson was whenever we let our excitement and emotions take over the due process and map... It's an easy business if you do the due process and map. It's not easy in terms of not putting the hours. I work seven days a week. But it's easier to find the right things for yourself, if you do the math, have a due process and structure created and you follow all the time, and evolve, and continuous improvement. But if you get your excitement let you diverge from that process, you can get knocked down pretty quickly.

So even though we've stayed super risk-mitigated, we have $0 of recourse debt, even in the construction world, we like to be in a very safe position from our investors money; less returns, that's fine, but never lose a dime of investors money. But that was a big lesson learned. That was a $45 million project that came to us from someone else. They said they did the due diligence, we trusted them. We didn't follow our process; we leveraged the documents that were provided by the sellers, and we found out there was a misleading set of financial information once we got under contract and the deposit was given. So that was hard to back out of; I personally lost money on it... But that's taught us a lot of things.

Ash Patel: How much was the earnest money that you guys lost?

Hemal Badiani: It was $385,000.

Ash Patel: Yeah... That's a tough one, man.

Hemal Badiani: It's a tough one. But if I had bought it, and three years later I'd have lost investors' money on it, my reputation, my credibility would have been on the line; I will do it any day of the week. It's very hard to do.

Ash Patel: Yeah, it's always hard to walk away from those knowing you're going to lose money... And it often clouds your judgment, because you don't want a loss. But it's taking the emotion out of the equation, so good for you on that one. Good lesson learned. How do you have all non recourse debt?

Hemal Badiani: We have some badass brokers, and we shop for it, and that's our criteria. A lot of people have come to us and said "Yeah, if you sign recourse, I'll give you higher leverage... And if you do personal guarantee..." I just don't sleep well at night with recourse debt. So we have 120 million in real estate, including three construction projects - zero non-recourse so far.

Ash Patel: Interesting. So you have to put a lot more money down on deals...

Hemal Badiani: Sometimes. Four months back, pre- this crazy Fed interest rate hike and all the other macroeconomic changes that have happened, we used to get 80% leverage, plus 100% CapEx. We've never gone to 90. That's too much leverage, from my vantage point. But a good 80% leverage, any deal that we could get with non-recourse?

Ash Patel: Hemal, how did you get into build to rent?

Hemal Badiani: We found out from a couple of masterminds that built to rent is becoming much more viable economically in terms of attractiveness of capital, and also the way things could be structured. It's like horizontal apartment building - you get more space, with COVID and other things happening... Because people need their own privacy, but they also want rent, because of fundamentals in the market.

So when we started looking at land, and the two guys we have, plus Brandon, my head of new development, our third partner there - we started looking at large tracts of lands that we could rezone, and just strategically found a couple of parcels that were just conducive to a great path of progress, built to rent community. And so we said, "How do we explore that?" We found a national developer that has built for a fee type of spec homes, or prefabricated homes that they can bring to the table... And then I was courting a fund, which is our first joint venture actually... Typically, we syndicate with retail investors, but this one is a fund that I've been talking to for the last 12 months, I would say, to see if we can do some deals together... And they were like "Yeah, build to rent - we'll bring in 100% of the money." I don't have to come with a dime from my pocket. They will co-sign the loan with us, again, non-recourse, and we have a 50/50 split, which is way better than a real estate syndication model that we do, at a lower pref, 6% pref, instead of 7%, 8% that we provide. So just stars aligned for us to do that.

And then we were like, "Okay, this is great." It's almost like my 100 homes, one by one. That's what we're doing. We have our own property management company. How do we expand this model now? Because we can build stuff at a cheaper rate; it's an affordability crisis, we need more homes, especially in the Charlotte MSA... We can bring land to the table, we can bring property management to the table... How do we make more cheaper capital to the table? How can we do that? So we're exploring different options. We're going international by the end of the year; I'm going to India and Middle East to find some capital there for that specific purpose. So that will be an exciting side of the business that we're expanding on.

Ash Patel: If I look at my notes correctly, you quit your job 16 months ago, and you said 12 months ago you started talking to this fund.

Hemal Badiani: Yes.

Ash Patel: So four months into quitting your job, you knew that you were gonna raise a lot of capital. Pretty courageous move there...

Hemal Badiani: [laughs] It's an evolution. Unlike many people, my philosophy is I don't put numbers to things. I want 4,000 units, or I want this amount of money, or anything of that sort. I just feel that if I stay disciplined on what works in this market -- like, we are completely going aggressive in this market, and low-balling at 18% discount offers all the time right now in multifamily... Even though we bought the entirety of 2021 less than 100 units, now we're trying to buy 200-300 units, 500 units at a time, because of where the market is and what we can do creatively on the debt side and the equity side.

So it's allowing me to just say, "Hey, I don't care if I do 100 million or 10 million. As long as my partners and employees make a good living, I can make a decent living, we're good to go." We just continue the momentum and the expansion of the business, and the way we're building each project is more important to us than having a fancy target. And that philosophy has allowed us, for the most part - except a couple of big mistakes that we made, like I mentioned - stay in a very disciplined lane in terms of what we're trying to do.

