I hate hot coffee. I literally only drink coffee over ice, quote unquote. Real coffee drinkers tend to disagree, but hey, to each their own, right? I enjoy finding little mom and pop coffee shops that serve special cold brew concoctions.

A few years back I was in my hometown while my dad was in the hospital. I was exhausted, feeling half awake and I decided to take a drive searching for caffeine that wasn’t hot hospital sludge. Thankfully, I happened on this hole in the wall, a mural splashed open late night spot that offered the double shot dirty chai that I was desperately needing and had vegan muffins that did actually taste delicious.

For almost two months straight while my dad was laid up, that place kept me upright, but nearly every time I went the place was practically empty. I remember thinking this place is great. Why is it so dead in here? Fast forward a few years when I was back in town, dad back in the hospital.

I went searching for that same spot and to my surprise there was a line out the door. The barista was calling people by name. There was a hustle and bustle within the place.

Aside from an updated sign, it seemed like nothing else had changed. I was curious where all these people came from when I made an inquiry about it to the sweet girl behind the counter who turned out to be the owner. She said they got serious about their online presence.

Their Google profile was tuned up and it shot the business up among the top local coffee spots. Same lattes, totally different bottom line. When thinking about today’s guest, Leonard Gilman, that story was the first thing that came to mind.

Lenny is the owner of Lead Masters. Lead Masters is an SEO shop that takes on one client per niche, per city, and works his magic to help catapult their business up to the top of online searches, ultimately driving traffic to the business. Not only a strategic and successful entrepreneur, Lenny is a savvy investor.

We’re going to drive in on his journey and his investing playbook on this episode of Invest in you. My name is Dena Glasgow. I want the discussion of money, financial literacy, and the creation of generational wealth to be less taboo.

My hope is to help people break down the barrier walls they use as a defense mechanism when asked to talk about their finances. For people to understand they don’t need millions or even thousands to begin making their way to financial freedom as well as offer insight and opportunities that are out there to take action to find their version of success and path to wealth. Because there’s not one way to success.

We simply have to find Your way to success. They say it takes a village to raise a child, so why go solo with your finances? Thank you so much for being here with me today, Lenny. I’m excited to talk to you.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Absolutely. If you would.

I really just want to kind of start out with the journey for you because I know that you’ve had so many different hats over the years. So if you would just give the listeners just a brief synopsis of how you got where you are today. Okay.

Well, when I graduated college, I actually had a TV and film production degree. So I started by trying to get a job in that field, thinking I could stay here in St. Petersburg. That quickly proved to be a difficult task.

So I was just looking for a job at this point, the. The TV and film production. If you were working for the news here, it was very low pay to start out.

It was full time. They could call you in the middle of the night to go film a fire. You were just always on call.

So I happened into Franklin Templeton because I saw they had a sign out they were hiring. I was on my way to another job interview and I just happened in there. And that was really the most fortunate thing I’ve ever done.

That was just happenstance. So I got there pretty quickly, got my Series 6 securities license and started to learn the path to intelligent finance and really paying yourself first, making sure that you’re investing a portion of your money. Because when you’re first starting out, you know, you need all that money.

It’s. It’s not a very big salary, but if you just start out slow, invest, and then as you get raises, I took a portion of every one of those raises and reinvested that in because that was once again, found money for me. After that, I continued to work on my education.

I discovered I was good at computers and started doing some programming there within our dealer services department. And then I started going to school at night for my Microsoft certifications. Once I had completed those, I went over to Home Shopping Network and got a job there on desktop support.

Started running around, fixing computers, worked in the server rooms, and then eventually over to the. The web webmaster department. So started working on their websites.

And that’s, that’s kind of how all this came to be in the beginning. That’s cool. So you went from film and video to finance to computers and kind of just melded it all together really.

Right, right. And. And the beauty of the TV and film production is that I still use some of those techniques and some of the knowledge that I learned there in website creation, it.

It relates to the digital marketing, the media, the film, all, all that. So it’s really been very good. That’s cool.

So with the business that you have now, and I understand that you take, you know, the one client, one. One client per niche, per city is, Is really your focus, right? Correct. So that particular client that you’re working with, not only are you helping them to, to optimize their s.

