Andresa Guidelli wanted to live life on her own terms. With a little hard work, a great mindset and time, she achieved financial freedom that allowed her to do so. In this episode, Chris Swartz talks all about her journey towards living life with Andresa. She shares her journey as part of The Real Estate InvestHER community and how this enabled her to reach out and help other women achieve their goals. Tune in and be inspired by her story and learn how to live on your own terms.

Listen to the podcast here:

Andresa Guidelli – Live Life On Your Own Terms

I am here with Andresa Guidelli. How are you?

I am here with Andresa Guidelli. How are you?

It’s a pleasure to meet you and have you on the show. I know we have some mutual friends and you are doing big things. I want to welcome you to the show and tell our readers a little bit about Andresa. She is the CEO and Founder of the InvestHER Community, and there’s a whole bunch of other things. She has a ton of property. You have done flips and buy and hold. She has done it all in the real estate game, so we are going to talk about that. I will let you talk a little bit more about the Community. You also have your own podcast. Tell us a little bit about that before we get into everything.

The Real Estate InvestHER Community was created out of a need. My business partner, Liz Faircloth, and I were friends. We met through the BiggerPockets and we started building a relationship. She has her own real estate business. I had my own real estate business and we were meeting every single month at a local bakery to support one another.

We start asking ourselves, “Where can we go to get the support that we need in a few parts of a community and concerned about raising our hands, asking the questions and practicing, asking for help?” That’s how The Real estate InvestHER Community was born. We started with a podcast, The Real Estate InvestHER Show, where we interview successful women in real estate to get the nitty-gritty about how they reach where they are now and how they live a financially free and balanced life. That’s our goal.

We have 54-plus meetups across the country because we feel that women need to meet in person to make those connections. We are in Canada. We have 2 or 3 allocations in Canada. Our goal is to expand across the globe. We have a very engaging Facebook community and women want more support. We develop different areas to support women, books, and memberships to live life on their own terms. Not in somebody’s else terms. That’s the biggest thing.

That’s exactly why our mutual friend, Kerry Faix, connected us. She’s a great person and naturally, as a man, I’m bumping into and having all of these men on the show that are doing these amazing things. It dawned on me and I said, “I’m missing the best part here, all of these awesome rock star women.” It’s only natural because of my experience.

As I started to have more women on and I had Kerry on, I said, “I need to meet some more people like you.” It’s so amazing and I talked to Kerry about this because traditionally, however that looks nowadays, in my world, my wife is the CEO of everything in my life. She does what I do and then times a thousand. We will meet people but she’s an introverted person.

She doesn’t want to be in the spotlight. She sits down and given my business, what I need to do and what I’m comfortable doing, I put myself out there and that’s what I enjoy. People see the dynamic and I see Chris. She’s just behind the scenes and she’s cool with it. I always feel the need to like, “I wouldn’t be able to do this if it weren’t with you.”

It’s whatever works for you and your family. There’s not this secret like, “She must do real estate.” We get a lot of questions for men and women like, “How can I get my spouses to agree?” You don’t have to. Let them be who they want to be in life. Have a partnership and a healthy marriage that you can flourish and support one another.

Whatever that means to you guys is a different way. For women like me, for example, I am a divorced single mom. We face different challenges. As an introvert, I am not naturally going to not working events. That’s drowning my energy. After that, I’m like, “I need two days to recover that.” I have learned that there are certain things that work for me.

Let your partner be who they want to be in life. Have a partnership and a healthy marriage that you can flourish and support one another.

Intentional networking works for me. Making meaningful connections like this one now works for me. It’s a good way that I spend my time because I have very limited time. I need to think very wisely about what I say yes to and say no to. It has to have a meaning behind the scenes. I get a lot of requests for podcasts real estate that I say, “No, thank you because I already heard about this.” What I love about your show is that it goes a little bit beyond and we are having real raw conversations here. That’s more interesting and it gives people a different perspective. We are not the number of doors.

How many doors do you have? The same thing, my background is in mortgages, as you know, I’m one of the principal partners of my company. People often say, “You have a show.” They expect me to be talking about interest rates and where is the market heading? I’m like, “There are probably 100,000 shows.” There are people that study the market and know where it’s heading more than I do.

