933: The Motivation to Make It: Real Estate Success with Ian Lobas

Aaron Amuchastegui: Real estate rockstars, hey, welcome back. Today is going to be a treat. If you guys have been listeners over the last couple of years, you are going to recognize this guy’s voice. Pat Hiban was the voice of the podcast for the longest time, but somebody that would come in and do a lot of guest and host interviews with him was who you’re about to hear from, Ian Lobas.

Ian and I go way back. Ian and I met for the first time in Lake Tahoe six or seven years ago, something crazy like that, at a GoBundance event. We were both new there for the first thing at a coffee shop. We just started talking about random stuff and started talking about doing estate and flipping houses and building teams. We’ve stayed in touch over many, many years as I’ve been growing my businesses and he has. I’m excited to talk to you today, Ian, just about all sorts of stuff. How’s it going?

Ian: Me too, man. Dude, this is such a cool, I don’t know, roundabout juxtaposition, whatever you want to call it because the opportunity that Pat gave me to host this podcast propelled me. We’ll talk about my new podcast in a little bit, but it’s just so neat to be on here with you so thanks for having me, dude.

Aaron: It’s a good time to come back. When we think full circle about how much your life has changed since I first met you since our very first stuff you were– How many years have you been in real estate? How many years you’ve been an agent?

Ian: Eight years, three days ago.

Aaron: When we first met, you were on year two, right?

Ian: Yes.

Aaron: You were a successful agent. At the time you were looking at some different business ventures and investments too, and maybe doing some flips or some developments and stuff like that. Now you’ve got multiple teams and you’re expanding those teams around the country and you have a lot of different business ventures that you’ve expanded into. Right now you’re out in Baltimore but when I first met you out in Tahoe– Let’s go talk about that. Let’s talk about your first couple years in real estate. How did you get into real estate? What was that like? What do you remember about that time?

Ian: My wife and I, we’re going to write a book on our experiences following the Amuchastegui model of husband and wife book writing on stuff that we’re passionate about. I’m reading your book right now.

Aaron: That’s awesome.

Ian: Dude, we love it. We love it.

Aaron: Our first book, The 5‑Hour School Week was totally a passion project because it was, as we had started doing these other things, it has so much into it. I’m glad you like it, man.

Ian: Since I know you and Kaleena personally, I hear you just talking. It’s not like, “Well, I researched 60 different things and we’re just going to compile a research,” it’s your experience. I love it, so shout out to The 5‑Hour School Week. If anybody’s looking at alternative methods, I think that actually should be a mainstream method honestly, but I digress.

I ran my father’s shipping company with him for seven years after I got out of college and the universe took a turn, obviously with the economic downturn of ’08 to ’12. By the end of 2011, I’d just gotten married and the economy had hit my dad’s business pretty hard, and the money dried up for me, the type of money that I was making before, big, big money. I literally didn’t know what I was going to do. I was teaching swimming lessons for $10 an hour. I was depressed, I was anxious, I was panic attacks, I hated myself, I hated life. I was this huge success in shipping, this big expert and now I’m sitting in the water with six-year-olds and I want to take a breath underwater, [chuckles] not really, but it just was so bad.

Aaron: That’s hard.

Ian: I said to my wife, one day, “Hey, I picked up application to stock bananas at this local grocery store.” She looks at me like, we’re married for five months, and she’s like, “What the hell are you talking about?” I said, “Yes, look, it comes with benefits. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think that sounds okay, right?” She just said to me, “I didn’t sign up for that.”

My wife, if any of you know her, she’s an incredible person that supports me without ever, ever, ever questioning me, trusts me, and just supports the moves I make, and then helps me through the failures that we experience just like your wife does. She said, “I didn’t sign up for that.” She wasn’t talking about money or lifestyle, she was talking about my possibilities and my abilities to go high level in my mindset, that I knew I could do something but I was shortchanging myself.

She encouraged me to get my real estate license and I did. I got into real estate because I was scared and I didn’t know any other way to make the type of money I was used to with my dad’s business in all honesty. From day one, I called it crack rock real estate, no joke. I was slinging real estate, nothing else mattered, family, friends, events, holidays. I didn’t give a shit about anything. I was focused on making money because at that time money for me was my lifeblood. It was my power, my significance. It was my purpose. It was how I just was rounded inside.

