Most of the time, those who want to delve into the real estate industry only need the proper help and guidance for them to finally take that long-awaited jump. Ralph DiBugnara is one of those people who has been building communities concentrated on that very mission. Joining Jen Du Plessis, he shares how he helps people leverage social media’s power for real estate and keep the right motivation despite the many failures through The Disruptors Network. Ralph also underlines the importance of proper collaboration between the old and new generations to develop effective strategies cultivated by combining their knowledge and experiences. Finally, he talks about Home Qualified, his helpful resource for property buyers and sellers, as well as his plans to launch a leadership academy.
Looking for some help? Jen is seeking individuals who would like to be featured as a panelist on the show for her Mortgage Lending Mastery Mastermind Series.
My guest is Ralph DiBugnara. He is the Founder of The Real Estate Disruptors. There are some other things that you do too, and we’ll go into all the depth of what you do. I want to tell you a little bit about him. He is a successful serial entrepreneur and real estate expert. He had growing up struggling financially. Ralph knew he wanted more for himself. He said, “I’m going to go and I’m going to get it.” He holds prestigious roles as the President of Home Qualified, a digital resource for buyers and sellers. He’s the Vice President of Cardinal Financial, a nationally recognized mortgage loan company.
He’s been nationally recognized as a mortgage banker and a real estate expert. He started a series called The Real Estate Disruptors, where he interviews guests on real estate investing, property guidance advice. I love the trailer. It’s done very well. He’s doing mentoring for inner-city young adults. I love that it’s called The Generation Disruptor Scholarship Program. I know you do a lot with breakthroughs in generational things. That’s something that’s top of mind right now. We have five generations working together. I call it generational leadership. That’s what I’ve been touting to everybody. I want to welcome you to the show, Ralph. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
I want to go all the way back to the beginning. You’re doing all these wonderful, powerful, great things but it didn’t start that way. It started way back. You can take us back to childhood if you want, but you could also take us back to the day you were handed rate sheets and donuts, and how you took that to the empire that you’re building now. Tell us a little bit about where it started.
I was a kid who grew up in New York. I grew up in Brooklyn. I was never a great student. To be honest with you, school wasn’t for me, but I was a very hard worker. I graduated college because I had to, not because I wanted to. I graduated with a Finance degree. I got out into the world in 2001, early 2002. The internet bubble had burst with the stock market. There were not many jobs. They were sales jobs. I had a friend who was working for a mortgage company. He said, “Come do this.” You don’t need to be licensed at that point, “I’ll teach you the business and we can get off of running.”
After two weeks, they handed me a phone book at the time and hit the streets, and do what you’ve got to do. Eventually, I got some leads. I started on the phones at a company. I was lucky because it was a company that was starting, but they ended up going public about two years after I started there. I was able to get in and advance quickly because you know as well as anybody, mortgages and real estate and this business, especially sales, you get back what you put into it. I’ve always said that. I came from a place where I had to work for everything. I was willing to put the hours in. Once I got the field being rewarded for that, after a few months of being broke, it took off of me up until about 2007, 2008, where my world ended. I then had to start over again.
As well as I did, I didn’t understand how to manage my money because I’d never been taught. I was not living the way I should have been, thinking it was never going to end like most people. That was the start of me in this business. I was the Vice-President at that point at Deutsche Bank, which is a publicly-traded company. I went back to being a loan officer in 2008. I’m back to 12, 14 hours a day selling again, except now I had debt. It was a life lesson I needed. It set me up for the future. That was my beginning in this business.
What did you do at Deutsche Bank?
I was on the mortgage side. I had worked for a company by the name of MortgageIT, if you remember that company. Deutsche Bank bought us in 2005 or 2006. They expanded the mortgage division. They expanded our product and it was the greatest thing ever. When the market started to fail, they were one of the first ones to be like, “We’re not going to do this anymore. We’re going to write off this bad buy and we’re going to get out.” At that point, they had offered me a job. They were working on projects internationally in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. They were like, “You could come work on this side. We think the future is here. There’s no future on mortgages.” I was like, “I don’t know if it’s ever going to work. I’m going to leave and go figure it out.” For six months, I treaded water. I didn’t know what I was going to do and I froze. That’s the lesson too that I’ve used especially in the present day. I got back to selling loans. I started over again as a loan officer.
You and my son walked in the halls together at Deutsche Bank. He was in M&A in 2004 to 2006.