Also, my eyes will glaze over. I am the opposite. I’m an extroverted person. I love to meet people and hear the stories behind the people because there are so many people that get lost in who they are in their success. You get identified with how many doors do you have. How many flips have you done? How much capital have you raised? There’s so much more to people than how many doors they have.

That’s what we try to do here and I love to go back to what you said, “The intentional networking.” If there are people out there that are reading or maybe getting started, be selective of where you commit your time because that’s a limited resource and a more valuable resource than your dollars. When I started in my career, I realized quickly and felt there was something wrong with me and nothing against these things.

I won’t leave the organizations but there are these organizations that you can go to that everybody shows up and there’s no intention but everybody is giving you business cards. It’s like, “I don’t even know who you are.” I need to make a connection with somebody real before I can even decide to do business.

A lot of investors are used to this system that we go to, those networking events, we exchange cards or we get into a conversation. The worst thing, Chris, is going to a networking event and having a very superficial conversation but then thinking like, “We are so similar.” You like the same things. “I want to flip. You want to flip, too. We like construction.” It was like, “We should partner up.”

At the end of the meeting, you are figuring out your LLCing type of deal. That’s rusty before a disaster. As an introvert, I was only able to build my business and live the lifestyle that I live now because I was able to partner up with other people that complimented my skillset, personality and strength. Liz Faircloth is exactly like you. She’s an extrovert.

When we go to networking events, you can probably look at me and I’m behind her. She’s introducing people and then I go ahead. At the end of the day, I am exhausted and she’s full of energy because that fulfills her but we leverage that. We leverage funding, time, skill, experience and personality. When you are thinking about building a business, the most important is living the life that you want. I will highly recommend partnering up with people that are not like you. They are complimentary to you.

I’m sure you have had other partnerships or been in relationships that you may be met in a situation where you were that similar person and now you are like, “There are two of us trying to do and think about the same thing.” The business relationships didn’t work and now, fortunately, you learn and grow. We can save some people reading in some learning and going thing.

I’m not saying my life was always perfect and I nailed this all the time. I’m probably sharing with you because, at some point in my career, that did not happen but I have to learn the lesson, otherwise, that’s going to happen over and over again. A lot of people, when they say, “Why is this happening to me. My general contractor is running with my money again,” that’s because you are not learning the lesson.

One lesson is in here that I can learn, take responsibility, and take control of it. The things that I cannot take control of, I don’t even need to worry about that because what can you do? What can I put in place during the vetting process of a contractor and during the contract itself? Those are all things that I can control moving forward but if I don’t learn my lesson and put a victim hat, that’s going to happen all over again.

I haven’t met one successful individual that hasn’t failed probably more times than they have won. There are many people that you can’t look at it as a failure. You look at it and you abstract the lesson. I went through a coaching and training program with an extraordinary individual and he always told us to extract the gift from every failure.

There’s something there that you can take away. That is a gift that has been given to you to learn from and then build. There are all these things and as you started, I’m sure you had many challenges, wins and successes. I will speak specifically because that’s why we had you on for women in real estate that are thinking about getting into it. What challenges did you face and wins that you have as you were building?

I am an immigrant from Brazil. I was not born here. I was born there and I came here in ‘08 for my Master’s degree. Real estate was not even on the radar. I didn’t even know that world existed. Passive income and cashflow are not even in my vocabulary. I knew I had to do something regarding sales because I was doing a Master’s in Business Communication and my goal was to go back to Brazil, get a job in a multinational company, and that’s it. That’s what I was thought would be the best route for me.

I took the position of door-to-door sales for Verizon during my last semester. I did not know what I knew now. That was one of the hardest things I have probably ever done in my life. However, it’s super valuable. I know the value now of knocking on people’s doors, building a relationship in 30 seconds, getting 50 to 60 noes per day to get a yes, the thick skin, work ethic to continue building it, and following up. I was like, “How am I going to use all of this?” Knocking on doors is a very good real estate strategy to do. I have no problem knocking on doors because I’m knocking on a lot of them, even I special knock. I built the company from ground zero.

