Episode Description

This week Stephanie and Zach trade the leadership talk for something their audience keeps asking about: the money. Being a "cash buyer" rarely means all your cash, it means other people's money, and knowing how to use it is what separates people who want to invest from people who actually do. The honest starting point is that leverage terrified them at first, and getting past that fear is the whole game.

They get practical and tactical: the leverage debate (Kiyosaki versus Ramsey), a field guide to the different types of funding, the reserve mistakes that sink new investors, and a Sub-2 cautionary tale straight from the headlines. Plus a Left Main update with a couple of bonuses for anyone funding deals.

Key Takeaways

• Own 100% without paying 100%. Real estate lets you control a large asset for a fraction of its cost, which is its real superpower. The truth on leverage sits between the "leverage everything" and "debt is evil" camps: use it as a tool, but over-leverage (owing more than a property is worth) is how people get stuck.
• Don't use your own money first. Early on, you discount your own losses and don't yet know the steps, so a good lending partner brings both a process and a stopgap. Keep your own capital for reserves and margin, not for going all-in on one deal.
• Know your funding types. Private money comes from people in your network, is fast and flexible, and is papered like any mortgage. Hard money is institutional and more of a hassle, but its appraisal can stop a beginner from overpaying by $80,000. Transactional funding covers the day of closing so you can get into the chain of title, which matters more as new regulation lands.
• Reserves are survival. Rentals cash flow, but they're also cash suckers: a vacancy, a turn, and repairs pile up while the bank keeps billing. Zach's own "house rich, cash poor" story is the warning. Keep real reserves, build in margin, run every deal through your own diligence filter, and always know your exit strategies. As he puts it, if you can ride the wave, real estate works.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description
The topic this week is energy, and it started with Zach getting called out. In a meeting last week, a teammate asked if he was okay, because his energy just felt different, and she was right. The lesson landed hard: your energy is contagious, so managing it isn't a nice-to-have. It's the job. Stephanie and Zach spend the episode on how to show up well even when you don't feel like it, and how to build the rest that makes it sustainable.

They get into why an off day does more damage than a day off, how to manufacture energy instead of interrogating your feelings, where authenticity crosses into emotional dumping, and the practical hacks (and rest habits) that keep a leader in the game. Honest, useful, and full of small tricks you can steal.

Key Takeaways

• A day off beats an off day. Your energy has a "blast radius," and the higher up you sit, the wider it reaches. Show up wrecked and you tank everyone's productivity, not just your own. Often the fix is smaller than you think, an hour to walk and reset, and planned rest is sacred: schedule it like an athlete and never blow off a commitment mid-day on a whim.
• Manufacture the energy, stop asking how you feel. For in-the-moment slumps, it doesn't matter whether you feel like it. High performers manufacture the energy a moment needs instead of talking themselves out of it, and pre-deciding, the discipline from Craig Groeschel's book Think Ahead, keeps you from burning out re-deciding what you already knew to do.
• Authenticity isn't emotional dumping. Being real with your team doesn't mean unloading on them. Heavy is the crown, and part of the cost is containing your own weight. Your team needs you present, not managing your emotions, so put the right needs on the right people: peers, a mentor, a therapist, not your staff or your kids.
• Read the room. It's not always about more energy. Sometimes the moment needs fire, sometimes it needs calm, steady confidence. Ask what this specific room needs from you for the next 30 minutes, at work and at home.
• Build in the rest and the fun. Steal the hacks: a standing desk or walking meeting, movement as a pattern interrupt, a clean workspace with meaningful cues, a "happiness folder" for the low moments, and scheduling hard tasks for your green-zone hours. As The Levity Effect argues, fun makes you more effective, not less. Things can be hard and fun at the same time, and you can't pour from an empty cup.

Resources Mentioned

• Think Ahead by Craig Groeschel: https://www.craiggroeschel.com/books/think-ahead
• The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description
Everybody lists integrity as a core value, so is it even worth naming? Zach opens with that challenge, and his answer sets up the whole episode: plenty of people talk about integrity, but far fewer actually hold it when it costs them something. Honor, Stephanie and Zach argue, isn't the word on your values chart. It's what you do the moment keeping your word becomes painful.

They get into a framework for the hard calls (legal, ethical, and honorable), why knowing who you are kills decision fatigue, and how reputation quietly compounds into the most durable asset a business has, especially in an industry as small as this one. Honest, tactical, and full of real stories from their own company.