My wife who I’ve met there, after I stopped working there, still works at Deutsche Bank until this day. Several years later, she’s still there. She’s on the investment banking side.
You pulled up your bootstraps and said, “I’m going to do what I know I need to do. Put my head down, do my thing,” which in present day, what we’re experiencing, there are a lot of people that are struggling. There are others that are doing well, but they’re struggling in a different way. They’re not used to the momentum. They didn’t have everything put together in advance. There are other people that had everything all ready to go, so they are manifesting and quadrupling their volume. You put your bootstraps on. You said, “I’m going to be a loan officer.” You’ve been a loan officer for a while. When did you start saying, “I don’t even know what the tipping point is?” Not even to ask the question, but at what point did you say, “There’s more to this than just lending?”
At Deutsche Bank, I was running a division of about 100 people before the market went to where it was. God blessed me with the fact that I knew when the market crashed, I can simply go back to being a salesperson to make a living. I recommend that to everybody. If you can sell, there’s always work you can do. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve always had businesses outside. Mortgage has always funded everything else I wanted to do. In 2011, 2012, when I started to grow a business together, division again, there’s always more stuff you want to do to grow. Mentoring and teaching were always something I liked. Around 2015, 2016, social media was starting to become something that I had to address, which is when I started Home Qualified. I started doing videos and trying to attain press to build my profile.
Through that, I started teaching a little bit of how to buy homes. It blossomed into Disruptors Network now, which is my community-based business, where I have a scholarship fund through, I have educational classes through, I have networking meetings even if they’re virtual now. I like the community aspect of things. More than anything, that’s what I gravitated towards. I feel like if you build people, it turned into money and that’s what I’ve realized at this point.
I put together some training for my clients because I coach real estate agents and loan officers, and it’s about charitable work. As I was putting it together and wanted to give some examples of some charitable things that I had done and some community involvement that I had done because I’m big on the community, which is why I froze when I said, “This is so great. He’s helping young adults.” As I’m putting it together, it’s growing and growing. This is becoming like an 80-page presentation with all these things I’ve done. I didn’t realize how much of that I did.
When I look back on it and I think, “That probably was another of my codes.” I have a bunch of codes, but it was probably another of my code. I love learning that this is something for you too is that when you help others, you help yourself. You go on social media. Everybody goes on there. What did you do that made it different than what others are doing? Community, I get that. Charitable piece is big now, but what else did you do that was different?
I’ve spoken to you once. It’s nice to have to send me your book. I read a little bit about you. What I like about you is that you’re a person with substance. You’re a person who did the work and is now teaching people to do the work. The problem that I found with social media from the beginning of it and now, there are a lot of people on the selling courses or programs or get rich quick schemes that don’t necessarily have substance. They’re telling you how to make $1 million, but I don’t know if they’ve ever made it. Even if they did make it, they’re not telling you that it takes thousands of thousands of hours of work to get there. It’s not something you can do just with a system.
I want to be a real prophet when it comes to this and I want to do some stuff from the place of where I did it. I don’t want to try to pretend somebody I’m not. I first started looking into building out courses and stuff like that. I had some people pushing me, “Put out a real estate course, how to buy real estate.” I was like, “I’m buying real estate, but I’m not the biggest person in the state or the country or whatever it is. I want to teach them things I know how to do.” I know how to build my brand. I know how to succeed in mortgages. I’ve used that success in other places. I’m going to teach from a place of that.
What I’ve done in life to build from 0 to 100 back down to zero and then back up to 100 again. I’m going to try to teach that way, instead of trying to pretend I’m somebody I’m not and saying, “I have the foolproof way for you to make millions of dollars in the mortgage business.” There is no foolproof way. I’m trying to give people like how I did it. I’m not even close to being finished in my life. When I look at myself, I look at other people who are my age or a little bit younger, a little bit older. They may be further along in their careers than I am. Sometimes I look at that and say, “That person utilizes their time on Earth better than I have. I have some ways to go still.” I can be better. That’s part of what I teach too. It’s never too late to start. It’s always the right time to begin doing it now, and everything you can. That’s where I’m teaching from.
It reminds me of a phrase that I always say, “Your future is a series of nows.” What are you doing now to create your future? We all know that in these industries, real estate and mortgage. There’s such a lag time in the annuity income that comes from any single discussion that you have now. Whether it’s a partner or a client, some will slide through. Darren Hardy said something called, “Do the thing.” Do the thing that you do well, just do it. Stop talking about it and do that thing. Do that thing you know and then that propelled you. For those that are reading this, it’s to find that bailiwick, that thing that you do so well and do more of it to be able to propel your business while you’re still in the mortgage industry. I said it that way because there’s life after mortgages. A lot of people are going to be working and doing mortgages until they’re 85.