I don’t wake up every day saying, “I am a woman.” I don’t have that in my mind. I didn’t know what I know now and the challenges that women face that are unconscious. A lot of the things that we take for granted now were not available for women in 1970. We were talking about mortgages, opening up a simple bank account, and all of this.

Our moms inherit that and pass certain things along. When we hear women are not good with numbers, they were not thought that. We are “catching up” on that financial freedom little by little because there’s a lot of stuff that we were not even in it. We didn’t play in the same sandbox. Now we do and have the opportunities to speak up. I remember building a real estate business, my husband, at that time was working in finance and we decided that will be vast for me to quit my full-time job to focus on building the real estate business.

I built to the point that I will be able to replace his income and he will be able to come with me. It was in 2017, we were at the top of our business itself. We were doing around fifteen deals at the same time and partnerships. Everything was on top. The business was good but my relationship and my marriage were not. I had been working on it for a couple of years and I had to make a very tough decision there. “Should I continue this because the business is very good?” It looks very good but internally, I’m not living the life that I want.

I am certain that something needs to change here because I have a two-year-old boy and I don’t want that for my son. I made the decision that it would be best for our family to separate, not the family but the marriage itself was not working. That meant that my business needed to close and I had to start all over again for myself and by myself.

There are a lot of things that women go through. I probably made a lot of mistakes speaking with you, guys, here now and will continue making them unless you tell me that is incorrect. The last time that you see me say, “It’s not that.” I didn’t look at that as a limitation. I’m speaking 100% proper English did not put a stop to my goals of having a podcast and putting myself out there. Me being from another country and not having a credit score history, I didn’t even know that it was a thing. When I came here, I paid for my Master’s degree. I worked and pay it. I was $75,000 that could have been in a credit card. I will pay the credit card and build that score.

There are so many things that we have to figure out. The biggest thing that I figured out as a woman in real estate is that we tend to “try to do everything by ourselves or figure it out by ourselves” because we were not trained to ask for support. Asking for support might look at us as weak or incompetent. I had to overcome that mindset to scale my business for sure.

I had to look at it as asking for support, expanding my team, and doing what I’m good at while I enjoy doing it. It’s a privilege and a gift but I had to make the courageous decision. That’s exactly what I was going to do and nothing else. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing the same thing and working on a rehab project my entire life. That’s not how I saw my life. Those skillsets, I can transfer that but I had bigger goals and I had to make those tough choices.

Our mission is to empower a woman to live a financially free and balanced life.

There is a lot to unpack there. That’s a lot of tough choices, especially as you said, “The business is thriving and it is tied to your marriage.” When you are mixing that much of your life and the intensity of a decision, that has to be extremely hard. Kudos to you for doing what you do and living. We will take Steve’s quote and give him a plug, “You are living your best life.”

It takes courage. I hope that works for every single person.

The thing about that is some people talk and think that’s a selfish thing. Oftentimes, the other person is not being served. You are holding them back from living their best life. That’s a big shift in your thought process. It’s just understanding, especially even if you are a CEO and you have employees. If you have somebody that isn’t working in your organization or your life and you feel bad or keep allowing them to do whatever it is they are doing that they are not comfortable with, you are not serving yourself and that person. Oftentimes, if you let them go, they are going to go find something else that they should be doing because it’s not working.

I’m not going to be able to also serve the people that I want to serve. When Liz and I created The Real Estate InvestHER Community, our mission is to empower a woman to live a financially free and balanced life. It’s not like, “Let me go on the corner and figure that out in some way, shape or form.” It is a big deal for us. We understand the dimension and mean what we say but then it comes down to, “How am I going to do that? How am I going to be able to even have time to serve other women while I take care of myself as a mom, woman, friend, and business owner?”

One of the misconceptions that I always hear, Chris, is that people think that for them to become free of time, they need to become financially free first, and then they are going to have the time. I second guess that. In my opinion, the more time you have, the quicker you will become financially free, so free up your time. Is it half an hour this week? Is it two hours per month? Buy somebody else’s time, so you can focus on building your business that will run without you being there. That’s the key.