With SEO, optimize their website through SEO. Right. Search engine optimization, but you do help them a little bit with content or graphics.

Yes, I, I can help with content graphics. I have a really good eye for it sometimes with some of my clients. Mostly I work with service area businesses.

So those are not your brick and mortar stores because those are much easier to rank than somebody who’s going out and say they’re a plumber or. My favorite is the tree service. They go and actually service customers at their location.

So to rank them on Google Maps is much more difficult. But I will go out there, I’ll shoot video for them, I’ll do photographs and take pictures of the work in progress so that we can do before and afters and create some engaging content for them. That’s awesome.

So as far as like your average life with a client, I mean, to see some progress. Well, let me back up. Do you work with startups or the businesses that you work with already established, they already have a brand, they already have been doing their own thing.

So actually my favorite is to work with startups who are in the, the very early stages of creating the business because we can optimize everything right from the beginning. There’s a lot of questions you can ask early that will help them get a good foot, you know, going forward so they’ll have a strong leg to stand on and that helps them throughout the life of their business. It just makes everything so much easier.

And so the clients that you work with, what’s like the average time frame that you’ve been working with your clients to? Well, some of the early ones, I, I had a tree service back in the day. That’s why I really like the, that industry. But some of the early ones have been with me going on almost six years now.

Nice, nice. So you owned a tree. Tree service business too? Ran a big tree service for about 12 and a half years.

How’d you even find the time you went from school to. Yeah, it was. I became a little bit disillusioned with corporate IT we’ll call it.

And it was it was a constant rotation of going through certifications, taking all these tests, and then those certifications would stay active for three years maybe. And so you’re starting once again with the Microsoft certification that I got, the mcse. It was, it was eight tests.

And back in the day they were like our St. Petersburg Yellow Pages. So each of the books was, it was, it was a lot. Yeah.

So that business, how long did you have that business for the tree service? The tree service, about 12 and a half years. I ran it. Okay.

And then I, I sold that because, you know, I just got tired of, it wasn’t something I could do myself. So I was always relying on a lot of people to make sure the jobs went off correctly. And some of those people had their own agendas.

Yeah. Sometimes managing people isn’t always the easiest. That’s, it’s not my forte, I will say that.

So when you sold it, if you don’t mind me asking, was it like a one time sale, cash sale, you were in and out, or did, did you offer some opportunity for the new owner to do some financing with you or how did you set it up? Set that up? It was pretty much a one one time cash deal. I gave it to him at a discount. I had just got a really big contract with a, with an individual actually for, for their property for the next year.

And it was a 20 acre property with, he had spent well over a million dollars just planting trees on the property. So it was, it was an extensive contract. We, we were there about six months before I sold the, the business and it was, it was a bit of a drive, so it was about an hour and 15 minutes each way, but they had substantial work to continue on and.

Yes, that’s great. That’s great. So coming back to Lead Masters, were you doing Lead Masters during that transition? So that’s, that’s when I started to, to learn about the SEO.

The whole game of SEO as it is is during the time when I was trying to get my marketing up and my phone ringing because when I started it was, it was yellow Pages. You did your website, you did a few things. You door knock, you’d hang flyers.

It was, it was kind of a nightmare to, to keep consistent business coming in. And so you, it was self taught? More or less. Self taught, Yep.

And then it just kind of snowballed for you and you saw the, the perks and it did. Yeah. I started out ranking a lot of the much bigger tree services here in St. Pete.

And so I would get a lot of questions from them. When I would see them, like at the dump or whatever. Yeah.

You know, we’d see each other out and they’re like, how the heck are you, you know. Right. Outranking us on the maps.

And we’ve been established here for 20, 30 years. And so you’re like, I’m just that great. Well, no.

So in learning all of that, what do you think is something that I know certain that there’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle. But if you had to tell like that guy at the dump, what would be that one thing that you’re like, start with? Yeah. As long as they weren’t my competitor, I tell them to.

Right now, today, the very best thing you can do is focus on the map pack. And so in order to do that, the single greatest action you can have is just to be consistent with getting your reviews from your, your clients. Because Google geolocates them.

