Helping One Person A Day Achieve The Fit Rich Life With Pili Yarusi

 

In this episode, Pili Yarusi of Yarusi Holdings LLC joins Lisa Hylton as they talk about helping one person a day take one step closer to the fit rich life. Pili dives into how she and her husband, Jason, got started in real estate and the lessons they learned throughout their experience. Pili expounds on their goal of $450 million in assets with large multifamily and why they kept with their beliefs and systems even with the disruption to pursue their goal. Pili digs deeper into the importance of communication with your partner and how she and her husband evolved while building a business based on the strong foundation of their relationship. Tune in and learn how you can create the fit rich life and get the whole package for you and your family.

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Helping One Person A Day Achieve The Fit Rich Life With Pili Yarusi

I have another amazing guest. I’m going to have you say your name. 

My full name is Pilialoha Yarusi, but you and your readers and anybody you know can call me Pili.

I’m notorious for butchering names.

Me too, especially if I forget to ask, I’ll stop the entire podcast and I’ll be like, “I forgot to ask you how to say your name. We’re going to do this over again.” I love it that you’re taking your ownership of this.

Pili is a wonderful woman, an amazing wife, a loving mom and an awesome human being. She has partnered with her equally awesome husband, Jason, and created Yarusi Holdings LLC, a large multifamily investment firm. They are general partners in about 800 units with 250 under direct asset management. Her focus is on large multifamily syndications and asset management. She has a goal of $450 million in assets under management. Pili’s high-level action steps are providing her investors with capital preservation by looking for B2C class assets in the $20 million to $50 million range. Her markets include Kentucky, Georgia and Florida. She’s the co-host of The Jason and Pili Project. Her goal is to help one person a day take one step closer to the fit, rich life. You are notorious for doing the go hard challenges. Is that what they’re called? 

Seventy-five Hard Challenge. I can go down that road with you this entire show if you want because it’s been a better part of our year.

You are fitness people all the way, always running, going hard. 

The funny thing is if you had asked me this if I was a fitness person 7, 10 years ago into my twenties, I would have been like, “I do yoga sometimes and I’d like to go dancing,” but not really. The thing is you become a mom, your body changes and all of a sudden you have to pay attention.

Did motherhood bring out the fitness side of you? 

Yes, it did. If you want to go down that road, my first pregnancy, I gained 75 pounds. I was like all of 115 to hitting 190, and that wrecked my frame. I was healthy. My doctors were like, “Maybe you should slow down a little bit.” After that I was like, “After every pregnancy, I would get my body back at fit and then I would bounce back.” I would gain the weight again, even though I try not to, but I would. That’s the way my body reacts to being pregnant. It wants to meet all the food. I’m 5’8”. I’m not hugely tall but I’m okay height-wise, so my body could take it. After every pregnancy, I would have to take my body and myself back to what I feel is normal and healthy. A lot of it is the mindset and challenging yourself.

Mentorship is key once you reach a certain level. Click To Tweet

How many children do you have? 

I have three children: 5, 3 and 1. Two boys, one girl in the middle.

You have your hands full.

A little bit, especially since they’re not in school now because of our whole situation. It’s been interesting taking on the role of a not only businesswoman and entrepreneur, now I am a teacher. It has been an amazing process and we can dive deep into that.

To get started, I’m doing a series on how people got started investing in real estate and you all have done a lot of amazing things. I’m also writing down Gary Vee’s name because I want to make sure that I touch on that episode that you did with him and how you made that happen. How did you guys start investing in real estate? What was the process?

I got pregnant, that was the process. Back up a little bit. We were in New York, Jason and I. We were working and managing the restaurant we met at. We decided after the season is over that we are going to have our first child. It’s going to take six months to a year to get pregnant. It took us two months to get pregnant. I was like, “I’m not bartending again. I’m not going to manage restaurants. It’s too stressful. It’s too much of a toll on my body and I’m not going to be pregnant behind a bar.” Jason tells me about this wonderful town called Westfield, New Jersey that he grew up in. It’s amazing with wonderful schools. I was like, “Stop. You had me at wonderful schools. Let’s go.” We moved into Westfield and we have to figure out what we’re going to do. At the time, we had already started integrating ourselves into Jason’s family’s house lifting business. They take a house lifted up and this was 2013. This was right after Hurricane Sandy had hit New Jersey and he hit it hard.