That was some of the stuff that scared me when I looked at some of the salespeople I had around me who were older. They were 50, 60 years old. They were still trying to do the same thing, working on draws. People think that this isn’t a residual business, but it is. Your network is your usual residual business. How do you grow a network so you don’t have to worry about that for the rest of your life? That’s what I’ve tried to teach. Whatever you are doing, have a solid foundation, have a real network and you have residual business forever. My net worth is who are the people I know around me and I do business with. That’s the stuff that scared me and that’s why I tried to attack stuff like this.
It’s interesting you said that because I’m much older. When I turned 47, for some reason I thought, “57, 67, can I do this for twenty more years?” At that time, I’d already been in for 30, “Can I do this?” I felt like I was going to walk around, shuffling my feet like some old realtors that shuffle. We call it the realtor shuffle, or being an attorney who says that they’ve been an attorney for 45 years. I thought, “I can’t do that.” I’ve got to start building a bridge to the other side and using every single loan as the capital to do something else to grow my whole life, my legacy. Tell us about your legacy. I didn’t mean to share mine. I have to weave that into a conversation and fully understand. What are you starting to do now that’s not beyond the network? Your network is your net worth, but what are you doing now to grow exponentially? The message I want to get out on this particular episode is that we make so much money in this industry compared to any other industry, any other widget. Why aren’t people doing something with that?
Legacy is a funny thing because I’ve talked about that. My kids are 5 and 7. My wife is a Dominican. My kids are mixed race. I grew up in New York City, which is a melting pot. My neighborhood was a melting pot, but I always go around with friends of all races and cultures. I’ve always been that person who was very comfortable in a room no matter who I was in it with. That’s who I am. My father was an educator and so is my mother. That’s how I grew up. There’s a lot of stuff that goes around me that bothers me, that people say or do, and stereotyping.
When all this stuff started over the summer of 2020 with George Floyd, which is all the stuff that came to a head. I was in New York City, which was the center of these protests. It was upsetting every single day. I couldn’t figure out what I could do to help. I didn’t feel like protesting was my best way to help. I feel like that’s a way to make myself feel better, not a way to help anybody else get any better. How do I help other people? It wasn’t enough for me to be good that way myself. I had to start speaking up because my kids are going to grow up. They’re either going to be judged by the way they look or given stuff for the way they look for no reason.
I didn’t want that either. I said, “How can I help?” The way I think I can help is I can give other people access to my network is and teach them how to make a career, make money and build the right foundation to have a better life. I want to give access to people who don’t necessarily have access. I created a scholarship. I called it The Generation Disruptor. It’s something that I had been working on for a couple of years, but I never knew what I was going to do with it. The first class I had, I found four people who I felt like had not been given opportunities either because of the place they came from, their background, their ethnicity, their color of skin. I wanted to give them the opportunity to get licensed as a mortgage loan officer or a real estate agent.
I wanted to teach them the right way. I created this scholarship. It was supposed to be a three-month scholarship where I was going to pay them a salary for three months. We had probably 100 applicants. We chose four people for the first class. I was throwing it out there. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t want to take too many people on because I felt like it wouldn’t go well. It was flying by the seat of my pants. I didn’t have a plan. It worked to an extent and we made some mistakes and I learned. Three out of the four people now still work for my company and they’re licensed. That’s what makes me the happiest of it.
It finished and I didn’t feel fulfilled. I felt like this is the start of something, but what do I do next? I was like, “I’m going to create a leadership academy because I don’t want to teach people just to be licensed.” I want to make them leaders in our community so they can affect change like I’m trying to affect change. I put more people out that have the intentions that I have and teach them that this is the way to not only be successful in life, but be successful as a person that give back. That’s what we are about to launch in May 2021. I bought a building where I’m going to house it in. We’re going to start a leadership academy.
I’m going to teach them the business. A lot of what I’m going to teach personally is this is how you should structure your days, your lifestyles. These are the mistakes I’ve made. This is how I’ve been successful with making those mistakes. That’s what I’m working on now. It’s what I’m most excited about even though it’s a lot on top of everything you have to do on a daily basis. I feel like that’s where my purpose lies at this point. That’s what I’m going to work on.