If you can get them to add an image with the review, it’s even more powerful. There’s, there’s a lot of little, little secret ingredients, you know, to the sauce that’ll, that’ll make it really work for your business. Well, so when you say map pack, is that the reviews.

I’m sorry. So when you do a search on Google, it will produce results there, and you will see a little map that’ll show three businesses. Right.

Those are the top three on the map. Right. Okay.

Below that there’s a button to click more. Yeah. But it’s, it’s been stated that 70 to 80% of all the calls go to one of those first three in the map pack because they’re right there.

Especially if you’re searching on a cell phone, it’s super easy just to click. And there’s a call button right there on the Google panel. Yeah, I know that for me, I’m looking at that map and seeing who’s the closest to me, you know, and because I, I do find that when you look at that initially, sometimes they’re way outside.

You know, we’re in St. Pete, sometimes they’re in Tampa. Right, right. And that’s, that’s a golden opportunity when you find a map that looks like that.

Oftentimes that’s because it’s being underserved by the local area. So that’s a golden opportunity to look for a business to start if, if that’s what you’re doing. Nice.

When talking about your changing from these various careers, was it merely because you, you mentioned already that you kind of were done with the corporate. Right. So you wanted to move on or was it, you know, triggers during life or circumstance? I guess is my question.

So with me, it’s really, I really enjoy learning more than anything. So I’m always kind of digging in and tinkering at things and I’m reading stuff at night, I’m watching videos. I, I love to build, I love construction.

So I have diverse interests. Interests. But it’s, it’s more than anything just that I love learning and really figuring things out.

So if there’s a puzzle out there, it’s going to bother me. I’m going to work at it. I like that I’m the same way.

I sometimes think that it might be shiny object syndrome at points, but I do go down rabbit holes and try to implement those things that, you know, I mean, right now AI is, is what’s really starting to take over a lot. And I do feel if people don’t start learning about it and implementing some portion into their business that they’re going to end up phasing them their own selves out. So, and that’s, that’s a very good point.

We, we work with that. It’s, it’s integral. It’s built into a lot of our tools that we use.

So even if we’re not going out to say chat, GBT and asking it a question, there’s still a lot of dynamic AI that’s going on in the background to, even for like the GMB service that I offer, where we’re doing the Google business profile, there is AI that looks at your competitors, looks at how often they’re posting, what are they doing for their updates, how many reviews are they getting and it kind of guides us to know how we can compete in that market. That’s good info too. I do think that we’re
going to see more and more of that.

And the fact that you’re already helping it help utilizing it to help you with other people’s info is really great too. Right. So we just initially, I’m sorry.

Additionally, we are now ranking people because AI and voice search are giving results that aren’t the Google results. So a lot more searches are going to hey Siri or hey Alexa, you know, know, give me a tree service in the area. And so you have to be ranking for those, otherwise you’re, you’re already falling behind.

That’s perfect segue because I was going to ask if there is a, a factor to that because just like you mentioned, I, I do use Google a lot. But now Google even has AI, you know, and it, when you are on Facebook or you’re on a web page of any sort, when it sees you typing some things, it will ask you if you want to kind of dig in deeper on that. Right, I’ve seen that.

So is that kind of, some of. Would you utilize that to kind of help boost the, the SEO stuff? Yes. So that’s, that’s exactly right.

We, we have to do certain things to get, get your site to be presented as a possible result in AI and, and from there you’ll, you’ll be at the front of the pack again. So otherwise you’ll just get passed over. Exactly.

The thing that’s happening that’s interesting is the, one of the metrics that Google looks at is click through rate. So if you do a search in the browser and it brings back five results and AI now is, is at the top of it. So none of those results are oftentimes getting clicked before it would look at.

Okay, you’re the number one spot. How many times are you getting clicked through as a result? And, and that was tracked. And then the time on your page, once they got to your website, did they immediately bounce out and leave or did they spend time on your page so the time on your page counted and then if they bounced out and went back and did another search for or went to the next result, that was like a down vote for your site.

So you didn’t, you didn’t answer their query, so they went somewhere else and continue to look. So Google takes all this into account and it’s really, it’s, it’s a policy. Yeah, it is, it’s a puzzle.

