Never Stop Raising Money

Mike Hambright (00:00.642)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. If you are not raising money right now, you need to be focused on raising money all the time. That is the second rule of real estate that Sal’s gonna share with us today, is always be raising capital for your next deal or future deals or building relationships. So Sal, good to see you buddy.

Salvatore Buscemi (00:15.361)
Mike, it’s a pleasure and a privilege. We’ve known each other for 11 years based on your calculations. It’s great to be here again. Thanks. Not everybody lets me back a second time. No, I should though. Now I will. Next year birthday, I’ll make that an anniversary date.

Mike Hambright (00:20.558)
You don’t have that on your calendar as like our anniversary date Yeah, so for those of you that are listening Sal we know he’s been on the show a couple times I think the first time was about 11 years ago as we just kind of discussed back on the flip nerd show So so good to see you. So I know you were living in Vegas for a long time living down in Miami now living living the crazy life

Salvatore Buscemi (00:44.545)
Yeah.

It’s a crazy life. It’s a crazy life where it your odometer a little faster. Miami is a great spot for guys like me who run a family office because it gets you much more intimate with Latin American families, European families who come in. And there’s a rush between the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is when Art Basel starts, until this coming week, the end of June, July, June, when Miami Swim Week or Swim Basel ends. And then everybody goes to their respective cooler places. And that’s how we sort of book

and the time here. And then everybody moves away and things are kind of slow. But during those six months, it’s intense. And the networking is intense. And the people you meet are intense. And the opportunities you see are intense. So it wears you off. I’m a little older. I don’t have the gray hair yet. But it’s a faster life. But I came down here not to write another book, but to network and continue to build a brand and a presence over here. Because certain areas of the country are better than others, especially as it relates to raising capital. I was in Vegas for a while. I was running a fund with one of my partners there.

That was successful and then we went into a classy industrial facility and after that was built, you know, I’d left and moved over here to Miami where I live in Brickell. And it’s just absolutely amazing because I don’t have a car anymore and everybody comes to me, Mike.

Mike Hambright (01:59.086)
That’s nice. Yeah, yeah. So, hey Sal, before we jump in, you’ve got a rich background that kind of led you up to this point. Why don’t you tell us kind of, I guess, the Cliff Notes version of your background.

Salvatore Buscemi (02:08.737)
Yeah, I’ll give you the cliff notes. wrote my third book about it because a lot of people have asked this question also as it relates to how family offices invest and anyone who’s listening to this will pay attention to the end. I’ll send you an autographed copy or a free audible code to that book, Investing Legacy, How the .001 % Invest. However, it started out one day between my junior and senior year in the summer doing an internship at the Beth Israel Insel Scott Kelly Institute on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for total knee reconstruction. I was working with a surgeon and he was championing me hard. He lived in the same building

Gloria Vanderbilt. He’s the reason why I lived on the Upper East Side my whole life. It was just great. He had a Aston Martin, a beautiful wife. He was a plastic surgeon. And well, he told me to go into plastic surgery. But what he was doing was that he was championing me to go to med school. And I was hoping that maybe Johns Hopkins would be somewhere I would wind up. One day during research, I was holding in the cadaver room a femur and I passed out. I woke up with smelling salts for the first time.

finished my senior year of college and it was really kind of a depressing time because I didn’t know what I was going to do. knew I needed to finish this. knew, you know, I didn’t want to be one of these perpetual students just leading on and on. I wanted to be out in four years and do something. And it was after I graduated that fall, sorry, that summer that I called my friend and I was trying to avoid him and he said, look, you know, I want to check in and congratulate on you, see what’s going on, how I can help you. And I said, look, Steve, I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Steve, I don’t think

I can do this. know, I that was just not something you know that I you know I was used to and you know even certain things in the OR with the blood I get kind of queasy after a long conversation He said to me his Long Island accent. Don’t worry about it. I’ve been talking to my brother about you He just made partner Goldman Sachs and he wants to meet you and at that point I learned it’s the power of the network and your Reputation that my grandfather always taught me that go further than your than your than your work fast forward a 29 or age 30 million dollars from a from a Park Avenue investment

manager, is like, a big deal, not friends and family, but like, you know, a big check from one institution. I was able to do that. And we were basically the kitchen sink for Bear Stearns buying a lot of their bad, you know, whole loans, not anything like the big short, like synthetics or anything like that, but just buying the whole loads. And then I did the same thing again out in Las Vegas. And then, you know, we started getting into some development deals. I will tell you, though, that in 2014, we were getting outbid on a lot of things in real estate. So we sort of put our pens down until we went into a