My father-in-law and my mother-in-law had been in this business for 40, 50 years, depending on when you ask them. They take-homes, lift them up, build a foundation and then put the house back down, and all of a sudden you have a new house that’s above the BFE, the Base Flood Elevation. We took that idea. In our first idea for our flips, we fall in love with this idea that we’re going to take these storm-ravaged homes, hopefully buy it at a discount because who’s going to want that home? Buy it at a discount, help the seller out and then take the home, lift it up twice, putting on a garage, putting a new first floor and then putting the existing house on top. We did that a couple of times. The thing is that, it was not cost effect and time effective. Knowing that, we started to get into smaller flips like lipstick on pig stuff that you’re supposed to do when you’re a new flipper.

We got into mentorship programs and we finally learned the systems. We never lost money on any of the flips that we’ve ever done, but we did not have the systems in place when we first started. For all your readers who are thinking to begin in real estate or are in real estate are pulling their hair out as to like, “What’s going wrong?” It’s either something is wrong with your systems or you need systems. The best place for us to get them at work was going into a mentorship program. We joined Justin Williams. Now it’s owned by Bill Allen, 7 Figure Flipping, amazing group. I recommend that to everybody if you’re flipping and wholesaling.

We get into these small flips and we started wholesaling. I go to a REIA meeting and for some reason, Jason wasn’t with me. I started talking with this gentleman. I don’t know him but we start talking about real estate. He is like, “I do this thing called turnkey.” I was like, “What’s that?” He explains to me what turnkey is. He buys a property and you invest in him. I was like, “My husband and I are already doing all this stuff.” He was like, “Look at my website. I have some deals on the plate. You sound pretty savvy investors. Let me know what you think.” We look at the numbers of some of his deals and they make sense because he was developing in Indianapolis. This was 2015, 2016. People were starting to get into that market. We’re like, “We’re not interested in those, but do you have some duplexes that we could take a look at?” He sent us a couple of duplexes.

We found one, the numbers were amazing. We’re like, “This is what we’re going to do. I don’t want to do turnkey. What we’re going to do is we’re going to buy the property outright. We’re going to have whatever fee you want,” because he was going direct to the seller. “You wholesale us the property, your team takes care of the construction. We’ll pay for your construction team. Your team takes care of the management. We’ll pay your management team, but we want to discounts as we’re fronting all the money upfront.” We got a great discount on the property. It was a great partnership. We ended up buying another duplex from them. If I remember correctly, the ROI on that was someplace at around 25%. Jason and I sit down and we start having a discussion because he’s like, “I have more duplexes.” He was like, “Pili, the only way you’re going to be able to make this work is if you scale.” I was starting to learn new about scaling and building our portfolio.

 

This is not stuff that I had ever thought about in my early 30s. I was 34, 35 at the time. He’s like, “I have all these duplexes or fourplexes and sixplexes.” We’re like, “Let me talk to Jason and see what we want to do.” He’s like, “Pili, if we can do this with a couple of duplexes and make this much money, what if we got a 50-unit, 100-unit, 1,000-unit?” That’s how we started in real estate. I could jump all into our journey into multifamily. That’s the start and we got into multifamily and we’ve been focused on that since then.

Before we get into how you play now, what were some of the lessons that those early experiences brought that impacted your journey going forward, maybe even the journey when you started going into multifamily? 

It was everything. There are a lot of people that jump into multifamily and kudos to them. I wish we had started multifamily earlier. I wish I’d gotten into real estate back in the ’80s when I was four. We used to say, “We’re going to get into it when we get into it.” Starting off flipping and wholesaling, it gave us the chance to fail. We failed big on a lot of our projects because we didn’t have the systems in place. It wasn’t until we joined the mentorship program that we finally met the right people. We have lifelong friends in the flipping and wholesaling industries. Jason will give himself permission to do anything, but I needed an extra boost to say, “Pili, you can do this from friends, colleagues, people that were doing kabillion dollars more than me.” Having that permission, especially from the mentors that I had in that group, it was building and I needed that. I needed that spirit and that building. I learned at a young age in a real state that within the first couple of years that we’re in that mentorship is key.

Once you reach a certain level, I’m not saying for your readers out there if you’re just starting, do not pay anyone a kabillion dollars to learn what they do, because you don’t know if the way they do it is the way you want to do it. What you do is you listen to podcasts like Lisa’s and mine. There are many podcasts out there. Read the books, get in there. That’s how you get learning about what asset class you wanted to get into, who you want to listen to. In multifamily alone, there are many mentors of different asset class sizes. There are couples like Jason and me, there are single people. There are many people that I would even recommend to you. It’s anything in real estate, you have to do your due diligence but you need to find a mentor at some point once you start making a little bit of money. That was a huge key turning point for us. All of a sudden, we went from doing it semi-well because my father-in-law knows a lot about construction and has run crews his entire life. My husband has a great business mind and has a great way of getting people in line and organizing things and I hug everyone. Our powers combined were fantastic. Having those systems was key. That was the biggest takeaway from everything we learned in flipping and wholesaling and the genesis of where we are now.