Whatever you are doing, have a solid foundation and a real network, and you can have residual business forever.CLICK TO TWEET
Is that what makes you tick, helping other people at this point?
I’m a person that likes to have good energy around me more than anything. To do that, you have to cultivate some people and sometimes you’re going to have to push through and drag people along to be that energy. Helping people succeed makes me tick more than anything. I also like having young people around me because I want to run. I want competition to run. I want to be challenged every single day that I show up for the office. I want to be the first one there. I want to be the last ones to leave and I want to outwork everybody. I have to keep bringing in new people to push the limits to that. If I don’t, I feel like I’ll slow down and I’ll get into a routine. As you definitely know, you said we make a lot of money in this industry. It doesn’t become about the money anymore. We have a lifestyle and it’s great. How much money do you need? What are you getting up every single day to do? For me, it’s to compete, grow and keep going. Bringing people in that want something in life and want to grow is the best thing that I got to have around me.
You make a good point where it’s time to make the donuts. This is an old commercial. We get up, and I had come over that process too in my story, which everybody has heard. Where I came over that and said, “There’s got to be more to life than doing loans,” going out, talking to people and creating relationships. There has to be more. That’s when I started my own charity. I started it when we had the great recession. I still have it running. That was important to me. Also saying, “How does this get cut off?” When I’m done doing lending at some point in the future, and this is years ahead, what is that going to be like for me? How am I going to replace my income?
I kept saying, “I want mailbox income,” because I’ve done this all my life. I want some mailbox income, which is passive income. I want it in a bunch of mailbox and be able to get the income, and then do the things that I want to do. I’m trying to stress that to loan officers now and to real estate agents to think beyond the closings, the fundings, the contract that you wrote to create a life for yourself down the road so that when the time comes, you can leave on your own terms and you won’t be finding yourself working at Walmart being a greeter.
I love that. You’ll always have a purpose.
That’s what you’re doing. You’re growing the youth foundation and doing that stuff. It’s great that you’re putting that. I’m going to ask you a couple of other questions too. What are some of the hardest choices you’ve had to make in your career in the lending process? You could say all the way back from 2001. Forward, what are some choices you’ve made but you feel like they’re the best?
I moved my whole group of about 100 people at that point from one platform to another a few years ago at this point now. I was this person who was outside of the box thinker, who was talking about all this progressive stuff, but where I was working, our message wasn’t that. Our technology was antiquated. We weren’t pushing anything forward. I realized we were going towards the digital age. For three years, I worked on a strategy to move everybody. It took me three years, but it was still a hard decision because I have a partner on it. We moved about 100 people, but moving everybody’s families, lives and stuff like that is not easy.
It’s a lot of, “Am I making the right choices?” We moved to a platform that had good technology. I grew my business from about $600 million a year to we did almost $2 billion in 2020. Some of that was the market, but some of it was making a choice to go somewhere, get out of my comfort zone, go someplace where the technology was faster and I could do things more streamlined. That was a very hard decision. In general, as a message, embrace what’s going on in the world and we’re going a certain way. Stop fighting it, jump into it and embrace it. If you did mortgages in the past in the industry we’re in, you could do anything. You just have to embrace it and go for it. That’s what I needed to do. That was something that was a hard decision.
2007, 2008, when the market crashed, people were running away from the industry and they almost never came back. I was too proud to say I failed and too proud to say that I made some bad choices and maybe I’m not where I want it to be. I stayed because maybe I was too proud. That was a hard choice, but it ended up being the right choice, not because of mortgages. I could have been successful at anything. It was a choice that I had to dig out of a problem I had created and do it again. Because I did that, I have the mentality now that no matter what happens, I’ll be able to progress, succeed and move forward. As long as I keep my feet moving and I don’t stand still.
That’s all super important. There’s a choice that you’re making right now that you don’t recognize as much. I can see it from the outside is the decision to work in the Millennial generation. I always said that when people go up to the Ivory Tower and they’re killing it and they’re kicking butt, sometimes you have to take the elevator back down and bring up some new blood, and that keeps it fresh. That’s something that you’re doing. I want to talk about the generations that we’re dealing with right now and your take on the importance of pooling everybody in. You already talked about ethnicity and whatever, but we also need to talk about the generation. This is the first time in history that we have five generations working in the same place. There are different things that make them tick. There are different styles that they want to use. This is a hard choice. Whether you think it is or not, it’s going to be a lot of work. I’m sure you’re already experiencing that, but let’s talk about why you think that’s so important to not become a dinosaur.