It wasn’t from my upbringing. I just had adopted that because I saw what money was able to do for me when I made really, really good money with my dad’s company selling, shipping all over the world, and logistics. I was scared of who I would be if I wasn’t a top producer and a high performer, if I was mediocre and stuck in the middle. I was scared. I ran with a lot of fear, and I know a lot of agents listening to this know exactly what I’m talking about.

My first open house, I threw up next to my car twice, no shit, I was so nervous. Dude I cried, no joke. I cried every day for the first six months. I just was so scared that I was going to fail, that I wasn’t going to be this person that I knew I could be, I just didn’t know how to get it. It was a tumultuous first year. However, I was very successful right out of the gate selling between probably 750 and 1 million a month by month three. I wasn’t stopping that trajectory.

That’s how I got rolling. Obviously, celebrating eight years now, things are much, much different because of personal development and friendships and relationships like I have with you, and guidance from guys that have gone down these dark roads. Things got affected and I made some changes in shifts before it was too late especially with my family.

Aaron: It’s like your wife had encouraged you and said, “No, you’re better than this. You got to go find something different.” Because you were ready to settle though, be like, “Hey, let’s just survive,” after losing the other job and she said, “No, you’re better than this.” That helped re-sparken you like, “You’re right. I am better than this. I got to do better. I got to make a lot of money.” Did you know someone in real estate? How did you know that real estate was going to be that avenue?

Ian: I just knew the activities in my dad’s business that were the highest dollar per hour production. I took that same concept to real estate. Like I said, money was safety for me and I felt very unsafe in the world without any money. My wife and I, our house was in foreclosure. The repo guys were after my cars. We were taking handouts from people for dinners and things like that. We were in really rough shape, really rough shape. I was really big in debt and I was terrified, man. I was terrified.

Aaron: This was 2012. The market had just corrected pretty significantly. In a lot of places, it was still maybe the lowest that it had ever been. I know that prices went way down, 2009, 2010, but 2012, that was where a lot of people say, “Hey, the market started really taking off after that.” [crosstalk] It was an unsure time for you to be jumping in. You jumped into real estate back then-

Ian: I didn’t think about that stuff. It was either selling Bentleys or something or high-end luxury items because I knew sales was my [crosstalk]

Aaron: You needed a sales commission-based thing?

Ian: Yes. Dude, the thing that terrified me the most in this world is for someone to tell me when to come in, where I sit, what my view is going to be, and when I can go to the bathroom, when I can eat lunch, that’s probably the scariest thing because I have this huge high need for variety and I don’t like being corralled.

Aaron: No, don’t go back to school. It’s a whole different subject right now. You were like, no, you needed your own job. You knew it was going to be a sales commission role. Right away you just said, “Hey, I’m going to work more than 40 hours a week. I’m going to work really, really hard. I’m going to focus.” How did you get those first deals? You were afraid to fail. You were determined to work really, really hard but the other side about a commission-based business is if you don’t do awesome, you’re going to get foreclosed on. If you don’t do awesome, your car’s getting repoed.

Ian: Dude, I was stuck in this middle ground. I was so afraid to fail. I was so afraid of the other side. I was trying to find myself. At 30 years old, I felt very lost in the world. I tell people I had 1% more desire to succeed than I did fear of failure. That’s all that was. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I can do this. I got this.” Not at all. I was so scared and so doubtful of myself but there was one degree different between the confidence in myself and the doubt and that won out.

I didn’t have kids back then. I used to imagine what my wife’s dad would think about me. He never said anything. He’s not that kind of guy but like, “What if I had a daughter? What if I were my wife’s father? What would I be thinking about a husband that’s a total failure and he just has potential but isn’t using it?” I use that to motivate me and the biggest thing that motivated me was the bank said, “There’s an auction now scheduled, it’s three weeks from now or a month from now, get out of your house.” I was like, “Fuck, it’s over.”

I remember watching my wife pack up our house, crying on the floor. I use that as an insane amount of motivation because back then I thought, “I never want her to ever feel this again. I never want her to know where the next dollar is coming from.” I started journaling and visioning, doing vision boards back then. I didn’t show it to her, I didn’t show it to anybody, I was embarrassed by it, but I literally said, “My wife will never, ever, ever wonder where the next dollar is coming from.” I made that my North star.