Salvatore Buscemi (04:38.307)
special development in 2019, which has been absolutely amazing. It’s class A industrial, which I really like. So I started pivoting into some of the families and what they were investing into because they had that pedigree and that was outside of real estate. was technology and life sciences. And today I can say that we’ve been investors in things like Stripe a couple of times, SpaceX five times and going into other big names that you probably don’t know of, but have all pedigree founders and are led by in-kind family offices that have that expertise to invest in these types of companies.

Brahman Partners today is my partner Albert Ewen, CFA myself, and you know we manage a great deal, I wouldn’t say a great deal of money, but we’ve been able to allocate money into things faster because of the conventions that we put in place over the past 10 years, putting people into these deals, which probably would never have been able to get into these deals in the first place. But I can tell you it took a little bit of trial and error because it’s sort of like anything else when you learn a new skill, that’s where the excitement is, but that’s also the frustration. And I can tell you nobody wants

to invest in life science companies, Mike, because nobody wants to be reminded of high school biology and chemistry. And using that and being able to pivot around that to be able to raise capital around those opportunities really made a name for ourselves. We had a couple exits. A lot of our companies, if you follow me on LinkedIn, Salvatore Buscemi, I always post this. For people who want to be onboarded to our family office, I’ll show you how to do that later. But we get into a lot of deals where we are behind or alongside some of the smartest families

in the industry and we brought in several families. Brahman Partners now manages 13 families, all over $100 million each. And then we have a few stragglers who we call who are not, they’re about like $10 to $50 million guys. We call them NREs or not rich enoughs, but they like to invest in the same deals as the big dogs too as well.

Mike Hambright (06:26.754)
Yep, yep, awesome. So we’re gonna talk about some tips today on basically how to build your brand, how to stay consistent with your marketing, how to kind of always be raising money. So let’s kind of dive in. I know you talked a lot about the importance of building your own personal brand. So let’s talk about that.

Salvatore Buscemi (06:44.871)
It’s interesting today. Nobody talks about Facebook today.

nobody talks about tesla they talk about zuck and musk and today with the advent of social media what has happened is that people have personal brands they used to be called influencers now they’re content creators and you have the financialization and the fractualization to be able to sell anything almost on the internet today and what has happened is that people are going to gravitate towards names with with personal messaging and i think too many people today especially on linkedin people who and i’m not saying this disparagingly people who you know are smart enough to talk

in certain way, we’ll copy and paste something else or maybe chat GPT something to make it look like there’s huge institution, but it automatically turns off a lot of people because they know that. know, people, no matter what the name of my firm is, whether it’s Andrew Partners or other iteration, you know, or Brahman Partners, people, doesn’t really matter. The question is who’s running it? Who is the brand behind it? And as Dave Ogilvie said, any institution is really the length and shadow of one man. And that’s way you got to look at it is what is your brand, building a brand,

People don’t know what a brand is. They think it’s a funky logo. It’s not. That’s a logo. A brand is your promise. And as you were talking about before, you invested in some guys who might have been on brand when you invested the money, but they got off brand pretty quickly or they redeveloped their brand by maybe not honoring their, you know, promises and commitments. So today you have to have a strong personal brand. And I can’t tell you how many people come to me like, I want to raise money from family offices. I’m like, you’re not even on LinkedIn. You don’t even have a photo of yourself on there. Who’s going to trust you? Because all these people are going to do like what I call the jilted ex lover diligence test is, hey, do you have a

heard of this guy, know what’s the story with him and then you’re going to find that out. So the more that the earlier the best time to start a personal brand is yesterday. The second best is today and now and there’s several ways to do that.

Mike Hambright (08:33.848)
Let’s talk about some of that because I think, know, interestingly enough, you operate at more of an institutional level, I’d say, than certainly the average person I have on the show here. And so a lot of folks are not even using, I mean, when I left corporate America, in many ways, I stopped using LinkedIn. I still have an account. It’s still active. We post content out there, but I don’t manage it as closely as you do, for sure. And for folks that are in the business of raising money, like talk about maybe LinkedIn versus other social platforms.

and why that’s a better platform.