I’ve had my bumps and bruises with it where I was doing things to bring these young people in. You hear a lot of people talk about the new generations. We look at the bad they are and we don’t concentrate on the good they are. The good that they have coming in is that they’re much more technology advanced than we are. They have a lot more information. They’re much further advanced than we are in certain places. That’s the good. The bad is that they have a board up in a society that’s a lot softer than we were used to coming up. They tend to be maybe willing to quit a little faster on things.
That’s the problem with that, but they’re much more advanced than we were coming up. They know so much more than I did at their age at 18, 21, even up to 25. I have to use that and then make them better at the things they’re not so good at. Where they’re not so good at is they wear their feelings on the sleeve. You have to communicate in a different manner. That is something that’s a little bit hard for me.
If I’m telling you something, it’s because I care and not because I’m trying to hurt your feelings. If I wasn’t interested, you wouldn’t even hear from me. Because I’m so interested and passionate, I’m going to tell you how it is. I’ve had to adjust the way I talk a little bit and not focus on, “I can’t believe that they are to show off.” There’s so much good about them that I’m going to utilize that to its fullest extent and I’m going to teach them the things that they don’t know, which have helped me in the past.
I’m going to interject, we have Millennials that read this. The reverse of that is while Millennials think we are maybe too rough, we don’t have a lot of filters. We dig in, we work hard. They think that’s crazy because we live to work. Some people work to live. There are all kinds of things that are going on. It’s important for Millennials to also understand that they need to look back in the generations to find the experience and the wisdom that we can bring forward. That’s why it’s becoming such a collaborative effort in the workplace. There’s no such thing as a boss, a manager anymore. That trickle-down economics in the workforce is not working. It’s all team members, not employees, flexibility, collaboration. That’s what’s going to take us further on.
A colleague of mine wrote a book called The Millennial Tsunami. It’s amazing what he has to say. It’s powerful. I don’t want to give it away. You have to read it because you won’t believe what’s coming forward. He’s a big fan on making sure that we’re all working together as a collaborative effort. I want to say congratulations to you on that. Thank you for being willing to take that on. It’s not just, “I’m going to hire a Millennial.” It’s, “I’m going to focus on.” That’s incredible. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? It doesn’t have to be in business, just anything.
I’m a learner by seeing and doing rather than telling me. I’m much more a functional learner that way. What I didn’t realize growing up is my father had all these habits like getting up early, going to work, and all those kinds of stuff. I didn’t realize at the time and I didn’t necessarily respect it the way he did it when I was a kid. He worked three jobs. He wasn’t there a lot. The best lesson I ever received is when I realized later on in life how much of that was in me. I was utilizing it in a different way. He got up at 4:00 in the morning, every single day and ate his breakfast and went to work. He didn’t brag about it. He didn’t post on social media about it. He did it and he never said he was tired. He never said, “I’m too tired to do this and that.” More than anything, he had no complaints. When I finally kicked in, and as you get older, you realize things from your past. A lot of the stuff I have was because of him. I was the newer version of him that was utilizing those things in different way. The same basics that I learned by watching him do it every single day, I still do now. It’s made my career so much better than it would have been.
That’s called mimicry. As leaders, speaking about your leadership and what you’re going into right now, and even now as leaders, we’re leaders of relationships. We’re leaders in our household. You’re a leader no matter what you’re doing. People are watching in this crazy little box that we’re in to determine what leadership is all about. Leading by example is mimicry. We can’t tell people, “You have to go do this. I’m not doing it, but you don’t have to, or you have to go do it.” That’s still there. We have to lead by example, which means if you are a life learner and you’re learning from other people, that mimicry will make the success of your industry. What you’re doing in your company is so much more powerful because they’re mimicking you. They’re going to want to learn from you too. It’s a message that we need to level up and climb to a new altitude as lenders and real estate agents to be experts and professional at what we do.
I believe all businesses is a craft and I respect craftsman in any business. That this is a craft and it’s still a craft, no matter how digital it gets. To be good at your craft, you have to practice all the time. You have to work all the time. Kobe Bryant is somebody I still resonate with every single day. I still think about him every single day. If you look at his athletic ability compared to Michael Jordan and LeBron James, he wasn’t as good as an athlete as those guys. He took 2,000 shots a day. He worked at it. He mastered his craft to the fullest. He squeezed every single little bit of his ability out that he could. He was the maximum person he could be every single day. That resonates me with everything. I want to be the best person I can be every single day. However long that takes, every single day I want to do it.