Where you are now, how do you play in real estate these days? I touched on it in your bio, you have such clear goals. It’s awesome. 

Our goal is $450 million in assets under management. We invest passively. We invest as a general partner in deals, which means we come into deals and we help out with the deal, whether it’s with underwriting, with finding the deal. We don’t manage the deal, but we help out with it. We become partners in the deal. We have operated deals and we have managed the assets and that’s 250 of our doors. We want to grow that part exponentially. That goal was made before all this stuff happened with COVID. The thing is we’re not letting that stop us. That is still our goal. I know you’re supposed to put a time limit on goals, but we don’t have a time limit on this because the thing is with large multifamily, you can’t force it. There’s some stuff about wholesaling and flipping that you can mold that. You can mold the numbers but the thing is with real estate, if the numbers don’t work, you don’t buy it. With large multifamily, because we’re working with such large numbers and we have a fiduciary duty to our investors because we are syndicators and we use other people’s money. We want to make sure that the deal is solid.

We don’t have a goal of having ten deals this year 2020. I’m not going to force that on myself. If I only take down one and it works to the tee and people make money, I’m happy. That being said, that’s where we are. That’s our goal. Jason and I are large multifamily syndicators. All of the assets that we have under management are in Louisville, Kentucky, but we do look in other markets and we have gone the general partner route in Austin and Atlanta. These are with other syndicators that we adore. They happened to bring us a good deal and we were like, “The numbers work and we like you, we’ll help you out.”

Why Kentucky? What do you like about your market in Kentucky that you invest in? 

There is a whole slew of things that we could go into, but the first thing we thought of, it’s not a state. The great thing about us investing in those two duplexes before is that gave us permission to look past our home market, which is New Jersey. That can be not cost-effective. We had a list of markets we wanted to go in and Kentucky being one of them. We decided to deep dive into that market. Number one, because we found our first deal there and number two, the real kicker was that we had boots on the ground. They weren’t necessarily real state boots. We didn’t get those until we started calling hundreds of people. We had to create our team first. Jason’s sister lives there. One of his best friends lives there. We could find out information about the market that not your normal person might know that doesn’t live there. That was what glued us in. There’s much about the financials and the growth of the market and the market itself and the numbers that encapsulates that hooked us in. It was a place that we wouldn’t mind going to.

The duplex that you did, was that in that market? 

You don't have to be passionate about it, but you have to want to do it. Click To Tweet

No, those were in Indianapolis. That’s close to my sister-in-law’s place. When we do duplexes, Jason went and did due diligence for us and stayed with his sister, drove two hours to Indianapolis and took a look at the properties. They were in bad shape, but he could see the potential. He was like, “This makes sense.”

I also feel that people who have that flipping and wholesaling experience, they come with that skillset of being able to see sometimes the diamonds in the rough and see the potential that a deal could bring to the extent that the work is done. 

It’s all of that. It’s looking at the numbers and seeing the potential, looking at the property, doing your due diligence, looking at each and every single unit when you’re dealing with multifamily, and seeing the potential in each unit. Making sure you know what you can bring and how you can raise the value of your building. That’s what multifamily is all about.

For the one that you said, there are 250 under direct asset management. Can you talk about what you mean by direct asset management? Are there investors in on that 250-unit?

It’s not 250-unit, it’s 250 units combined. We invest across four properties. By direct asset management meaning, we manage the asset, we manage the financials of the asset. We manage the property manager. We make sure that everything falls in line with our business plan. Whereas if you’re a general partner of a partnership or a limited partner, the general partner wouldn’t have anything to do with that. A general partner assists the operator and asset manager. A limited partner is passive investors.

As you continue to build out this goal that you have of $450 million in assets under management, what do you see the path for yourself? Is that a combination of continuing to collaborate with other syndicators? This is your active goal as a general partner.