Salvatore Buscemi (09:04.787)
I think, you when people go to LinkedIn, they go there for a reason. It’s usually a professional reason. They’re looking for some sort of professional enlightenment. Unfortunately, you know, it’s changing. And I actually met the founder of LinkedIn. I was invited to one of his events a year ago, March, Reid Hoffman. was raising capital for his AI fund. And people are gravitating towards different social media platforms for different reasons. And Facebook has a lot of the wannabes and the hobbyists, right? They’re the people who are not really too determined on really doing anything. They’re weekend warriors.

You know they it they are people go to LinkedIn to people go to Facebook to really learn about What’s going on with their friends, right? What’s going on with the people they went to high school with who’s going? know people who I moved away from What is going on sort of getting that like real-time local update whereas with LinkedIn people are looking for business. They’re looking for networking There’s a lot more polish with the people who are on there. Some people are intimidated to use it I don’t know why but even then you’re starting to see like some of the bigger guys like Alex Ormosi move on the LinkedIn and other

areas. The next spot is Twitter, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a platform where you can actually just stick with it. So whether it’s X or TikTok or LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is my jam because that’s where my people hang out and that’s where I get searched out. Then, you know, that is, you know, then that’s what you should stick with. I will tell you, though, since moving to Miami, I am invited to a lot of conferences and some of these conferences are free and some of them charge like five hundred dollars, right? But they’re family office oriented. So the first thing they’re going to ask me before they take the credit

card number or send me the link to the credit card is what is your LinkedIn profile? And that’s the most important part today because what happens is if you start talking to people and they take an interest to you, they’re going to want to search you out. And if they search you out and you come clean, even if you have a few blemishes on your background, whatever, people would just want to see that there’s consistency in your story and what you’re talking about and that you’re not just gravitating from one shiny object to the other. Right. This is something we saw during NFTs. People who are crypto, they’re hustling crypto and now hustling NFTs. And then they were hustling

You know multifamily who knows what they were doing, but it’s a great way for you to really see exactly Yeah, it’s a great way for people to see exactly who you are without having to put too much effort in it other than consistency And you know you can do that today very easily for less than an hour

Mike Hambright (11:20.588)
Yeah, so let’s talk about that, like how to be consistent with kind of creating your brand and creating your, I guess your kind of paper trail, if you will, of content. you use LinkedIn a lot, so we can talk about that. Just talk about like, because building your brand is not just having a pretty profile and a pretty picture and a great written thing, right? It’s more than that.

Salvatore Buscemi (11:33.547)
Yeah.

Salvatore Buscemi (11:40.929)
I think, think, you know, your brand is like your track record. But for people who are listening, if you want the ultimate kill shot and the ultimate, uh, fast pack, fast track to legitimacy, there’s two ways to do it. Either you own a professional football team or you write a book. I will tell you that today with chat GPT is no, it’s, easy to write a book than ever before. I remember spending months writing a book. remember, you know, after my third book, I wrote it. I met with my publisher today. You can self publish, but I ripped it up and I

started all over again and I felt much better after I did that. I wanted to add in some other accoutrements. But today really writing the book because author comes for the word authority. And if you are able to put a book out it is going to expand your it’s going to expand what people think of you immediately. I’ll give you a story. I moved out here with nothing but a suitcase and my books in two and a half years ago and every conference that I went to every dinner party I went to every yacht party I went to every investor gathering.

every investor breakfast, I would always bring five books with me. And I would always sign those books and autograph them in exchange for a business card if these people were investors who I wanted to connect with. And that book sort of opened the eyes of these people because it distinguished me from being just someone else looking to jam deals together like a broker dealer. Well, you don’t like what’s in my left pocket, then here’s what’s in my right pocket. And it answered all the questions that I had been asked over the past many, many years as to what do the wealthy people invest into? I just inherited $50 million. I don’t know what to do with it. I’m scared.

What do these wealthy people do? What is this you were telling me Sal about a family that has their name on the side of the library on the know on the off the highway in California for everybody to see that’s what it is because when you get to a certain level of wealth the Quite frankly, we’ll probably get into this the the needs and wants change and it’s not so longer that you’re You’re already rich now. You’re looking to build a legacy for yourself because that’s something that a lot of people can never afford to do

Mike Hambright (13:39.106)
Yeah, that’s awesome. So write a book. Let’s talk about other ways to be consistent. Anything else you want to share with social media? mean, are you regularly publishing articles or blogs or are you?