It’s funny because he’s been said to have said, “I hated doing that every single day, but I love the results.” That’s not sexy to have to work, but a lot of people meander through their businesses and their lives. They wish they had what other people had and it takes work. It doesn’t have to be hours. The work doesn’t equal time necessarily. It means working smart and you already know all that. Let’s talk about Home Qualified, a digital resource for buyers and sellers. What is that?
Home Qualified was something I started back in 2015 where I started doing buyer videos like tips on how to buy, how to have a better credit, how to do home improvement quickly. What it’s turned into is more than that. Now it’s my media company. It’s the company who produced my television show that’s streaming on YouTube, Amazon and Roku. It’s called Disruptors Network. They produce that, but it’s become an all-encompassing real estate company that educates or help build brands. Originally, it started as an informational website where I was putting up videos weekly with home buyer tips. That’s what it was. It generates revenue. Everything goes to there and it’s HomeQualified.com. There’s still stuff daily up there, buying trends on stuff in the business and a lot of information up there, but it’s an informational company. That’s how I generated a lot of the community around me.
That’s where we have to start. If people are worried about going into social media, this is where we have to start. Many people say, “I don’t have any content.” I go, “You’re asked a thousand questions every day and every single question is content.” It’s easy to do. You’ve got The Real Estate Disruptors, the Home Qualified, and you have The Disruptors Network. I know your first episode got released. What is the focus and purpose of that particular avenue? You already have your network of people. You already have your clients. You’re already doing well in the lending space. What does this do for you from a passion and purpose perspective?
We’re focusing on the show. Every show has two different entrepreneurs, whether they’re real estate, mortgage based or outside of that. Some of them are outside of that. We want them to be self-made people and they all are. There are people who made it on their own and they have a story behind that. They’ve gotten to a level of success. Not only are they successful, but they are using that success to either help the youth or help people build their own careers. There’s a purpose in it. Not only it becomes successful, but we’re using its success to educate. I wanted to find people that had the same purpose as me and we’re moving in same direction as me and focus on them. Back to the same thing, these are people with real substance who have done real things, who are still succeeding in educating.
It’s been a good journey with that. I’m calling a lot of people I knew and meeting some new people and hearing their stories. One of the people who is part of our network is a basketball player. His name is Charlie Villanueva. He played for the Mavericks and the Bucks. He had a 10 to 12-year NBA career. He’s now big in real estate. We had a conversation. He said, “I’m applying the same things I did in basketball to real estate. It’s the same work every single day.” He’s educating on his social media. That’s the kind of people we’re focusing on in the show. It’s powerful to me that people who understand how to work and they think they can do anything successful by working at it. That’s what we’re focusing on.
That’s a good message because when we think about anyone who’s struggling now, the message for them is to think about a time back when you were going to be a tennis pro. I was a great tennis player at the time when I played flute and piccolo, and I was good at it. It’s the same principles that we used back then, but sometimes we have to go back in our minds to think about that. For some people, it’s easy. Others have to be reminded, “I was a track star. I was a football player. I was great in grades and here’s how I did it. I can do it again.”
It’s all the same principles. When you learn that, it’s almost free for your life.
Ralph, thank you so much for sharing all this. I’m excited to see where you’re heading with this. I know that you’re doing well. I’m going to say it because I’m older. That’s so refreshing to see someone putting the work that we’re doing in lending and real estate to work elsewhere, whether it’s for yourself, which it is. There’s a purpose behind there for yourself, and then doing something for other people instead of having the blinders on and doing mortgages. If I could get that point across to everybody, my world would be so wonderful because that’s what I’m trying to do. What one piece of advice would you like to give to someone who’s reading that when we’re done, they hang up the phone and they start doing something?
More than anything, if I have to start it over with knowledge and no money or anything, I truly could do it again. It’s never too late to become the best person you can be. It’s never too late to get in shape, to become successful and educate yourself. I don’t care how old you are. The successes of people after every single age and never look at what the person is doing next to you because we’re our only competition. It’s just getting out of our own way. It’s never too late to start to be successful. Whoever is reading, now is the day to start. A year from now, that person who’s starting now could be ahead of where I am in my life now just by starting. That’s the most important thing.
Thank you, Ralph, for being here with us. We appreciate it. I love your success. I look forward to continuing our relationship for years to come. Thank you for taking the time.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
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