As a sponsor, as a syndicator, as somebody who wants to manage these assets, this is what we’re looking towards. That’s our North Star, our lighthouse, our big audacious goal like any goal because we’re talking about fitness. I’m doing this goal of 50 pushups every day for the next 30 days. I can’t do that in a row, but if I bite chunks off, then I’ll get to it. It’s the same thing with the $450 million. That sounds a big number. If you had asked me that number even years ago, I would have been like, “What are you talking about?” When Jason and I put our heads together, we’re like, “You’re going to make the number $450 million. We know people that have done it. We know people who have reached that goal and are doing well in all their assets. Why not us?”

I want to touch on a couple of chunky topics here. The first one is building a business in a partnership. You talk a lot about you and your husband working together and doing these different things. I want to know the advice you would give to other married couples who are approaching real estate as partners, and perhaps lessons you have learned to navigate the path and still stay married? 

I’m going to give you the answer that you’re going to expect from me because it’s true, communicate. I’m going to be completely real and honest with your readers, but if you have stuff in your relationship that’s holding the relationship down, it’s not going to go away if you put this heavy layer of real estate on it. Jason and I are huge proponents of building a foundation. You and your significant other, your partner need to build that foundation together. That foundation starts with both of you. If both of you have problems that are in the background, you need to bring that forward and talk about it first. I used to have difficulty with money. Jason and I had to have that hard conversation as to why I had difficulty with money. I’ve never had debt. I went to a fairly cheap college that I got mostly scholarships for, so I didn’t have any debt on that. I didn’t have any credit cards until my early 30s. I never liked the idea of debt, but the things I never learned how to manage it. Once I started acquiring debt, or I might be using the wrong word, I didn’t know how to manage it. I had to learn how to manage it and learn how to work with Jason financially.

That’s one thing because finances is a huge thing. Number two, I get this from a lot of people I talk to, if it’s not something that you want to do, go ahead and try it if your significant other wants to try it. If it’s something that you don’t want to do and you don’t have to be passionate about it but you have to want to do it. Whether it’s for the money, whether it’s to teach other people how to do it, you have to have a why that you’re doing it. If you can’t fill in that why within the first year, give yourself six months to a year to explore it, then you need to pivot and figure something else out. It’s okay to pivot as long as you pivot together, or you can pivot separately but you have to support each other. You have to have that line of communication open because if you are afraid to tell your spouse, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” There might be a time that you might do that, then that’s a conversation you have to have with your spouse.

 

For instance, large multifamily, I didn’t dive deep into this because I left a large multifamily that we got into it. When Jason brought that conversation for large multifamily, my head wanted to say no automatically because the numbers were big, 50-unit, 100-unit, 1,000 units, having all these things under management. The purchase prices were big. I was like, “Stop.” That’s the other question you have to have with yourself, are you saying no because you’re too uncomfortable with it? If your spouse is passionate enough, what will it take you to match your spouse’s passion? For me, it was to educate myself. Once I educated myself, it made sense but I had to make that decision. If you can’t make that decision, then it’s another conversation where you have to have with your spouse.

I keep on coming back to communication because that is key in any partnership though, whether you’re married, you’re doing it with your best friend, you’re partnering with other people as a general partner on a huge deal, you are going to have to have that communication. That’s why even with your investors, once you get into large syndications, you have to have communication and open communication with all of your investors. Everybody that’s in the deal, your investors, brokers, property managers, cost seg people, attorneys and SEC attorneys, it’s all about communication.

Could you talk a little bit about the roles you play and maybe how they may have evolved overtime, maybe you started thinking one way or maybe they haven’t evolved over time?

We’re always evolving, even if we don’t want to. I have been pregnant throughout my entire real estate journey. This is the first time that I’m with a small child. Our youngest is going to turn two. If we had gone the way we were going, I would be pregnant now. I’m not. Unless up there has another idea for us. I get it but if I have the decision, I’m going to stop at that. When we first got started, I started out as a real estate agent and we were going to buy properties because we would want to buy them at a discount, but we could buy them at market price because of the value add we were putting on the property. We did buy a couple of properties at market price. We still made money, but it took a long time that the ROI was still significant, but the stress of it wasn’t worth it. I started off as a real estate agent, which is great because I had that mentality of having the fiduciary duty to people which transcended into large multifamily.

The thing is your mindset has to switch a little bit when you get into large multifamily because you’re responsible for more people. That’s where a lot of my evolution has come is when I jumped into this asset class. I not only had three young ones to take care of, I also have my husband. We have tenants we’re responsible for, we have people who we employ who we’re responsible for, and having that mindset of care and being careful with people’s lives had to come in. That’s why many of my podcasts feature mothers and motherhood. You don’t have to be a mother, and I’m not going to say everyone because I hate generalities, but for a lot of us, we have this ingrained, nurturing spirits. At least I do. I want to nurture, grow people and lift them up as much as I can. That’s never changed. It’s the how with evolution. Between Jason and I, the evolution of our relationship, communication came into play.