Salvatore Buscemi (13:44.884)
Yeah.

Salvatore Buscemi (13:48.789)
Well.

We do and that’s a great idea. When people come to us, I onboard them to our family office and our family office gives a more intimate detail of the deals that we’ve invested into. And what we use is now we have their email. We own that media. So what you want to do is you want to as many people giving qualified people giving you their emails so that they follow you. And you want to use a good linked in. You want to use a good email service provider. We use HubSpot, which is overkill. However, one of the things that you know we talk about is making sure that you always are reaching out to them at least once

a week, maybe even twice a week. And we do this by showcasing our CEOs and successors that we’ve had with our company. next week, we’ll be showcasing another one of our opportunities, which got a $50 million investment from SBB Bank and another family office. I think it was Google Ventures maybe, into one of the deals called Avive Solutions. And to us, that’s amazing because that gives us an opportunity to showcase our investments to our investors, but it also gives our investors the opportunity to brag to their friends about the investments that they’re in.

or the people who they’re with. And remember, whatever you do, whenever you communicate to your investors, it’s not to make your ego look big, it’s to make your investor’s egos look big. So they feel very comfortable working with you and investing alongside you.

Mike Hambright (15:03.982)
That’s great. Yeah. So talk about the importance of actually talking to people. I mean, there’s a lot of people that hide behind social media these days, try to automate a bunch of communications. You talk about HubSpot. mean, we send out millions of emails. We send out millions of emails a month now, let’s, but that can be part of it, but let’s just talk about the importance of kind of real relationships, especially in the world of raising money.

Salvatore Buscemi (15:26.185)
So this is something that I learned and I actually put a little guide together called Calling the Capital, which I published on Amazon. It’s a black book and it has 24 case studies.

What happened during COVID was that everybody who was a recluse was thriving because they never had to meet anyone ever again. And the skill sets that you have as a spreadsheet runner or someone who’s very good at analytics do not really carry over as far as the communication. so people were just sending, people became very, very transactional and wealthier people don’t want that. Even poor people don’t want that. Poor people would go in because they don’t understand the deal and they think,

That they’re gonna get shark tank like returns and those are people you don’t want to deal with but we if you want to be successful in this business You need to be what they taught us at Goldman Sachs and that was long-term greedy You got to be able to build the relationship and provide a lot of value before anything happens before you ask for it too many people today They take the opposite hack they say well I got to find a deal and I’m gonna shake down as many investors as possible to call the action and You know hustle hustle hustle hustle like the Gary Vee way But the problem is you need to have those long-term relationships if you’re asking anyone to invest in

any of your commercial real estate deals, syndications, private direct transactions like we do, that’s a marriage. That’s a long term relationship that you are working with. And you need to be able to make sure that you want to work with that investor over a period of time too. It works both ways. Just because someone is going to give you their money real fast, that’s probably not necessarily something that you want. You want to build a long term relationship because things inevitably do go wrong as you and I both know. You’re to have to go back to these investors at some point to ask for more money or, you know, and it’s happening all over the place. Although we’re

not doing it now, thank goodness, you need to have those relationships with these investors. And a lot of people do not bother to, they just want to meet a family and get money and treat them like an ATM. And it’s the same thing to go into a bar, picking a girl and then just, you know, trying to get her to go home with you in the first 15 minutes. It’s not going to work. Right. And if you look at it, it’s like building a relationship. It’s the same way with a family as if you were courting someone for long-term marriage or relationship. Only I have 13 of them. Does that make sense?

Mike Hambright (17:35.906)
Yeah, yeah, and what’s, and you’re, I think you’re probably like me, you’re very methodical about how you reach out to people. you’re, you know when a birthday is, you know how long it’s been since you last talked to some person. It’s not just I’ve got their contact in my phone. Like any tips on how to maintain relationships with people to make sure that you’re reaching out periodically?

Salvatore Buscemi (17:44.747)
Yeah.

Salvatore Buscemi (17:54.889)
Yeah, think you, yeah, think, you know, this is where technology comes in. It’s one thing to go to a conference, say, and meet a lot of people and get a business card, but what do you do with them next? Right?