What I’ve discovered is what drove me wasn’t actually the way my wife felt, it was the man that I was back then; angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, fear. I wasn’t afraid of what my wife would feel. I was afraid of going back to that man. That’s why I ran from that guy so fast and hard going forward that I just never looked back.

Aaron: There’s so many things you said there. I love that you said that your motivation, it’s not that you didn’t have doubt and it’s not that you didn’t have fear but your motivation just had to win the scale. You just have to be slightly more motivated than you did have a doubt. You had to have slightly more confidence than you had that doubt. A lot of your story is similar to ours where, when my second daughter was born in 2009, I was working a full-time job as a home builder but the world was crashing. My pay got cut in half and my wife was working nights at a casino as a waitress while she was super pregnant.

She was seven months along and she delivered, then my second daughter was born. She was delivered way early. I blamed myself for that because I was like, “She shouldn’t be a waitress seven months pregnant, running around at two in the morning in a casino.” We were broke. I was looking at my daughter with all the oxygen tubes and stuff onto her, and I just said, “Man, I need to do something different.” That became my drive.

A lot of my drive for the longest time was saying, “Hey, I was not going to put my family through it.” That’s when I quit my job started my own business. That was the drive that led to those 12 and 14-hour days to finally see something else come through. That’s fantastic. You worked really, really hard. What advice would you give to agents right now to go get those first deals? Part of your advice is like, “Hey, work really, really hard. Have a North star that you think about that is your focus and your drive to go through it.” Do you have any methods that you would recommend people use that worked really well for you?

Ian: Yes. You asked me about open houses. The first week I had my license, I did my first open house. Dude, I’m in a suit, my wedding suit because I didn’t have any money to buy another suit. I’m in my wedding suit, tie, buffed-up my shoes. Like I said, I threw up outside of my car twice down the street from this house. I was so nervous, then I call my wife and she’s like, “Look, you’re not trying to sell anybody anything. You’re just trying to build relationships and that’s what you do really well.”

I started to compartmentalize my fear and my confidence. Instead of it being, “The world’s caving in on me,” it started to become, “I know how to build relationships. That’s what I did with my dad’s business. I was very successful. There’s no difference except the product’s a little different. It’s a little different way.” The first open house, I know it very well, I’ll remember it. I actually just drove by it the other day, just reminiscing. I just started talking to people, and I was just me and I got two buyers from that who bought, then I started going through the office.

Open houses, four or five a weekend. There was no counterbalance for me, there was no balance. It was, “I got to get this ship rolling. I’ve got to get this rock up the hill,” there was no balance. If I could do it over again, I would do it differently. However, four or five open houses a weekend, get that momentum going, get 15, 20 buyers in the pipeline, start working on some listing stuff.

Look, nobody knows what you don’t know unless you tell them. All the agents in my office were actually motivation for me because they all told me that I’d never make any money the first year, so I set out to prove them wrong.

Aaron: You’re like, “I need to make money next month.” You’re like, “I can’t wait a year.”

Ian: Right. They’re like, “It’s a 90-day sales cycle, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” I said, “Watch me. Watch me. I’ll be on the top leaderboard in the next two months.” I set that as goals and I just kept having these little North stars and then applying whatever, again, compartmentalizing. It wasn’t the world caving in, it was, “I’m great at this little thing and I’m great at this little thing. I know I wear a suit well, and I know that my car can be cleaner.” Little things like that. I wasn’t worried about contracts or business cards or any of that bullshit. I was worried about the actual getting a buyer to sign by our agency, getting a listing contract signed, building those relationships. That’s it.

I knew that the buyers were going to be a little farther out and it was going to take too much of my time to take them around. The manager that I had at the brokerage I started at said to me, “Why don’t you go after FSBO and expireds. I found myself, again, crying in my car, nervous as shit, man. I’ve never been so nervous in my life. I went to my parent’s neighborhood where I felt more comfortable and I saw a FSBO sign. I remember I called the number and they said, “Yes, there’s 11 agents that we’re interviewing on Christmas Eve 2012, you’ll be the 12th.” I’m like, “Great.”