When we first got married into our 1st, 2nd and 3rd child, we’ve grown together, we rarely fight. Every time we do, we both know there’s a miscommunication. We have to take that breath and figure out together. Once you start figuring things apart, that’s where you start having problems because you’re not communicating. Your solution might not be the actual solution either of you needs. You have to ask yourself, “What does my significant other need from me?” It starts with you. I know sometimes we all fall into that trap of, “I’ve been wronged. It was his fault. It was her fault. It was the thing that they did,” but the only person you can control is yourself. What can you do to improve the situation? That’s something that Jason and I had to learn along the way. That’s one huge evolutionary step that we took in our space together.

Another thing that we learned together, and this came key when COVID happened. This used to happen on a micro level, now this is on a large-scale level, but when it came down to it, I would always go to family and he would always go to business no matter what. We would mesh the two again when we could, but for safety, money and everything sake, that’s where the split happened. It doesn’t have to be the wife goes family and the husband goes business. It doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to go along gender lines, but that’s what we did because number one, I was pregnant most of the time so it made sense that I would go family. Number two, that fits our mindsets.

When COVID happened, we didn’t have to have that conversation. There was no argument. I talked to a lot of couples who got into arguments because they both wanted to work or they both needed to stay home with the kids. They didn’t have that communication beforehand. That’s something that you should have, that communication with your significant other, if you haven’t had it already hopefully COVID is over for most of your readers. I’m in New Jersey, it’s still much real. We’re still told to stay at home. Hopefully, we can start having play dates because my kids want to see other people. That’s a little bit about our evolution.

From the answer to that question, you brought up your podcast, so I’d like to transition into that. First, you have the Jason and Pili Project, the umbrella and then under that, you have the Mothers of Multifamily and then you created Mothers of Real Estate. Can you talk to me about the importance of these avenues of podcasting and stuff? How have they impacted your life and the life of your listeners and why you are choosing to take these paths?

Before I dive into each of the podcast that we do, first off, everyone’s a brand. All the readers right now and I’m speaking to you, you are a brand even if you’re not on social media. If you’re not on social media, you’re not reading this, but if you’re and you’re listening to podcasts and you’re out there, you are a brand, whether you like it or not. Your future job, your job now, you’ve already dealt with this. Your bosses are looking for you. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re deep into real estate, other investors are looking at you. They’re looking at your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. They’re even looking at your TikTok. You’re allowed to be a little bit funnier and dance a little bit more there, but no matter what, you are what you put out there.

Communication is key in any partnership. Click To Tweet

Going back a few years, we take down our first 94-unit and large multifamily and our coach at the time, Trevor McGregor, look him up. He’s an excellent coach. Our mentor at the time was Joe Fairless. Both Joe and Trevor were like, “Jason and Pili, You need to start a podcast and you needed to start a podcast a year ago.” The thing is we felt the need to have something big under our belt, so we took down the first 94-unit and started a podcast. At the time it was called The Real Estate Investing Foundation Podcast. We chose the word foundation because we believe in building a foundation for people, plus it went and tied into the type of flipping that we’re doing since we lifted homes and built new foundations. It all made sense. That’s what we started.

Did we know everything back then? No. Do I know everything now? No. The thing is, and I didn’t get this at the time but Joe and Trevor did, this is another reason why you need a mentor or smarter people than you that you align yourself with. They knew at the time the key and the power of branding, getting your voice out there and being a thought leader, it’s key. Even if you don’t think you know things, you know things that other people don’t, and they’re going to want to listen to you. If you have the voice that carries to them, they’re going to keep on listening to you and learning about you and from you. This whole thing started as a value add. The other thing that we got from podcasting and we noticed this from the get-go is that we got to talk because people want to talk. They want to talk about their businesses and themselves. They want to get their message out to the world. We learned so much from podcasting.

We got to learn from Rod Khleif back in 2016. Rod Khleif has skyrocketed since then. This was before he started his coaching program, before he was into it. He was the first one that got me into vision. Without that, maybe it was his voice at the time because I’ve heard it before, but it was his voice that got into my head. Then we had Joe and I got to learn much about Joe. We’ve had many amazing people, Michael Blank. I could go down the list and it was because we started this podcast. The last meeting that we ever went to was some figure flipping, I didn’t realize it was going to be our last meeting. We were in the hot seat. Jason didn’t come to this one. I was talking and giving my value, asking for things. My ask was, “I need focus now. How can I focus?” Two of the mentors looked at each other and then the big mentor walks in and he was like, “Pili, you’ve asked us this for the last two years, you need to find your focus.” It hit me that we weren’t flippers and wholesalers anymore. The next evolution of our life was to focus and focus entirely on large multifamily.