Mike Hambright (18:09.868)
Most people put a rubber band around a stack of them and throw it in a drawer somewhere, right?

Salvatore Buscemi (18:13.377)
And then they’re like hustling because they have a closing and their diligence money is going hard or something. And they’re like, hey, I met you at this conference. And you lose credibility. To me, it’s like, if that’s a great handoff in a relationship, I want to be able to use that. And so I put that into our HubSpot. I put it into my iPhone. I label it correctly because this way I can get in contact with them with ease. And I don’t mean that way. It’s like they’re part of the community today. And when you bring these people in, you got to

and saying like you have a community, not an email list. If say email list, nobody wants to be on an email list. But if you say, welcome to our community, Mike, do you mind if I onboard you to our family office? It’ll give you a much more intimate look at what we’re investing into. You’d be like, yeah, that sounds interesting. You know, it sounds very interesting. Intimacy, I like that. You know, that means different things to different people. But it means like there’s gonna be more confidentiality and discretion expected. And then once you start opening those emails, then I know that you’re following along. Am I gonna die on a hill? It’s gonna be.

Mike Hambright (18:48.652)
Alright.

Salvatore Buscemi (19:13.321)
for people opening emails because I can’t communicate with everybody all the time. So when we have a big deal like SpaceX or maybe Neuralink or something, I tell people, they’ll text me like check your email, check your email, check your email. Because in this way I can say, look, this is a community, you signed onto it, this is how we communicate. HubSpot says it’s gonna opt you out for low engagement, you have a lot of money with me, why aren’t you opening my emails, Mike, right?

Mike Hambright (19:40.974)
One of the things you said up front when we were talking, was…

pretty insightful. Obviously I run a mastermind is the higher the barrier to entry into a network the more valuable that network is and so you know there’s obviously a lot of people that just go to free meetup groups or are in free Facebook groups or free online groups or whatever but if you go you know the more you’re willing to spend to get to surround yourself with the avatar you’re looking after just the more exclusive it is the easier it is to probably connect with people. Let’s talk about that a bit.

Salvatore Buscemi (20:10.655)
Yeah, I was on Twitter and this one guy was telling me and he’s like a small multi-family syndicator and one of the things he was, yeah, a lot of these guys like to…

There’s kind of self-righteous and he’s like, I am not sending my sons to any private schools in the Northeast. not, I’m not doing this. I refuse to join any country clubs. And I’m like, why? Right? Like why? You know, you’re kicked at the whole reason why people go to Harvard Yale and all these schools is the networking. That’s really what it is. Right? Nobody, nobody likes to say that. people, you know, and same thing, you know, advice to anyone wanting to get an MBA unless you’re going to a top 10 MBA school, you’re, you’re wasting your time.

money because the networking is at the highest level of those schools. Same thing, we’re looking at houses right now for $75,000 a month out in East Hampton to rent. Why? Do you think I like spending that much money? No, it’s the networking, it’s the parties, it’s all the other house parties I’m going to go to and continue to build my network that way. I didn’t go this year, but in years past we went to the Milken conference. It’s a $25,000 ticket. If you have a badge that says that you are a Milken attendee and allocator, people are going to take you much seriously. The conversations are not going to be

nearly as sophomoric or pedestrian as you think it is, is what are you investing into? How can I help you? How can I help you? How can I help you? That’s what it comes down to. I’ve never had someone who is doing better than me ever make fun of me for doing something. It’s always the people, you know, when you’re starting out, you know, people are trying to dissuade you from doing things. But when you’re working with these people and you go to these high dollar conferences, you’re going to rub elbows with certain people that you never thought you’d be able to invest into. And if you elevate your network, now all of sudden you’re not elevating just the investors you have, but the opportunities you’re able to get into.

Mike Hambright (21:50.158)
Yeah. And so, Sal, you’re operating at a pretty high level with raising money for family offices. There’s also real estate investors that watch this show that are raising money for multifamily deals or syndications or even single family houses. So what kind of advice can you give people on some of the things we’ve talked about here? But you talked about always raising money. Sometimes people don’t need money right now. So talk about why they want to always be raising money and how to make sure that maybe they don’t over raise where you’ve got a bunch of people that want to give you money, but you can’t keep their money busy.

Salvatore Buscemi (22:11.606)
Yeah.