Ash Patel: Hemal, what was the anchor asset you mentioned earlier?

Hemal Badiani: It was a '60s asset LITEC deal. [unintelligible 00:29:18.12] More than he wanted to learn... Low Income Housing Tax Credit deal, if your listener doesn't know about LITEC. So it's a very compliance-oriented -- you'd work with the North Carolina Housing Authority all the time. It could have Section 8, it could have non-section eight... So it's a very compliance-oriented, capped tenant base in terms of the type of rents you could charge... But it was just bought by this guy eight, nine years into the making, and he bought it for a couple of million bucks. Beautiful 26-acres property, with a school in the middle, community gardens... It was a model asset for the city, for us to get into. And again, we love the local aspect of influence - business alliances, council people, the mayor, the governor, all of that, kind of building that. So that's 246 units. It's an asset called Madeira Crest, that we bought in Winston Salem.

Ash Patel: Hemal, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?

Hemal Badiani: Take action more than procrastination. When you're trying to climb a mountain, if you're thinking about what shoes you want to wear, and what pack bag you want to bring, and what gear, and what kind of filtered water you want to bring - I'm telling you, folks like myself, I'm gonna go barefoot and we're halfway there by the time you decide to take action. So you better be taking action, make mistakes, fail, and put your skin in the game; build that credibility through that... Have those scars. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. So you've gotta have those.

Ash Patel: Great advice. Thank you for that. Hemal, are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?

Hemal Badiani: Yes, let's do it.

Ash Patel: Alright, Hemal, what's the Best Ever book you've recently read?

Hemal Badiani: The Alter Ego Effect. It talks about how you can [unintelligible 00:31:10.08] or put yourself in an alter ego; a lot of famous celebrities, like Beyonce and others do, that allows them to have infinite energy. So when I come home from my work, and I put on a coat around "I need to be a dad now", and that's my Batman coat, and I call myself Batman to my kids. That's how we play, and that's how we do things.

Ash Patel: What happens if you get a phone call while you have that code on?

Hemal Badiani: The phone is in the other room, so it doesn't happen.

Ash Patel: Good. Hemal, what's the Best Ever way you like to give back?

Hemal Badiani: Through real estate. My whole world now revolves around real estate. We're going to buy land for climate change, and keep trees there... We already, as Exponential Giving, part of our Exponential Equity brand, we are giving back by saving people's homes from tax foreclosures. So that's one thing that -- in my flipping world, I knew that people just buy stuff at a very discounted rate from people who lived there for 50-60 years, because they couldn't pay taxes on their homes. We're doing a lot around that as well.

Ash Patel: I love that. And Hemal, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?

Hemal Badiani: My email address is hemal [at] exponential-equity.com. Our company's name is Exponential Equity. And my cell phone number is 980-254-5692. Happy to connect with anyone who's looking in the world of real estate and talk about things.

Ash Patel: Hemal, thank you again for joining us today and sharing your story. You quit your job 16 months ago, and scaled to an incredible business in a very short amount of time... And thanks for giving us some of the tips and tricks on how you got there.

Hemal Badiani: Thank you for inviting me here. It was a pleasure.

Ash Patel: Best Ever listeners, thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five-star review. Share the podcast with someone you think and benefit from it. Also, follow, subscribe and have a Best Ever day!

Website disclaimer

This website, including the podcasts and other content herein, are made available by Joesta PF LLC solely for informational purposes. The information, statements, comments, views and opinions expressed in this website do not constitute and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action. Neither Joe Fairless nor Joesta PF LLC are providing or undertaking to provide any financial, economic, legal, accounting, tax or other advice in or by virtue of this website. The information, statements, comments, views and opinions provided in this website are general in nature, and such information, statements, comments, views and opinions are not intended to be and should not be construed as the provision of investment advice by Joe Fairless or Joesta PF LLC to that listener or generally, and do not result in any listener being considered a client or customer of Joe Fairless or Joesta PF LLC.

The information, statements, comments, views, and opinions expressed or provided in this website (including by speakers who are not officers, employees, or agents of Joe Fairless or Joesta PF LLC) are not necessarily those of Joe Fairless or Joesta PF LLC, and may not be current. Neither Joe Fairless nor Joesta PF LLC make any representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information, statements, comments, views or opinions contained in this website, and any liability therefor (including in respect of direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage of any kind whatsoever) is expressly disclaimed. Neither Joe Fairless nor Joesta PF LLC undertake any obligation whatsoever to provide any form of update, amendment, change or correction to any of the information, statements, comments, views or opinions set forth in this podcast.

No part of this podcast may, without Joesta PF LLC’s prior written consent, be reproduced, redistributed, published, copied or duplicated in any form, by any means. 

Joe Fairless serves as director of investor relations with Ashcroft Capital, a real estate investment firm. Ashcroft Capital is not affiliated with Joesta PF LLC or this website, and is not responsible for any of the content herein.

Oral Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action. For more information, go to www.bestevershow.com.

    Get More CRE Investing Tips Right to Your Inbox