A month later, I had a difficult conversation because I’d become part of this amazing family. We didn’t cut ties with them, but I stopped going to their program and I started looking more into multifamily programs and learning from other multifamily investors, peers and people that were doing much more and much better than I was. That was how we focus. Taking that, we focused our podcasts and became The Multifamily Foundation Podcast. That was the next evolution of that. Because Jason and I can’t sit still, we get out there and we tell everybody what we’re doing business-wise. We tell everybody, “This is what I’m doing for homeschooling. This is what I’m doing for that.” Jason and I realized, “We’re more than real estate.” We want to give people the whole package that’s why our hashtag is #FitRichLife, not rich as in money but that comes into play because of money. I’m not going to be like, “We can do this without money.” Without your fitness, whether it be mind and body, what’s it all for? Without the richness of soul, your network, your mind and your bank account, how are you going to uplevel your life?

Life as we know it, how are you going to uplevel your life by living a fit and rich one? That’s the goal behind the Jason and Pili Project. With that said, I also have Mothers of Multifamily. I am all about my mamas. I love them. I’m not saying that mothers are any better than other women or fathers or any of that. Somebody asked me once and it was this marketing person. He was like, “Who is your audience, Pili? Who do you feel like you speak to the most and the best?” I was like, “Lots of men listen to me, I’m sure. I feel like I speak to women the best. I’ve been pregnant throughout this whole thing, so obviously I speak to mothers even better.” He was like, “Dive deeper.” I was like, “Multifamily mothers.” The whole thing blew into my head. I was like, “Mom, mothers of multifamily.”

Lisa, I’ve had some of the best people on that podcast. We talked a little bit about real estate, but mostly it’s how, as women, as entrepreneurial women, as women who have these lives we have to take care of, these lives that we’ve given birth to or have adopted. These little creatures that we are responsible for. How does that all tie in? My one question to these ladies is, “How do you do it all?” A lot of them say my partnerships, whether it’s with their spouse, partners and network, it’s those people that they’ve surrounded themselves with. I’ve had many mamas start off with that and that is key for people to hear.

That’s an idea that I’ve had brewing in my head since the beginning of 2020. I brought it to a couple of friends of mine, but they were like, “Pili, we’re way too busy. Talk to us in a couple of months.” It fell apart because COVID and everything that’s happening. I didn’t think of it until I went and did an online call with another high level. It’s called Next Level Wives. They used to be called Next Level Flipping. They call it Next Level Mastermind. This is Ryan Robson and his wife, Becky Robson. They partnered up with Jamie. She’s a fantastic woman and has wholesaled. She’s the best wholesaler that I know. I know a lot about them.

I was talking to these ladies and we had a great discussion and one, in particular, came on as she was somebody that I had known from 7 Figure Flipping. We haven’t connected for a while, so I connected with her and I’m like, “I wonder.” I spilled this idea of this podcast that features women in real estate, mothers and moms in real estate. The idea behind it is to have four moms and it’s an accountability call that everybody gets to hear. It grew from there, we decided to bring in two other mothers that we knew from 7 Figure Flipping. It was getting the band back together because these are women of my heart. They’re also women that I’m not afraid to share some of my deep dark things. We were talking about in the podcast, Becca had asked me, “Why do women bring themselves and other women down?” We had an in-depth discussion about it. We talked a little bit about real estate, but these are things that women have to deal with in their mind, and it shows in their business. If we can help women and mothers out there live fit or richer lives, that’s what we’re going to do.

That’s what MORE was all about. That’s what Moms Of Real Estate are about. That’s its own show. It has its YouTube Channel. I haven’t pushed that out. We’re doing it live every Thursday. We’ll see what we do with the actual content. Put into a podcast or something. We want him to get it out there but we go live every Thursday at 1:00. You can see us live on my channel, on Becca’s, Melissa’s and Stephanie’s channel. I did not want to brand this as me or any one of the women. This is us and we go live on each of our Facebook. I know some of your readers or even in my head, I’m like, “That’s a lot.” Who’s to say that’s a lot? When we were Real Estate Foundation, all things real estate and then we dug in and we were like, “We’re going to be laser-focused we’re not going to talk about anything else except for multifamily.” We’re like, “That’s not us. We’re not just multifamily company first. We’re all this whole package.” That’s why we created the Jason and Pili Project because that’s the way we can talk about anything and everything we wanted.