Salvatore Buscemi (22:18.057)
Yeah, and that’s the best problem to have. We’ve been oversubscribing a lot of things, SpaceX, Stripe, AI Scout, which, you know, some other, some others names that you probably never heard of, but are very, very prominent in their own right. I, by always raising money, I don’t mean by asking for money. mean, always reaching out and saying, hi, hey, here’s an email. Yeah. For example, like this, this recording is going to go out to my family’s. It’s an excuse for me to send them an email because I was on the Michael Hamburg podcast, Investor Fuel.

Mike Hambright (22:36.556)
always building those relationships.

Salvatore Buscemi (22:47.981)
want to see what I’m talking about and they like it. Okay, some of them listen to it, some of them don’t, but I’m always in their mind. Does that make sense? They’re always reading the email whether they like it or not. It’s congruent, it’s on brand. I’m always, know, somebody comes to town. And another thing too, if you really want to build a network fast, depending on where you’re from, and I do this a lot, is what I call power brokering. Power is much more important than wealth and so everybody has a problem. Rich people have problems, poor people have problems, but if you solve rich people’s problems, it gets you a lot further in life.

Mike Hambright (22:54.776)
Yep.

Salvatore Buscemi (23:18.091)
economically and financially. And so I, you we were dealing with someone that was having an issue, they needed a tax attorney because they forgot they had a, you know, they, they, that the, happened where the accountant didn’t tell her that she needed to pay 1.2 million because she gave her son 3.5 million. I don’t know, something ridiculous like that. But I was able to find someone who I respected in New York, who I’ve known, to be able to take care of that. Whether that works out or not, it’s the effort that I made, Michael, to put that together and that reciprocity will come back to me and it already has.

Mike Hambright (23:19.15)
That’s right.

Mike Hambright (23:47.394)
Yeah, just being a power connector of connecting people that need help. That works in so many ways. mean, there’s so, the best thing is, is whoever you’re referring people to, obviously you need to refer people to people that are gonna take care of them. But it’s amazing what kind of doors that opens for you down the road when you need help and they’re like, there’s just this law of reciprocity if folks wanna help you back.

Salvatore Buscemi (24:08.619)
Yeah, I think, know, there’s a double edged sword with that too. It’s like you have to make sure the person you’re referring this person to is someone who you would vouch for. And that’s something that goes very much further today than ever before. And I hear this from a lot of people in Miami and they say can vouch for Sally’s investment and stuff. great. But you if you do not respect the person giving you the referral, you’re not going to respect the referral that they’re giving you. Right. So if you don’t respect this person, you know, it’s kind of like maybe a near dwell lift driver, but he knows someone who’s really

Good at crypto, know Birds of a feather sort of hang out together if you know what I mean And so, you know, you got to be very careful of that But I spend it probably about a half hour at night before I go to bed just making introductions to people I make it high value meaning, you know, I tell a story I’ve known this guy or you know, like there’s this one guy that runs a family office I’ve been following like the Grateful Dead for the past 18 years and I say that and you know You want to meet this guy Marty and I hyperlink his you LinkedIn bio so people can do the research and see it and here’s the name of his company

Making it very easy for people to do that and you can have your assistant do that or you can have chat GPT do it and it’s easier than ever Today to do it, but it’s the connection that really makes an effort and especially for people who are raising money I you know, I was telling the story. There was one guy that was just dying to meet me one day. He’s a New Yorker From you know, and he lives in Miami Beach and we met him on a Tuesday at a bar around the corner over here a nice place called the River Waster Bar and he was dying to meet me and the person he introduced Who was introduced who?

Introduce me to him was like Sal. What’s up? How come you even followed up with this guy? I’m like, oh, I’m sorry So I meet the guy and he wanted to money to invest in one of his companies that he was going to invest into not his but Someone he was raising money for and wanting to put money into and I said Jeff I can help you out. I’ll meet you I just want to tell you something this might not be for us, but worst-case scenario I probably know someone who can help you and so we met and he loved it. We could vetched I gave him, know, I made it, you know immediate casual connection by email

right there at the bar between the two guys. He was so happy. He said, what are you doing tomorrow? I’m like, Wednesday? He said, yes. And he said, I’m going with a bunch of families and investors on a private jet, no cost to you, up to Greensboro to check out a site. And I’m like, I’m in. I know already it wasn’t for me. But just being and networking with these people and working with these people, I was able to build relationships. And these are people who will be coming into our next real estate deal soon.