At that point, what I didn’t know I didn’t know actually helped me. I went in with a listing presentation suited up, there’s no heat on in this house and the guy said to me, “Put that–” and I started reading a listing presentation and he was like, “Put that away. Tell me about you.” That showed me right there that nobody gives a shit about that listing presentation. They want to know you, about you and what you’re going to do.

I pitched him on me and everything that I was going to do and he said, “What about staging?” I said, “You’ve got a stage, it’s an empty house, and I’ll help you with construction stuff.” I just pulled every card that I could out to help him and his wife. He called me back and he said, “It’s down to you and another agent. The other agent wants us to pay $1,500 for staging, what will you do?” Without even skipping a beat I said, “Bro, I’ll empty my fucking house out.” He goes, “Great, you got the deal.” I was like, “Oh, my God.”

I sold that house for $20,000 over comps, cash, which is unheard of in Baltimore with 11 offers. I blacked out everything on those offers and I got into go mode. I took all those 11 or 10 other offers around the neighborhood, and I said, “There are 10 other people that want houses here. Who wants to sell?” Dude, before we knew it, we had eight listings up in that neighborhood, and I controlled that neighborhood for the next six years. It just takes one little thing.

Aaron: It’s like you got so lucky on that first– not lucky but that first one turned out really, really well, and then take those extra offers and then go find other people, and using that as their sales point like, “Hey, by the way, I listed the house down there. I’ve got extra offers on it. I bet one of these guys would want to buy your house. Do you want me to sell it?” What an awesome way to really get rolling.

We got a lot of people that we interview that talk about focusing on a neighborhood, focusing on an area, finding their niche. That neighborhood was one of your first niches and you were able to drive it home. How do you go from that to hiring your first assistant or building your first team and then jump forward and tell everybody what you’re doing now? What does your real estate business look like now?

Ian: It progressed. Honestly, I’m not going to tell you the brokers. You can look it up, but they wouldn’t let me have an assistant for my first year. There I am managing 12 to 15 active deals by myself. With my dad’s business, I was the sales guy and I passed everything back as you should. Once I learned about the inner workings of the operations of the transaction, I knew that I needed another option and I wasn’t getting it there. Plus, my splits sucked and my wife, we had our first big month in March of 2013, six months in. Really big month.

My wife looked at the checks and she’s like, “This is BS. You’re paying them more than 50% of your commission. You’re doing all the work. You got leverage now. You’re the top guy in the office.” I was the top guy in the Mid Atlantic region and all I was ready for is hustling. I wasn’t paying attention to that but my wife said, “You go back in there and you demand a higher split or you’re leaving.” I’m like, “Okay.” I went in, and they said no. As scared as I was to move on, which by the way, that brokerage is great now

Aaron: I like that you’re like, “They said no. I went in and said I’m leaving and they said no.”

Ian: I was like, “I need a higher split,” and they said, “No, you’re a firecracker. You’ll fizzle out.” You and I are very similar. In school, that defiant mentality meant that you were a bad kid. That’s why I hate organized schools so much because if I didn’t have such a strong parent base at home that encouraged me they could have shut me down. I could have been hitting 10% of my potential because of that programming that I got from school, I’m not going down that road.

I had this defiant attitude in me that said, “F you, watch me.” I was scared, man. I remember I sat at this restaurant and the VP of this company was there. He surprised me and the manager in basically my exit interview. He’s no longer there so I’m telling you this. He said, “If you leave, your clients won’t trust you anymore. You need our logo, you need our brand. That’s why you’re selling so much real estate. If you leave, you’ll never sell another piece of real estate again.” In that moment, I thought to myself, “Be smart about this, but dude, there’s one thing you got to bet on is you.” I said to him, “F you, you watch me.” I went back to the office, and I packed myself and I rolled out.

My wife came on board at that point in October of 2013. My wife came on as a full-time assistant, learned the business. She’s a rockstar. I didn’t teach her anything. She learned everything on her own. There was a couple of agents that wanted to come with me, so I built my first team right around September, actually of 2013 with another person. We merged our businesses and that was the start of building a business.

That ended pretty quickly after about two and a half months, and then we ended up at KW, and I really learned how to build a business there. My wife had been my assistant until right before my daughter was born, in 2015, the end of 2015. She just was there by my side, just handling everything behind the scenes.