Key Takeaways

• Integrity only counts when it's inconvenient. Everybody claims it; the test is whether it holds when it costs you. The industry runs on contracts, yet too many operators treat an agreement as binding only when someone else wants out of it. Real honor is keeping your word when it's painful, even buying a house you expect to lose money on because you gave your word.
• Decide who you are before the moment comes. Zach frames three levels of doing right: what's legal, what's ethical, and above both, what's honorable. When you know that line in advance, the hard decisions stop being decisions at all. As Stephanie puts it, there's nothing left to decide.
• It's a game of deciding who to disappoint. Sometimes you can't keep every commitment, so honor becomes weighing the trade-offs, usually against the relationship. The rule is to never let anyone feel blindsided: lay the trade-off on the table plainly, the way Stephanie did when an employee was interviewing with a direct competitor.
• Run the honor tests. Before a hard call, Zach checks five things: the mirror test (can I respect myself after this), the headline test, the explanation test (could I explain it to my team, kids, and spouse), the reciprocity test, and the long-game test.
• Reputation is the asset that compounds. Character can't be faked over time, and it's a small world, so it always comes back around. Do right consistently and the people who've known you for years will weigh any rumor against who you actually are. The cleanest test of a core value: are you willing to turn away revenue to protect it?

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description

Stephanie and Zach take on a question they openly admit they haven't solved: how do you raise kids who stay grateful and driven when they're growing up with advantages you never had? It's a parenting conversation, but they frame it as a leadership one, using the same muscles they rely on to build a team.

They get honest (and personal) about talking to kids about money, building self-reliance before handing over the bills, and how to give every advantage you can without mowing down the struggle that builds grit. Two fools in love, as Zach puts it, trying to figure it out in real time.

Key Takeaways

• Teach the value of a dollar. Both grew up in homes where money was as taboo as sex or politics, and both call that a mistake: if kids won't learn it from the parents they trust, where will they learn it? Make it real and age-appropriate early, from what $20 buys at Target to a teenager covering her own gas, and remember being rich isn't the bad thing. The love of money is.
• Build self-reliance before the bills. The deeper lesson comes before money enters the picture: the intrinsic hit of "I did it myself." It can start as small as letting a kid bake their own cake from a box, a snowball of little wins that builds the confidence to later handle a hard decision alone.
• Don't be a lawnmower parent. Cutting down every obstacle robs kids of the muscle memory of pushing through hard things, what one book calls the poverty advantage. The goal isn't manufactured hardship, it's letting kids struggle under your wing while the safety net is still there.
• Drive without removing the net. Stephanie's parents could have paid for college but didn't, and while the "it's all on me" feeling built her independence, she's not sure the tough love was necessary. She wants her kids to own their lives without ever believing no one will catch them.
• Match their energy, and back real passion. Whatever a kid puts in, match it, and when an opportunity stops being appreciated, the funding stops. Pour advantages into the passions they actually own, not the ones you manufacture for them, which is harder than ever in a world built to keep them consuming on a screen.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description

With Zach out for the day, Stephanie takes the mic solo and brings on two people she's building something big with: Steve Trang and Jordan Samuel Fleming. The occasion is REI Tech Unlocked, the first-ever real estate investing tech event, landing September 19 to 21. But the conversation is really about a frustration all three share, and the AI lesson most operators are getting wrong.

They dig into why they built an event with no pay-to-play booths and no Lambo mindset talks, the difference between siloed AI tools and a business actually redesigned around them, and why big technology is finally paying attention to real estate investors. Tactical, honest, and built for operators who want something they can use right now.

Key Takeaways

• Built out of frustration. The idea started four years ago on a boat in Jamaica: roughly 100,000 serious operators in the country and no honest place to evaluate the tech meant to serve them, just affiliate links and guru referrals. So the three built the event they always wanted to attend, where you sit down with the service providers your peers actually use and see exactly how the tools work inside a real business.
• The bottleneck isn't the AI, it's your business. As Jordan puts it, sticking a digital employee into an analog business kills the leverage. Run a thousand AI calls into a closing team built for twenty deals and you've created capacity that just gets dropped. The win comes from redesigning for integrated capacity, not bolting a tool onto a broken process.
• AI made productivity go up, so headcount went up too. Steve started the year an AI doomer bracing for lost jobs, and is now hiring more salespeople, customer success, and fulfillment. The productivity gains surfaced a new bottleneck: quality people. The whole business transforms, not just the one tool you plug in.
• Overwhelmed is fine. Staying the same is not. Even top AI researchers admit the pace is overwhelming, so it's okay to feel behind. What's not okay is for your business to look exactly the same six months from now.
• Get in the room. Meta, Salesforce and Slack, Twilio, and Collective Genius are all showing up, a sign big tech is finally taking this industry seriously. Attendees get 45 minutes one-on-one with any company (including the people who actually build the products), plus sessions on the 2026 sales team, the 2027 org chart, and trusted calling.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description

Bobby Suarez ran his South Florida home-buying business as a one-man show until 2018. Today Sell to Bobby is a team of more than 25 with an executive bench, a second market in Tampa, and a few side ventures on top. In this episode, Bobby sits down with Stephanie and Zach to trace how he got there, and the throughline is a comfort with risk most operators talk themselves out of.