That’s the finance freedom piece. When you are building a business that will run without you there, then you are free. A lot of people talk about how many flips they have done or how many flips they are doing, and it’s great. They are making a ton of money but I see the work. These are too jobs that pay very well but that’s very hands-on.

The key that you said is building that team and putting those people around you. Something I have focused on a lot in my career and one of the biggest things. I pay outrageous amounts of money for coaching and mentorships. I am a coaching junkie. I can’t even tell you how many programs I have done. Some of it you are all stopping and you leave. You execute some of it, some of it you don’t, and then a year later, you are like, “Now I’m ready for that one. I’ve got it. Let me dig that one out.” You crush it and get back to it.

I think that that’s huge and in leveraging your time. I always tell people, especially in my space, “I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not inventing new things. I’m simply doing something that already exists, trying to make it better, refine the process and free myself to do what I enjoy and live my best life.” I love connecting with people, solving problems, helping people, putting people together so that they can help each other. The mortgages are the vehicle that I’m connecting with people.

It’s where I ended up in 2005. I was flipping houses, doing some things, and a friend of mine said, “You should do the mortgages with me.” This is where I landed but you could probably replace that with anything as long as I’m making those connections and surrounding myself with good people. It sounds that your community was tapping into The Real Estate InvestHER Show and leveraging your time by aligning yourself with the experts and good people.

You are part of the BiggerPockets real estate community and I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people are in that community of BiggerPockets. The podcast through BiggerPockets is 110 million collective downloads. There are these communities out there to plug into so that you don’t have to do this yourself. That’s a big part of what you do.

The biggest thing is the mindset. I didn’t know half of this stuff from the period that I’ve got here to now. The mad of courses that I took and I’m the type of person that I’m going to any type of self-development course. I’m going to give them 30 minutes of my time. If I like it and catch my attention, I will stay. If not, I’m out.

Interestingly enough, I stayed in all of them because it sparked my attention and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was like, “Now it’s time for me to put my student hat on, leave the leader hat outside, follow here even if I do not agree with it.” I had training once. It was one week in the middle of New York in the woods and no cell phones. The event did not have an agenda and I had a problem with that. I was like, “What do you mean there’s no agenda? How do I know what’s happening?”

It broke my way of being so much that I was like, “If I can’t handle all of this, I can’t handle anything.” I cannot share everything that happened but I came out of the week. I came home super energized and I’m good to go. My mom looked at my legs and she asked me, “Did they spank you there? What happened?” I was like, “No, mom. We had different types of exercises like crawling, going to freaking fire, and jumping.” She was like, “What?” I was like, “These are the results but I’m good.”

That’s the best and then you tell people that. “Do you pay for this?” “I paid a lot of money.”

You paid to sleep on top of rocks and have bug bites all over your body. You come home and say, “You will do it all over again.” Will you pay all those thousands of dollars? The answer is yes. A lot of people don’t understand the power and the connections of that. I highly recommend you start testing the water out because the bigger players are doing things out of their comfort zone, so we can expand like a rubber band.

The key is stepping out of your comfort zone. When you think about being financially free or being a Real Estate InvestsHER, you are not thinking about sleeping on rocks in the woods in New York. That’s not part of the plan, typically. Step outside of your comfort zone with like-minded people. You have to have to align with good people.

Chris, right there, there were other entrepreneurs but we are nobody. We don’t have titles there. When they said, “You need to clean that part body.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” “It’s your turn.” “It’s 5:00 AM.” “That’s your problem.” He breaks you down completely. You don’t know who people are, and you are like, “Do you want to have coffee? Let’s have coffee over here” You start talking to them. It’s like, “What do you do? Who are you in the world? This is amazing. I did not know you as that. I knew you like that person that carried bricks on that field with me.” You build such strong bonds that are unbreakable, to be quite honest.

I have done a couple of events like that myself. Fortunately, I didn’t have to clean porta-potties but we crawled on the beach, dive, got smashed by waves, and did all kinds of things that I questioned, “What I had got myself into?” Sometimes, when you are doing these things, it doesn’t always click like how you are going to apply it in the event. You are like, “This is so crazy. Am I doing some crazy events to be different? How is this going to apply?”