Aaron: You left your first one, you were like, “Hey, we’re going to start our own brokerage .” Then you said-

Ian: No. I just went to another brokerage.

Aaron: You switched your brokerage. You went to another one and then you moved over to Keller Williams, and now you’ve been with Keller Williams ever since?

Ian: Yes.

Aaron: People said, “Hey, without our name, without our brand, you’re going nowhere.” Was it hard to transition that? Or did you find that agents can make the transition as long as you’re still you?

Ian: Dude, you and I share this, I’ll jump real fast and I’ll take huge risks because I trust that I can figure out a way to get out of it if I make huge mistakes, I’m confident with that. I came home and I told my wife what happened, and she was like, “Well?” I said, “I’m actually nervous that I made a big mistake, and we’re going to go down if I can’t make this work.” She goes, “What’s your dad always tell you?” My dad would always say, “Hey son, you’re going to figure out a way to make it work or you won’t. The choice is up to you.” She said, “You’ve got one choice. You better figure out how to make this work or we’re going down hard.” I’m like, “I’ll figure out how to make it work.” That was it. I just tried to figure out how to make it work.

Aaron: Just getting to push-

Ian: The monster chasing me was so scary for me, that fear of being a nobody or that fear of just sitting in mediocrity, like I was in school. That drove me to hustle harder, which I would not advise. I don’t advise that hardcore hustle because I lost me. I didn’t understand Ian. I only understood Ian, the business guy, the realtor, the real estate sales guy. Ian, the person was completely negated and lost in all of that mix, and that was a dangerous place to be, very dangerous.

Aaron: Maybe you’ve been asked this, maybe you haven’t. Let’s look at that because that monster chasing you that, “Hey, I don’t want to be a nobody,” that drives you to not be broke, helped you be successful and push, how do you feel about that monster now? It worked out for you, but what’s your drive today? How do you feel about all of it?

Ian: When I met you back in 2015, 2016, I adopted the understanding very quickly of a family man with a business, not a businessman with a family, the John Roman mentality, your mentality too. When I met you, my daughter was about six weeks old. Before she was born, I remember I had this anger because these deals were going south and I channeled that into an emotional response, and I wrote out this big “why”.

That was almost five years ago and that’s my mission today. I basically shifted and understood regret. My dad said to me, “You got to do something here because you’re not paying attention to your family, your wife’s not happy. Yes, you’re providing, but you’re missing the other side of the coin.” The real reality of my wife leaving with my daughter, which was a very big reality at the end of 2016.

The fact of, me having regrets in my life that I could change now, that was my driving force at that point. I learned through the GoBundance and the M1 worlds and the big personal development worlds that I had to really figure out who I was. If I started taking some steps back in real estate and wasn’t a top producer, it only was me making that up inside my head, like, “What’s really behind that?” Once I discovered what was really behind that fear, it freed me. The monster doesn’t chase me. It actually doesn’t exist anymore because that monster was me. It was my own thoughts. It was my own patterning and BS and trauma from the past. It doesn’t even exist anymore today.

I use this in my coaching practice. If you don’t have a mission, if you don’t understand the purpose, the mission is what the world looks like when you’re done, and your purpose is who you are on that mission, if you don’t know that, then you are just selling houses. Somebody said this to me very early on in my career, they said, “Look, if you died tomorrow, people are going to be sad, but if you’re in the middle of $500,000 transaction, your broker is going to take that transaction, give it to another person that can take over your Dotloop account, take over the keys, the transaction, and close it, and your ass is not worth anything.”

I took that very seriously and I thought, “You know what? You’re right. I’m a commodity at this point, and I don’t want to be a commodity. I want to actually give people real value,” not that I don’t in the real estate business. I do. I wanted to shift into something that was really valuable where you can’t duplicate Ian because this is how Ian does it. You can’t duplicate me. That’s when I started picking up video marketing and I started really building my team and understanding like, “This is how we do things.”

I took some KW models, I took some models from my other friends and I started just really focusing on, “This is what I want. I don’t want internet leads. I don’t want any of that stuff. I run a very tight referral-based business from my database, all video marketing, nothing else.” I think that made us really valuable to people. Then I just started increasing the value from there, and that’s how our coaching business started.