Bobby walks through the television bet that rebuilt his company, why he now spends to be omnipresent instead of chasing perfect attribution, and how a mastermind rewired what he thought was possible. Along the way: hiring people better than you, keeping a team aligned on comp, staying a student when the channels change, and the short memory that keeps entrepreneurs moving after a loss.

Key Takeaways

• Do it scared. Bobby said yes to a five-figure monthly TV spend despite the fear, rebranded to something memorable, and closed his first contract on day two. When he's scared he moves fast and figures it out after, because overthinking is usually the more expensive mistake, and you don't need all the answers to start.
• Brand is a moat built on frequency. Broadcast TV, radio, billboards, direct mail, PPC, even Super Bowl spots and a billboard doctored to look vandalized: the goal is to be impossible to miss. Instead of toggling hard-to-measure channels on and off, Bobby budgets to be everywhere, because sellers only hand their house to a name they trust.
• Hire people better than you, and align the comp. Bobby focuses on what he's good at (running the company, recruiting, building leaders) and brings in "culture enhancers" people love to work for. Everyone's pay, from executives to entry level, is tied to closed deals, so the whole team rows in the same direction.
• Buy the cheat codes. Joining Collective Genius showed Bobby what was actually possible and shortcut years of trial and error. As he puts it, the more people you know, the more money you'll make, so get in the rooms and stay a go-giver.
• Keep a short memory. When the Tampa launch stumbled, Bobby logged it as what not to do next time and kept moving. Learn the lesson, tag it, forget the rest, and stay a student who's willing to pivot rather than clinging to "this is how I've always done it."

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description

You can repeat a goal until you're blue in the face, but if nothing happens when the date passes, it never meant anything. In this episode, part two to last week's conversation on meetings, Stephanie and Zach get into accountability: the least glamorous lever in leadership, and one of the most important. It starts, fittingly, with a story about their daughter missing an academic goal by a single point.

They dig into how to hold a standard without demoralizing your team, why conservative and realistic goals beat grand ones you'll miss, how to shorten the reward loop so effort actually gets reinforced, and the difference between telling people what to do and telling them why. Honest, tactical, and full of lessons that cross straight over from parenting to payroll.

Key Takeaways

• A standard you don't hold isn't a standard. Don't devalue a goal by negotiating it after the fact, but do build a path that rewards real effort. In business the line is blunt: you can't make payroll on effort alone, so hold it, while watching that the metric you enforce is actually producing the result you want.
• Set goals people can actually hit, and reward them fast. A conservative goal you crush beats a grand one you miss, and data should set the number, not a gut guess. Shorten the distance between the work and the reward (monthly bonuses, small wins celebrated along the way) so the effort gets reinforced.
• Make accountability cultural, not personal. Framed as data instead of emotion, the only question is whether you did what you said by when. Praise publicly, coach privately, and remember that what you tolerate speaks louder than any all-hands speech, because how you do one thing is how you do everything.
• Tell them why, not just what. Stephanie's retelling of a Jocko Willink lesson lands it: a team ordered only to "get to the roof" gets stuck when the roof is blocked, but a team that knows the mission can improvise and still succeed. That's the difference between the concept and the blueprint, and it's why every task should tie to an outcome, made personal to the individual.
• Keep goals finite so you can see drift early. Know what week of the quarter you're in and what percentage of the target you've hit. That turns a meeting into a place to solve the gap and IDS what's off, instead of just reading the number aloud.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description
Meetings get a bad rap, and there are whole books to prove it. But in this episode, Stephanie and Zach make the case that a meeting you dread is almost always a leadership problem in disguise: poorly set up, poorly run, or one that should never have been on the calendar. Stephanie comes in worn down by weeks of back-to-back calls and real decision fatigue, which turns out to be the perfect place to start.
They dig into what actually separates a meeting that drives decisions from one that just drains everyone: leading with purpose, preparing (or canceling), holding people accountable without steamrolling them, and protecting the leader's energy and thinking time as the company scales. Practical, tactical, and honest about their own mistakes along the way.