So wild when you see on Google Pages and you see at the top where it says sponsored next to businesses. Yep. I tend to scroll right past those.

Right. But isn’t the goal to try and be one of those? I mean, what’s the met? I don’t know if there’s metrics behind that. So the sponsored results are the pay per click.

So that is when you run Google Ads, those are the sponsored results. Okay. Now there’s a new way to do that and it’s called local service ads.

And you have to get background checked. I just did it with one of my clients. It’s, it’s an involved process.

But they, they verify your, your employees backgrounds, they verify your business licenses, your insurance, all this other. But then you’ll get a Google guarantee designation. And the interesting thing there is oftentimes if you can do that and jump through the hoops, the cost per lead is Actually less than the pay per click because the pay per click you might get five or six clicks and they’ll go to your website, but maybe you get one call out of that and this way if you don’t get a call or
whatever else, Google’s like watching in the background what happens when they recommend one of these Google guaranteed businesses.

And so all you have to do is hit a button and qualify it. It’s not a lead and they will take it off of your account so that you’re not paying for that lead. So to actually get a job out of it is cheaper than with pay per click.

Do they note it Because I don’t know that I’ve ever seen I, I know that I’ve recognized sponsored but do they say Google guaranteed or how do they do. It’s mostly service businesses. So it’s mostly like plug plumbers and you know, paving companies, concrete things of that nature.

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So to know that their client, their employees have been looked at, that they should be licensed and insured and things correct. That’s really good to know. Yep.

When you think about success and as well as failures for clients that you’ve ran into, what have you seen if there is a common thread as far as failures that businesses have tried. So the failures that I’ve seen are mostly if people just wait too long. If you’re on your last hundred dollars and this is a hail Mary, it’s, it’s probably not going to have the time to help you.

You, you need to, to start this sooner and make this a part of your budget. That’s, that’s probably the best I can tell you for a. Let’s say you said service business.

So we’ll say plumber. Right. For a plumber listening right now, what would be their.

Obviously we just mentioned time, need time to do this but if they were thinking of a, a cheaper way if they wanted to do this, they didn’t have the money to, to really buy your services right now, but they wanted to start somewhere what might be that cheapest thing for them to start bumping their ranking, working on Reviews or yeah, working on reviews is really the, the biggest signal because that’s an engagement signal for, for Google that you’re, you’re an active business, you’re out there,
you’re satisfying customers, you’re doing jobs. It’s, it’s difficult to get reviews oftentimes it seems like for some of my service businesses if we try and get reviews, it’s maybe one in five that’ll actually leave a review. So oftentimes you need to, you know, ask more than you than you think to get them.

Uh, the other thing you want to do is just look at your profile. Is your profile newer? Do you have few reviews? And if that’s the case, you never want to send out a mass email to your past customers. You want to sprinkle them in.

So I would, you know, no more than one a week, something like that. If you all of a sudden get 10 reviews and you’ve got 5 reviews on your site, they’re going to be all just kicked back out by Google as, as being bought or fake or, or whatever. They’re really cracking down on that.

So that’s really good info too. My, my, we are working on my wife’s site for her dog walking, pet sitting, grooming business and everything and she’s had it a long time, the business and she, you know, comes highly recommended. But there is a section I said we have to start getting Google reviews out because they’re old, they’re dated, you know, and people tend to utilize social media and put the reviews there, but not on Google, you know.

So well if you link your profiles so within your Google business panel you can link your different social profiles and then once the those are associated with your Google account, Google will pull in your other review accounts from Facebook and other other places. Trustpilot’s one Yelp. But they’ll, they’ll pull those in.

Ah, I did not know that so much. Right. It’s one thing to run the business, but then to do everything else to help with lead generation and with keeping your business at the forefront of people’s minds is right.

It is a separate running of a business, right? It is, yep. So if someone gives themselves an hour weekend to boost their visibility, it would be that. Right.

It would be trickling out some reviews, requests for reviews and making that maybe just the once a week drip that you send out to people. And then the other thing they can do is actually post an update to their Google review or their Google profile and they can do before and after pictures of a job they can even put small video snippets up there. All those things really help with engagement.