Aaron: Some great points you made there too. At the beginning, there’s things you needed to be successful. You need to go from zero sales to one, to two, and to three. Once people get successful, being able to hold on to the “why” and finding some of those values because it’s really easy once you do become a top performer to make some bad choices, make some bad steps, have worth of risking all of it.

At the beginning, we do it for our family because you don’t want your wife to be going through a tough thing, but then before we know it, we can actually be screwing up while we’re financially doing fine but forgetting about the family stuff. It’s great that you got to touch on that for a second. Now, you’ve found your new marketing, you’ve got your teams out there, you’re expanding across the US, there are some other things too. When you say, “video marketing,” what is that? What do you mean?

Ian: It was something that actually scared me a little bit and it made me nervous. There’s a really cool book called War of Art. In that, they talk a lot about resistance and two types of resistance. One is, you push up against it because you’re meant to break through it. You have to learn and have abundance, skills, education, mindset, and the things that’ll help you breakthrough, and then eliminate the things that no longer serve you, which I think too many people don’t understand. They think abundance is money and elimination is bad, but you have to eliminate the habits, the skills, the ways of thinking the mindsets that don’t serve you anymore and get into abundance of what does serve that mission and those goals now.

Video marketing for me was something that was a little scary. I hired a company to coach me and help me, and we saw amazing results from it. I said, “That’s it, we’re not doing any other marketing.” I realized that this is more of a blue ocean within the red ocean. Not every agent’s going to get on video. They’re not going to be me on video. I think the clients are really going like this. Then we got really good at social media marketing and that was it. I just keep it really simple.

Aaron: Is it videos of you? Is it videos of properties? Is it walking through houses?

Ian: It’s videos of me just sitting there talking about real estate tips and tricks, and then videos of me walking through properties and pointing stuff out. There’s hundreds and hundreds of videos out there that– That helped algorithms, that helped SEO. Google loves YouTube and videos, so here we go. I’m just going to do video.

Aaron: You went all-in on video and you would push them out through all the different social media channels, and then people would recognize you and you’d be able to get more that way. Real estate, you’ve had an awesome journey so far. What’s next in real estate? I want to talk to you about your podcast. What are your plans for next year in real estate?

Ian: Say 2017, 2018, I was running a big team following the red book, the Keller William’s red book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but I hated my life, man. I was making great money, empowering other agents and I hated my life. I thought, “I can’t stick with this. This sucks. I don’t like this.” Then I thought, “Oh, it’s just me being whatever, defiant.” Once I realized that the real estate business for me was the means to an end, that’s when I got very clear on the next phases of the mission and was starting to be okay with slimming my business back to only focus on the great referrals, only work with agents that really want to do something and take my guidance, my advice, my coaching.

I started slimming our business back in 2018 to really understand how we can build the coaching business out and that model of what I’m looking for in my coaching business. We’ve been able to do that. My wife is from LA and she said, “One of my dreams is I got to get back there. I want to live there. I want to raise our kids there.” I said, “Cool, I’m into that.” I started really ramping the coaching business up. I started dialing back the real estate business so that I was really only helping at a very, very high level maybe four or five clients a month versus 10 to 12.

We just started having conversations with people out on the West Coast about partnerships and mentoring and coaching. We just started aligning with some great people out there that we’re now in business with that we’re building some really great stuff together. I knew that moving out to California was going to be expensive, so I wanted to have a lead with a revenue model, so the teams out there start to produce revenue and then I’m free to roll.

Aaron: Then you can start. I’m excited to see what happens out there. We’ve got a lot of friends down in there. We have some of our other podcast hosts that come in, guys that run big offices down in LA.

Ian: Dude, you’re crucial in that. Remember that time I texted you and asked for Paul’s number?

Aaron: Yes.

Ian: That’s what came from that.

Aaron: You guys will recognize Paul, he does a lot of State of The Markets with me. He’s our co-hosts on some of the things out here. Ian heard us on the podcast, reached out, and said, “Can I go out there?” Now he’s building something giant out in LA. I’m super excited for both of you guys to see how that goes.

Your podcast. You have this really cool new podcast that you have also taken on. I think that partially, goes into, at first, it’s about building businesses, now it’s about family. Now your new podcast is called The Men on Purpose podcast.

Ian: Men on Purpose podcast.