Many times, at some point, either in any event or when you get home, if you have gone to a good event, you say, “Don’t sign up for everything, do your homework.” You’ve got to find good people. You come back, that is where you find those lessons, and then you start connecting the dots. I’m sure when you are cleaning porta-potties and carrying bricks, it didn’t have a direct application to how that would go.

What are the worst situations that I face? I compared to that and I was like, “No, that was worse. This is nothing. I can go through this, no problem or whatsoever.”

That’s what my show is all about. Tapping into, whether you have chosen to participate in situations that break you down, whether life naturally has kicked your ass. Life is hard. I have two daughters and they are at ages now where there are real lessons that they need to be learning. My sixteen-year-old was in all these advanced classes, and it’s intense. I was an okay student in school but she’s doing things and she has opportunities that I didn’t have.

I was in a different world than she is but she said, “I’m so tired.” She’s telling me all these things and I said, “That sucks but get up. This is what life is.” I’m tired a lot of the time and you have to make the decision. Life is hard and you can either bitch and whine about it or you can get up, put your boots on or heels on, or whatever you’ve got to get and do what you have to do. She’s a junior in school and I went back to school. I’m not going to lie. When they were little, you zone out of those things. At least I was like, “Okay.”

You need to do your work. What are your goals? Where are you? Where would you like to invest?

This was one where I was like, “It’s time to pay attention. This kid has SATs, pre-SATs, and was thinking college.” In my head, when having gone through and been in her world for that back to school, the AP teacher was like, “We are going to rip through so much content in this class. I’m sorry but this is the class they are in. This is what it is.” She said that to me, “Dad, this is hard.” I’m like, “Thankfully, I have been through enough shit that I know how you to support her.”

The biggest thing is the support and continued having those conversations. I don’t have a teenager. I have a six-year-old but I was a teenager one day. When I was overwhelmed, what I wanted was the support like, “Tell me how can we support and create workability here. If that’s not working, what do we need to do?” Sometimes, for me, it was taking half an hour to go out for ice cream and come back because, as an introvert, I’ve got too much in class. That brought my energy down and I didn’t have the energy to do other things.

Sometimes, it was just ice cream with my dad or having a conversation with my mom but I knew that no matter what, both my dad and my mom were raising me for the world. That’s what they said, “We are raising you for the world and we will be always here if you need to come back.” I do not have to come back yet, but to go back and do it. My dad passed away when I was seventeen. I was raised by a very strong mom that still kept that, “I am here for you. If you need it, I’m right here.” Your daughter is reaching out to you and sharing, as sixteen tells a lot about your relationship with her.

I’m very appreciative that we do have good communication as good as it can be with a sixteen-year-old. She does tell me I feel a lot of things. It’s about having somebody to support you. That’s tying back to what you do in your community. We are talking about the people here and the extraordinary lives that have led you to where you are.

We could get into, how many flips have you done? How many Airbnbs and development projects because there is an extensive portfolio of big stuff that you have done. If somebody is reading and they want to talk about living a life of financial freedom and figuring this stuff out but to tie it back to not being alone, how does a woman tap into your community? What resources do you have?

We have prepared free resources. It’s a free membership for women who wants to get a start in real estate but are confused. There’s a lot of content out there but it’s overwhelming. We prepared a couple of on-demand videos that you also can watch at your leisure. If you are a mom and you have other things going on, you can watch, pause, and then go back. Those are the foundation.

Understanding your market before you even go see a house. This is one of the biggest things. We broke that down. We have a Facebook Group community where we have very experienced people there. All the people that I know and my peers are there. Having the courage to ask a question and get the support and say, “This is where I’m getting stopped. I have done my homework.” You can say, “How can I get started?”

You’ve got to do your work. What are your goals? Where are you? Where would you like to invest? Other people can narrow down and share. They are kind and generous in sharing their perspective and their own experience. That’s the best thing, and then check out our local Meetups. It is the core of connecting with other women and getting started.

If you are a solopreneur and tired of running your business by yourself, you want to take it to the next level and you are looking for mentorship and accountability. We have a membership for that woman. It is a very high level per se because there are live masterminds, which I love that we are like, “Let’s go there, talk about it, and move forward.” That’s more for the women that are already investing in real estate.