That’s the other thing is you want to respond to your reviews. A customer’s nice enough to leave you a review review on your site. You want to make sure that you go in and respond to that in, in some manner.

Even if it’s negative. You want to respond and try and address the situation. Offer to have them call your company or send you an email.

The, the one thing you don’t want to do is kind of leave those sitting by themselves because it looks like bad customer service. Never even really thought about that either. You know, the opportunities with a business and, and starting your business up from scratch.

I mean, you already had a little bit of knowledge going into this business already for yourself. Right. We kind of pivoting back to where you were on the tree side of things.

Sure. Yep. When you handed that business over, had you already done your optimization on it and things or, or was that still.

So what ended up happening with him was he bought it, but he bought it for down south. So he just took all the equipment and went down south. He never, never took the phone number, didn’t take the website address because he wasn’t going to service any, any clients up here.

What happened was I then still had people reaching out to me on my cell phone, things like that. So my best employee from my years of running that started his own tree service and now he’s, he’s my best client and I, I, you know, am constantly helping him. We have taken the tree service and broke it off into multiple businesses.

Now he’s got a landscaping division, he has a paver and hardscaping division so that we can target each one of these on Google separately. So he now has all these different businesses that are all flourishing. What a success story that is.

That’s awesome. Yeah. He’s your poster, poster guy for what’s capable of working with Lenny, right? Well, yeah, a lot of it’s him.

I mean the, the day to day is just brutal with running all those crews and keeping the equipment going because people don’t take care of stuff if it’s not theirs a lot of times. Right. Unfortunately, not too many employees take ownership.

Right. Well, you’ve had all kinds of hats throughout your career. What has been a highlight for you? Well, I really, I’d say the relationships, the friendships I’ve made working on different things and just, just challenging myself and, and challenging people around me to try and think differently.

It’s, it’s easy to Come up with an idea and, you know, you tell one of your friends and they’re like, oh, that’ll never work. Or you can’t do that. But.

But if you keep pushing and, and really believe in yourself, I mean, you have to, at the end of the day, be willing to just kind of turn your back and walk away from a job. You need a little bit of savings, obviously, but you, you need to have the faith in yourself that you’re going to be able to figure it out and make it work. Isn’t it crazy that oftentimes the people that are the biggest naysayers or the closest people to you in your life.

Well, and they do it out of love because they want to protect you from being hurt. Right. And.

And maybe it’s a little bit of. They also don’t want to see you go right on past them. So I don’t know.

Definitely truth in that. Yeah. I know you as a real estate investor as well.

Yeah. At what point did you get into all that? So I was always interested in real estate. I got my parents into it back when I was in high school.

I was always reading, you know, the Kiyosaki books and just wanted to. I wanted to have this recurring income stream because I felt that was the only surefire way to build both. It’s.

It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous. Nobody’s gonna, you know, come up to you and congratulate you on it. But it, it does work for sure.

When did you buy your first rental? So I made a very difficult decision when I got done with college and I moved back into my parents house for a year. During that year, I worked at Templeton and I worked overtime because they offered it. I was able to save and pay off all my student loans.

And then I got my first house and I moved directly into my first house I bought under the market. And the realtor kept going, oh, you can afford more house than this. And I said, I don’t want more house than this.

You know, and so then I got the next one like six months later and turned that into a rental. And then it just, just kept going from there. So I was on track if the market was right.

Let me, let me caveat this, because if you can’t buy a house and make the mortgage and all the payments you need to make and make, at least back in the day, it was $100 because you had to be able to make the 1200 over the course of the year to cover if the fridge went out. Or cover part of an AC repair. You just always had to be ready for these things to happen.

But now if the market’s right and you can make the money and have the margin that you need, it’s a no brainer. I get asked a lot is, you know, I keep hearing it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time. And my answer for it is it might not be the right time for somebody else, but if it’s the right time for you, it’s the time to buy.

Right. And not only that, it might not be the right time for a specific strategy. If you’re an investor, sure that that is something that you do have to consider.

So when you’ve bought, has it been traditional financing or have you done creative deals? Like what’s been. So in the beginning, you know, when I was just dipping my toe in, I didn’t know anything about it. I did the traditional financing.