Can you talk a little bit about the decision to interview Gary Vee? You interviewed Gary Vee, right?

 

No.

Did he interview you? I can’t even remember.

I need to put that out because his advice to us is priceless. He didn’t tell us anything. If you listen to Gary Vee, he doesn’t say anything that you don’t already know. If you are a listener and an avid follower of the guy, he says it so you’ll hear it and hopefully, you’ll execute on it. How did we get on the show? We asked. If you listen to Tea with GaryVee, he tells you how to get on the show. We listened to that. I looked at Jason and he was like, “I’ll try it.” Jason tried it, gave them some of the things that we might ask, we got contacted back and we were on a show because we asked. I love to say that we’re super special. I can’t even say anything because it would be a lie because we just simply asked. If you haven’t listened to our bit with him, it was 5 or 10 minutes with him, which at that time, our kids infiltrated the whole thing. His gift was for us to ask and ask more. Ask to the umpteenth degree.

We always tell people you need to give value and you need to give value first. I completely believe that. I believe you need to give value. That’s one of the key lessons I learned when I first started investing, don’t just ask for things. You need to give value first. In Gary’s case, he was like, “If you don’t ask, then you won’t receive. You have to be open to the receiving as well.” He didn’t say that part, I added that, but he was like, “If you want to grow your channels, your reach and if you want to grow, then you have to ask people to follow you.” He was like, “Jason and Pili, you have something to give and it’s there, you’re putting out a ton of content but unless you ask people to look and listen to it, they might not even know it exists.” Some of my family members didn’t even know what I was doing and they see me on Facebook. I assumed that they knew what I was doing, maybe they weren’t interested. They were like, “Pili, we love what you’re doing. Thank you for asking us. Thank you for bringing us in.”

Lisa, if you haven’t asked people to watch your show, this could be your best friend, somebody that you talk to all the time, there are some investors I talk to at least monthly. I got up the courage like, “If you haven’t already, could you go to our YouTube channel and subscribe?” He was like, “Of course, I listen to you several times. I just haven’t hit the button.” It’s not a big thing. I know you’ve heard it before and I know your audience has heard it before. Ask and you shall receive, the same in real estate, podcasting and creating whatever you wanted to create. If you want people to follow you, you’ve got to ask.

I’ll end it with my Level Up questions that I asked all of my guests. The first one is what are you grateful for in your life now? 

It’s going to be fuzzy and sappy but the first name that came into my mind is Jason, my husband. I’m super grateful to him. We give each other direction. We give each other a home. He gave me beautiful children. He gave me everything. There’s much I’m grateful for in my life right now that he is incorporated in. I understand, ladies, you might not be married, or you might be single, divorced or like, “I don’t want to touch another man.” You need to have a person in your life. Jason is that person for me. He’s my person. He’s the person that I know I can go to, tell things to, I can share things with and I know he’s going to always be there for me.

What have you attributed your continuous growth and success?

The ability to pivot and the ability to communicate. For instance, we did fail at flipping and wholesaling. We knew we were that much better at large multifamily and doing that pivot was key. If we hadn’t done that pivot, I don’t know where we would be. Maybe we would have learned to manage them all, but we were managing small children. We were managing a plethora of businesses, too many employees, it was too much. I could go down the path of why we didn’t exceptionally excel at something wholesaling, but we pivoted and went in the direction of large multifamily. How are you and your readers pivoting in COVID, in this recession? It’s going to happen. I’m not an expert, but if we’re not already in it, we are going to be in it. How are you strengthening your business? I know a lot of people out there have already lost their businesses, have lost lives. I don’t want to say I’m sorry, but it touches my heart. How are you going to take that and grow from it is where mine and Jason’s strength lies. Taking our failures and growing from it, that’s the only thing to do.

The last question is what do you now know that you wish you knew at the beginning of your journey? 

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Multifamily is awesome. There’s much information that we’ve learned because of the steps we’ve taken that I wish I had known about large multifamily when we first got into real estate, and we did it. It was out there, but it wasn’t something that we thought we could do. I wish I had known that we could do it at the time, but would we have been ready? I don’t know. Even the thought of knowing that back, I don’t know if we’d be ready for it. That’s information that I would’ve wanted to know that we would get into large multifamily and we would excel.

