https://youtu.be/NQsbgn4iBos
Rocky Lalvani coaches businesses to leverage Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First System. We discuss the Profit First strategy, dissect what a healthy business looks like and contrast good and bad money behaviors.
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Pool Your Profits with Rocky Lalvani
Our guest is Rocky Lalvani, who is a fractional Chief Profitability Officer (CPO). He is a Profit First professional certified by, or based on Michael Michalowicz's book, Profit First, I guess he's a certified professional with the system. He is also a partner, he's a real estate investor and he focuses on rehabilitation type real estate investments. He is also the host of two podcasts, Profit Answer Man and The Richer Soul. That would definitely be good for me to enrich my soul. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Rutgers and an MBA from Penn State. Welcome to the show, Rocky. Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I'm excited to join you today.
So, let's dive in. Rocky, I'd like to understand how does one become a real estate investor? I mean, what is your entrepreneurial journey to real estate investment? And then this whole profit source, how did that come into the picture? Tell us your story a little bit.
So, I have a horrible entrepreneurial journey.
Okay.
As a kid, I always made a buck. Like I would go into New York City, buy stuff wholesale, come back and sell it to all my friends for double what I was buying it for. So I was making money. Computers were just coming out and I bought my first Apple II. And back then they came out with the electronic spreadsheets. So the first one was VisiCalc. I was teaching accountants how to go from paper ledger to electronic spreadsheets.
And while I was in college, I was working in a bank, like helping them with spreadsheets. And the idea in the back of my head was always, I want to start a business and teach people how to, you know, I'll create spreadsheets for you and make it work. In the meantime, I was also learning how to do real estate. So I was learning how to do all the repairs, because if we wanted repairs in our house, we couldn't afford people, we had to do it ourselves. And I actually had my real estate license when I was in college. S
o I was selling real estate, got out of college, had no clue how to start a business, how to approach companies, got a good job that turned out to be pretty lucrative. And the evil of great is good. So for quite a long time, I had a good life and I didn't invest in real estate. I didn't do anything. I kind of like, it was hesitant always. I didn't know what to do. And then probably 20 years later, right? After the last crash, real estate was cheap and we're like, okay, let's start playing around with real estate.
So I started buying rentals and then we started flipping because at that time it was kind of a no brainer business. I already had all the skills. I knew how to run the numbers and we finally got kicked off of the seat of waiting because that's the biggest problem I think so many of us is the fear of starting. So that got me into real estate and once we got started and I figured it out, we just started running with that. I still had this thing with numbers. So by this whole time, I knew how to build wealth and essentially I became a multimillionaire.
I'm like, why aren't there more people who are wealthy? Like, why is this so difficult for people to do? And I couldn't figure it out. And then I realized we aren't taught, like I have two degrees, as you mentioned, an MBA. You're not taught how to build wealth. And then I realized when I was a kid, my parents taught me about money. Most people are not taught about money or what they're taught about money is not appropriate. It's bad money behavior, so to speak. And so they're not taught good money behaviors, unfortunately.
Okay. So, what's a bad money behavior and what's a good money behavior?
Well, so if you grow up thinking rich people are evil,