I do want to highlight the fact because this has been a game-changer in my business that as you are speaking about all of these things in how you grow. I know one of the biggest game-changers in my business was joining a community. It’s paying to be a part of an amazing community of people in the mortgage world that have scaled. I’m in a group called the Freedom Club.

There are people in there that do an insane amount of business, 100 times more than what I do but that’s not the point. The point in the group is freedom. Creating a system, the scalability, and building out the team so that you are not bragging about how many loans you closed last month but you haven’t seen your family or you haven’t gone on vacation.

I see people that, “I haven’t been on vacation in five years.” I’m like, “How are you saying?” They think that’s like a thing to brag about. I’m like, “This sounds terrible.” One of the things that you do is you are unpacking. How do I get started? If I’m at the entry-level, how do I connect with the community? If you are at a higher level, you have that additional option of support.

The key here is we are not bringing people to real estate to create a job that is going to create an imbalanced life. The key is you are also going to teach people how to powerfully hire, manage teams, build that confidence and peace of mind, and that’s where financial freedom comes in. That’s why what you are doing is so special because you can have all the money in the world. If you don’t have freedom and time, in my mind, you are broke.

You are not free and a slave of it. We base our community on three pillars. It’s real estate investment, business strategies, and then self-care. That is goal hand-to-hand because it is also important, the self-care, whatever that means to you in the sense of self-care. To me, it might look like an hour drinking tea and listening to a podcast, for example.

Other people might be getting their nails done and traveling overseas, whatever that means. It is important to put that on the table because many times, we are not on our to-do list. We are not even there. Taking care of us mentally as well and being aware of our needs, fulfilling and honoring that, don’t cancel the schedule that you have with yourself. That’s what I like to recommend. We sometimes say, “I have that time for me but this call here is more important.” Nobody is more important than you.

Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show. It has been a real pleasure. How can people connect with you? Where can they find information? I know you said you have the free course.

Thank you so much, Chris. This has been a very refreshing conversation and I enjoyed it. For people that are looking to get more inform our community. You can go to TheRealEstateInvestHER.com and you can also find our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and all the other channels. You can also follow us on Instagram @TheRealEstateInvestHER.

We are looking forward to hopefully helping some women join your community, get financially free, and connect with good people.

Thank you so much, Chris. It was a pleasure.

You are not getting off the hook yet. We’ve got three rapid-fire questions and then we are out. These are three fun questions we always end this show. This might be good because you are an introvert. If you are stuck on an island, outside of your friends and family, one person living, past, celebrity, friend, doesn’t matter, who are you taking on the island? We know you would take your family, and we will give you that.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I will take her. I would like to have a conversation with her. Unfortunately, I did not get to meet her and talk to her, so I will pick her.

Secondly, this would be an easy one. What’s a book that’s had an impact on your life that you would like to share.

We sometimes say, “I have that time for me, but this call here is more important.” Nobody is more important than you.

Who Not How, I love it very much. It had the same impact that Rich Dad Poor Dad did at the beginning of my career. It was life-changing.

The last one is a fun one. You are stuck on the island. You’ve got to have some treats and something that you would love and enjoy. What’s one food that you are taking with you that you have to have or snack?

Any Mediterranean food.

It has been a pleasure having you on the show. Until next time. We hope to have you on. We love following your journey with the InvestHER Community and for one that’s reading, we ask that if you’ve got something out of this now, share it with your friends and on iTunes. We are out there on all the different platforms. If you enjoyed the show, give us a five-star rating on iTunes, and make sure you check us out next time.

Important Links:

• InvestHER Community
• BiggerPockets
• The Real Estate InvestHER Show
• Facebook – The Real Estate InvestHER Community
• Kerry Faix – Past Episode
• iTunes – The Real Estate InvestHER Show
• Spotify – The Real Estate InvestHER Show
• @TheRealEstateInvestHER – Instagram
• Who Not How
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• iTunes – FUEL with Chris Swartz
• Facebook – The Real Estate InvestHER

About Andresa Guidelli

Tags: Community, Financial Freedom, Real Estate, Real Estate InvestHER, Real Estate Investing, Self Care