If my readers want to learn more about you, where’s the best place they can learn more about all the podcasts, the work you’re doing, your investments, all of that good stuff?

The one place that you can go to, the easiest place would be our website, www.YarusiHoldings.com. If you type in Pili Yarusi and get my spelling right, there is no other Pili Yarusi in the world. You type in Pili Yarusi, you’ll find me. If you type in Jason Yarusi, you can find Jason. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok we’re even there. We’re all over the place. Find us, we’re there and we’re willing to talk to you.

Thank you, Pili, for coming on the show. I appreciate it. It was good. It was such an awesome episode. 

 

I’m honored to be on your show. Thank you for asking me. I was thrilled to come on. I was glad that I got the chance to speak with you.

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It was such an amazing episode. Thank you, Pili, for coming on the show. There were many nuggets in there. Some of them resonated with me. I would say the three top key things that I took from this, and there was much, one, the importance of communication in all of your relationships. That is your marriage, your business partnerships and everything, extensive amounts of communication, and being willing to communicate and continuing to communicate. She even talked about being in a marriage, investing with her partner, the fact that if you have those issues that are in the background, knowing that you can’t put real estate on top of it. You need to deal with those things in order for you to be able to build whatever you and your partner are trying to create. That’s true for even non-romantic partnerships as well. If you’re going into a partnership with someone else and issues are coming up, having those conversations real-time and setting the records straight and getting that clarity and moving on and moving forward.

The next item that she’s talked about was getting on the same page in regards to finances. She talked about her own personal struggle with how she looked at money, not necessarily in having credit card debt, but the way she saw money, the way she saw debt like how it could be used, and being open to that. The other item she talked about was you must know your why. If you can’t feel and understand and be connected to that why, when you’re doing something, then it’s almost like an indicator that you need to potentially pivot and figure out what is the thing that you need to be doing that is connected to a strong why in terms of the what makes you want to come and do it and get it done each day? I love the Fit Rich Life. It’s awesome. The fact that they want that for the people that are with them, investing with them, around them, the whole nine yards. She talks about your mindset needing to switch when you decide to invest in multifamilies, these large multifamily projects, we’re talking 100-plus units because of the responsibility that you take on. You have more residents but you also have investors, etc. and the gravity of that.

I would say this episode and the episode that I’ve done in the past, it’s funny because both people have talked about the fact that they wish that they had gotten started in multifamily earlier than the time that they did. Also recognizing that there’s a process and respecting the process and knowing that sometimes when you’re introduced to something much earlier on, your mindset and maturity has to develop. There’s so much that needs to develop. Being willing to stay resilient and going through that process of continuing to grow and figure things out and be open to that next step as well.

It’s an amazing episode at this point, have close to 15 or 20 episodes that are out there, maybe even more. By the time this actual episode goes up, there are going to be more episodes. I want to do outreach to you. If you haven’t already, and you’ve been reading this and it’s been adding value to you, please subscribe to my YouTube Channel. It’s Lisa Hylton. Subscribe to my channel, all the videos on there. There’s something about watching and being able to see the people that I am interviewing. I like it and when you’re able to see them, it’s almost as though you have a connection with that person that you are watching. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify. Please leave a review. The reviews help my show to reach more people as well. Then take a look at my website. My website is www.LisaHylton.com. Go on there, sign up for my weekly newsletter.

I also have a passive investing seven-day course. If you drop your email in there for either of those items, they’ll come out to you. At the end of the day, the purpose of this show, as well as all my offerings, is to help people that are reading, who are potential investors or investors already to continue to level up through consuming content that helps them to feel even more confident and invest confidently in real estate, be it multifamily, passive investing or maybe something else, whatever is your choice. At the end of the day, I hope that it’s bringing you an education, inspiration and opportunities to continue to level up in your investing game. Until next time, keep leveling up. Take care. Bye.

Important Links:

• Pilialoha Yarusi
• Yarusi Holdings LLC
• The Jason and Pili Project
• 7 Figure Flipping
• Mothers of Multifamily
• Trevor McGregor
• Joe Fairless
• The Real Estate Investing Foundation Podcast
• Rod Khleif
• The Multifamily Foundation Podcast
• Next Level Mastermind
• Tea with GaryVee
• www.YarusiHoldings.com
• Facebook – Pili Yarusi
• Instagram – Pili Yarusi
• TikTok – Pili Yarusi
• YouTube – Lisa Hylton
• iTunes – Level Up REI Podcast
• Spotify – Level Up REI Podcast

About Pili Yarusi