But back then it was so easy because if you had a good social, all you had to do is write your social down and you would pay a half point more on the mortgage. But there were no questions asked. So I, I got a lot of houses like that until I think the tipping point was around seven houses.

They started giving me pushback to give me more mortgages. So then I found a private individual who worked as a, as a banker who, you know, had some decent money. I had done some work for him, so he knew my character.

And I was able to get loans directly through him for an unheard of like 6 to 8% on hard money. And so we would go, I would find the house, I would bet it all, bring him in. He would come and kick, kick the tires on it and pick at the paint and go, oh gosh, what’s that? I’m like, that’s a baseboard.

He goes, what are you going to do with it? Well, I’m going to paint it. Oh, okay. And that, that would satisfy him and we’d move on.

But so there was always this bit of back and forth with him. I did a few deals with him and, and that was good. And then eventually I got more into creative financing.

I’ve bought a few of them subject to, I’ve bought a few of them where I’ve got the owners to hold paper because they were already out of the house. The house is paid off and now, you know, you can get a five year balloon mortgage or something with them where you’re making some payments while you’re getting it fixed up. Because most of the Houses I buy were stinkers.

Yeah. And they wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because if you have a bad roof or you have anything else, all this has to be done and up to par before they’ll write a mortgage for you. Right, right, right.

Is that self taught stuff too? I mean did you. So yeah, my, my dad was a, he taught wood shop, metal shop and print shop. So he, he taught me a lot of skills.

He was a, an ace mechanic and so he taught me about cars and I’ve always just kind of, you know, fixed my own stuff and keep learning as I go. That’s awesome. As a trade person, what, what part do you do you love to do? What part do you hate to do? So I’m interesting.

I, I really love electric. I’ve done entire rewires of probably six of the houses I’ve had and undertaking. Yeah.

And then I get them inspected and they pass. I’ve made good friends in the contractor space who will oftentimes, you know, you’ll pay them $1,000 or something. They’ll pull the permit for you and then I’ll do the work and then they’ll, you know, call in the inspection.

That’s awesome. So the only thing I don’t touch is H Vac. I’ll do all the electric for it.

I’ll run the ducks. But I don’t, I don’t actually, you know, drain and fill the machines and do the soldering and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

I’m same on electricals. Like my. Yeah, yeah.

But it’s got to be open, you know, I need to see it. I don’t want to. I don’t.

Especially the old houses here, you know, you don’t know what you’re getting into. Knob into. Yeah, exactly.

So that’s great as far as strategies go real estate wise. What’s your main bread and butter? What do you enjoy the most? So I, for a while I was trying to get all these rental houses. I thought that was going to be my saving grace.

But that was a job in and of itself. At one point when I was running the tree service towards the end I was managing some for my parents and some of mine and I was, I had 16 houses I was taking care of and chasing tenants and all that fun self managing and all. Getting the 3am calls for random stuff.

Yeah. I normally would completely rehab them when we did them before anyone ever moved in. So.

Okay. You know, the first couple, it was, it was almost a year. You know, I’d be working on this darn house all the time.

Yeah. And then I, I got better at it and, you know, soon it was six months and towards the end here I can do a complete rehab in about four months by myself. By yourself? By myself.

Yep. That’s putting in the work. It is for sure.

Sweat equity, they call it a real sweaty. Yeah. Are they all Florida or.

Oh, yeah, they’re all, they’re all within probably Central St. Pete, you know, five, 10 minutes from Central St. Peter. I stay out of the flood zones. I don’t buy any condos.

I don’t want any HOA fees or anything. That’s just going to sneak up and continue to creep on you and never go down in price. It sounds like we’re sharing the same brain about a lot of things.

What. Let’s talk financial, like financial mindset. Okay.

How do you measure your success? Let’s go with that. If I had to. I’m kind of a slow burn type of guy, so I’ve, I’ve built this up over time.

I am not one that runs out and buys a new vehicle. I always kind of buy my vehicles about 7 years old or so. And, and that way there’s enough history with the vehicle to, to know if it’s a good model line for that particular manufacturer.

You can, you know, use Consumer Reports, things like that and really figure out what your issue is, are that you’re going to be up against. And when you say, you know, measuring success for you is really slow and steady wins the race. Just keep packing it away.