Aaron: Men on Purpose podcast. Very cool. Very cool, the name. I can imagine what it’s about but who are you interviewing on there? What are the topics that you’re tackling? How often do you publish your episodes?

Ian: Sure. I’m going to give a quick backstory because Aaron and Paul and Pat, this is about the power of saying yes and just asking questions and being curious. If there was another thing that somebody gets from this interview– last September I was asked to be on stage to talk about podcasting only because I had been a host on Real Estate Rockstars and because they came with that clout.

I was just, even before I talked to Paul, so curious about what they were doing. I asked to just get on the mic. I was nervous and scared and I didn’t have the skills but I figured it out, I practiced in the mirror. I’m just curious, anyway. I wrote a ton of questions. Then I interviewed Pat and the next morning, 5:30, I had this vision and I just texted Pat and I said, “Hey, do you think I can just learn from you, maybe co-host with you?” Pat said, “Yes. Dude, come on.”

We set up four interviews in a row, and Pat out on me in the first 15 minutes and just left me to do the interviews. He said, “Look, you did great.” I tweak here and tweak there and then it just started sailing. Then all of a sudden, my own podcast opened up. You took over this podcast. I why-ed out a little bit but because of this podcast, obviously have a relationship with you, but I was able to hit you up real quick, get to a guy like Paul Morris, who honestly the rest of the world isn’t getting to Paul and his cell phone very quickly and very easily. Paul’s a busy guy, he’s a successful guy.

I had this beautiful conversation with Paul about my mission and the things I want to do in LA, and Paul’s like, “Dude, whatever I can do to help, let’s roll.” Because it was mutually beneficial, I said, “Paul, what can I do to help you with my real estate background, my expertise in coaching?” We talked about it and he just started making connections. It’s the power of saying yes, it’s the power of curiosity that got me into the position I’m in today.

Fast forward to my podcasts, Men on Purpose is perfect for me because I am a man on purpose. My family is out front, its driver is the North star, time, experiences, moments and memories with them, living a life of no regrets, out in the world is our playground and our classroom. I don’t have to be locked in, “Oh, we got to get back home to get to what looks like a jail but it actually says, ‘school’ on it.” I’m not playing that game.

We interview high-level dudes that are doing amazing things and being amazing people. They’ve gone through transformation. They’ve had a bunch of failure. They’ve had these moments where their lives were teetering on a, “I’m going to lose my wife,” or, “My kids hate me,” or, “My business is going down.” I got to make this shift and to counterbalance versus this balanced life that people talk about which isn’t real. You can only balance so much. You overload one side, you’re going to topple over. If you counterbalance in an equal fashion to both sides, you can live a really free flow life.

We talk a lot about feminine and masculine energy and understanding your emotions and past traumas and conditioning. We’ve got some really good guests; NASCAR drivers, NFL football players, pro wrestlers, you name it. Look, everybody, Aaron’s going to be on here soon. He just doesn’t know it. [laughs]

Aaron: What a fun thing you’re doing, man. I love your mission with that. I love your story of failure to working hard to success, and then having a bunch of success in real estate and saying, “What’s next? What else is there? Hey, I’ve made it,” and now having the focus on that. It sounds like you’re just on a mission for balance and giving back, that balance of, “Can I be super successful, but can I also be a great dad?” Like we said at the beginning, being family men with businesses, instead of businessmen with family. We’ll see what it’s all about, man.

It’s been super fun catching up with you today. I knew that you would be able to bring a lot of fun with your story. I hope a lot of our listeners go over and listen to you on your new podcast to see. As you guys know, Ian helped so much with Real Estate Rockstars over the years, and then with that being able to take that to go run his own podcast now and still be expanding his real estate businesses, his coaching, and everything else. I’m proud to see what you’re doing and proud to call your friend. I’m excited to see what’s next for you.

Ian: Thanks, brother. I appreciate this.

Aaron: The last if somebody wants to reach out to you, how do they find you?

Ian: My website, ianlobas.com, or you can go to menonpurposepodcast.com and find literally anything you need to know about me, my coaching business, my front runner company, the events we’re doing and the masterminds we’ve got, the one-on-one coaching, group coaching, corporate coaching. Whatever you need, it’s there.

Aaron: Awesome. All right, guys, go talk to Ian. Thanks for having you on in Real Estate Rockstars. We will be back later. Thanks for listening.