Key Takeaways

• Give every meeting a purpose, or cancel it. The meetings that burn you out are the ones where you only discuss and never decide. If someone shows up unprepared, the work quietly shifts onto you, and a meeting that is just a status readout could have been an email.
• Judge it by clarity, direction, and purpose. You should leave more clear than you came, knowing exactly what happens next. Use the IDS habit from Traction (identify, discuss, solve): bring problems to solve, not reports to recite.
• Hold people accountable without diminishing them. Deciding for people to save time makes them smaller, but staying too reserved to name the problem is just as damaging. Lead with extreme ownership by first asking what they needed from you that they didn't have, and ask more questions before you jump to the answer.
• You can't outgrow your own leadership. The company will never grow past the level of the CEO's leadership, so hire strategic thinkers instead of task-doers and keep investing in your own development, even when learning doesn't feel immediately productive.
• Protect the capacity to decide. The bigger the company, the more blank space and thinking time the leader needs, not less. Borrow the fifty-minute hour, remember that a task expands to fill the time you give it, and put your own oxygen mask on first: canceling a meeting you're too fried to run well isn't rude, it's protecting the whole team.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description

Now that AI has made speed cheap, a website goes up in an afternoon and "We Buy Houses" is on every postcard, moving fast is no longer a differentiator. So what is?
In this episode, Stephanie and Zach dig into the two things worth slowing down on to actually pull ahead: building a brand, and understanding the revenue math underneath your pipeline.
They get tactical fast. Stephanie and Zach talk through branded versus unbranded marketing and why recognizability and reviews win in a noisy world, then go down the revenue-operations rabbit hole: pipeline coverage, active pipeline, and the simple math that turns a big vision into a goal your team can actually hit. Along the way, why both plays come down to the same discipline of delayed gratification.

Key Takeaways

• If you can't draw a line to revenue, it's entertainment. Brand and marketing conversations are fun, but ground every one of them in the funnel. The question that matters is not what's easiest to measure, it's what's actually effective.
• Your logo is not your brand. In a world where everyone runs the same cash-offer message, attention is only the surface. Real brand is trust built over time, and it answers a harder question: what do you actually stand for?
• Recognizability and validation drive inbound. People research you before they ever call, so reviews, a real website, and a consistent presence do the convincing. Most buyers will trust 30,000 reviews at a good rating over three perfect ones.
• Size your pipeline with real math. Pipeline coverage is one divided by your close rate. Close 20% and want a million dollars in a quarter, and you need five million in active pipeline. Per rep, a million-a-year target at a $15k average deal and a 20% close rate works out to about 83 active opportunities every quarter.
• Clean the pipeline before you buy more leads. "Active" means alive: pending appointments, hot follow-ups, deals in negotiation, not four-year-old cold leads. Most reps have less real pipeline than their dashboard shows, and often the fix is another person working it, not more volume.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home

Episode Description
There is a new AI tool almost every day, and for anybody who struggles with focus, that is equal parts exciting and terrifying. In this episode, Stephanie and Zach cut through the buzzword noise and get practical about where AI actually earns its place in a real estate business, and where it just becomes an expensive distraction.
They dig into the reframe most owners get wrong (AI is labor, not a person you replace), a simple way to sort your tech stack so you know where to plug in, and why the operators learning this now are quietly pulling away from everyone else. Along the way: what stays valuable when the machines get good, and why the highest performers are still the ones having fun.

Key Takeaways

• Ideas without execution is just entertainment. The excitement of a new tool means nothing until you do something with it. Shiny object syndrome is fun, but it's a distraction from the thing your company is actually supposed to do.
• AI is labor, not a job role. Stop asking who you can replace and start asking where the friction is. Hook a tool up to your CRM, ask where your best opportunities are today, and it makes the operator better instead of replacing them. You do more with the same team.
• Sort your stack, then start with the funnel. Split your tech into system of record (your center of truth), system of action (where the work happens), and database (the raw data underneath). Then pick one friction point in your funnel, lead to close, that ties directly to revenue. That keeps you grounded instead of chasing the next tool.
• Speed is the race, and this is the worst it will ever be. The people learning AI now are pulling away, and catching up gets harder every week. As Stephanie put it, winners lose more than losers: you fumble, you iterate, you come out faster and more accurate.
• Protect the human layer. AI can manage tasks, but it won't lead a team, and the trust between two people is something a three-minute website can't fake. When AI does away with average, relationship, perspective, and leadership become your real differentiators.

Left Main is more than just a CRM, it's an end-to-end Real Estate Investment operations solution to run your company as an actual business with sales systems embedded. Want to find out more, book a call today, leftmainrei.co or whosinchargepodcast.com/home