Yep. Just. Just slowly, you know, I never really.

I’ve never had a banner year where I’ve made a ton of money. Yeah. Except when I’ve sold some of the properties.

But from my jobs, you know, it’s just middle of the road, just kind of slow and steady and make sure I’m paying myself first into my investments. Okay. And then, you know, that’s, that’s got to be all the time.

So always, always kind of be the payment first to the investments. Got it. Which habits or routines have helped you the most in your financial growth? Besides the real estate being a main foundation and, you know, squirreling it away.

Squirrel it away, stack it into a little pile, and then look for your next investment. I, I never. If I’m going to do a bigger investment, like say a vehicle or I’m itching to get into another boat, I’m going to think about it, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to do my research.

I’m going to find kind of where I’M at and what I’m thinking, and then I’m going to save up and I’m going to have at least half of the money before I even think about pulling the trigger, if not all of it. A lot of times it, you know, drives people crazy, but it can be up to a year process for me to, you know, do a really big purchase. I can understand that.

I, I, I’m not an impulse when it comes to big investments either. I, and not belief in impulse, I’m the mindset of conservative when it comes to the financial aspect. I want to double.

If it’s going to be five, the numbers five, I need it to be 10 or at least eight. I need to double down on it most times, you know, before I’m making moves. So I. Right there with you.

All right, a few more questions. I think that there’s been a lot of great info. I mean, you’ve definitely taken so many different avenues through your career and found success in each one.

And then, you know, tweaked it, made it what you wanted it to be, and then said, I’m gonna try something different. Yeah, I’m done here. I like that.

I like that a lot. Because you either, you know, you either win at something or you learn if you keep with it long enough. Exactly.

There’s no, there’s no losing. There’s no, there’s learning. Yep.

There’s learning and moving on. Right. Okay, so imagine your profession didn’t exist.

What would you be doing instead? I’d probably be somewhere in the construction field. If I had it all to do over again, I probably would have gone right out and got my contractor’s license and just stayed there and been happy. Yeah.

If, if money was no object, what would be the dream project? Oh, the dream project is definitely a glamping campground up in the mountains. Yeah. With, with a water source.

I, I’d have little, little neighborhoods within the campground. Some of them would be a frames, some of them would be yurts, and you’d have a, you know, kind of a community bathroom shower structure in each neighborhood. Love that little, little four to six kind of cabins or, or huts around it.

I literally just went in down a wormhole yesterday looking at the geodome kind of things. But they’re all clear. Yep.

You know, and they’re not expensive. Right. And take no time to set up from it.

But yeah, that would be awesome. Especially in a scenic area where you got the views and the weather. Right.

It’s awesome. I love that. And there’s something about Being out in nature, that’s just so recharging for sure.

I side Note. What in St. Pete? Where, where’s your favorite beach? I used to spend a lot of time at either Sunset or Upham. You know, either side of that pass.

So growing up, I was having the discussion earlier today about the favorite beach and Sunset is my wife’s favorite beach. I’m, I’m an Indian Rocks kind of girl. I, I love the sleepy beach town.

Yeah. Like trying to get. Especially when you get a day where there’s not everyone on the beach.

Sure. And you, you get the water to yourself. That’s, that’s, that’s the best day.

That’s the best day for me. I was super fortunate. My, my parents bought a house directly out of college on the water on Treasure island, had it built.

And so that’s where I grew up. And so yeah, I’d ride my bike down to, down to Treasure island to go skimboarding or just, just wherever it was. It was wonderful.

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, I don’t think we left any stone unturned.

Okay. I really appreciate you spending some time with me today and really in my sign off, I think that if listeners take anything away from the discussion, it is. You can always reinvent yourself.

It doesn’t matter when you’re doing that in your life, you can start fresh. I think that the tried and true slow and steady wins the race. It is a great way to get to where you want to go.

No one says that you got to jump straight up and hit, hit the top, the top floor, out the gate. And that when it comes to building your own, your, your financial future, it’s all your own. Yes.

So you just find your path and keep it going. Thank you so much, Lenny. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you guys for listening. This is invest in you.

See you next time. Sa.