Mike Hambright (26:35.158)
That’s great. That’s one of the things that’s important, right? It’s not just, it’s opening doors to people that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I mean, you said the same thing. When you’re trying to raise money, sometimes if you don’t have enough deal flow or you don’t have the reputation yet, you need to work yourself into finding ways to raise money for other people that have that credibility so you can start to, you know, kind of increase your pedigree, I guess, if you will.

Salvatore Buscemi (26:58.655)
No, that’s a great way. again, you’re doing the thing that is the most highly coveted skill going back to Solomon, and that is asking someone to part with their wealth for the greater good of something. And a lot of people are afraid of it. You know, these guys that hide behind machine and you know, I can tell right now I’m going to be quant’s blamed on a deal. I can already tell the guy is like he’s kind of sloppy on email. He’s got great numbers, great pro forma’s. He’s a first time operator. I’m not going to talk to him, you know, because I already know he doesn’t have the skill set or the gravitas.

to actually negotiate this deal. A lot of people think that real estate is math, but it’s not. It’s a human business. Right. Pro forma is Latin for lie. And people know that. They don’t know it. they’re only people are implicitly trusting you. Nobody. Mike, you could have the best deal in Texas. Right. And you’re bringing investors in. I guarantee you none of them know anything more about that deal than the other one, especially if they’re retail investors. Right. A lot of people think the IRR is what they receive in the mail each quarter. You know, a lot of them don’t you know, they they they buy off the pro forma.

You know the brokers are great at this they hide the no I and you know page 64 and fine print and the footnotes You know the offering memorandum I’ve seen all these games and what people are really doing is that they’re in there They’re trusting you they’re investing in you and not the deal If you could change it so that you’re invested you’re that they’re investing in a deal That’s something that they would never be able to get into on their own That would be amazing you know and you build a community around that and that’s what we do and we we’re talking about that We love class a industrial going back into it again. You know there’s other opportunities

opportunities that we’ve looked at, we know what we like and we know what our family’s like because, you know, not all real estate is created equal. And I’ll just finish with this. Smaller investors are still in wealth creation mode, right? They want to get rich. Wealthy people don’t want to get rich. They don’t want any headaches and they want, you know, credit tenants, you know, that pay maybe not as much as something where you’re taking a lot of risk with a class C or class B, you know, multifamily. But they want to know that they’re putting money into something because a lot of these people have operating companies that throw off millions of dollars a month.

And that’s the most important part of it. know, everybody, and the rich want to invest with people who are richer than they are. Whereas the middle class want to just see if they can swing for the fences. They read risk like a wine list, right? Like over to the right and down. The highest return, like look at Prosper, for example, right? The peer-to-peer sharing. All the NRs, they’re like so terrible they can’t put it on there. They can’t rate it, you the low credit. They’re the ones that get bought up first. And it’s because people are just, you know, they’re just very, very aggressive.

Salvatore Buscemi (29:28.315)
for risk because they think that’s a sign that they’re able to find something that pays a 21 % that that’s a sign of intelligence when really it’s not if that you know to some investors. I hope that answered the question.

Mike Hambright (29:37.538)
Yeah, most wealthy people are focused a lot more on wealth preservation, right?

Salvatore Buscemi (29:41.355)
Well, I mean, look at Armacio Ortega. Like I wrote an article on LinkedIn not too long ago, and it say why liquidity is overrated because he’s buying 1.2 billion. Well, last year, maybe two years ago, he’s the founder of Zara. You can’t go anywhere in any city without seeing someone holding a Zara bag. Even in even when I was in Paris over the summer, everybody had a Zara bag. All that money he’s using, he’s putting into class A real estate in various cities around the world. You know, he had data centers and class A.

industrial and you know some other things too as well. It’s really interesting when you look at it, but he’s not going into like small multifamily emerging operator emerging fund manager type of stuff. They’re looking for certain things that go beyond that as it relates to look this is how we’re going to you know create the edifice for the next generation and you got to think too a lot of families that I know of who are very very wealthy they will not invest in anything that doesn’t give them at least a 40 year time frame because they’re going out two generations and I have a mastermind too.

here, which we have with our families in Miami, we meet quarterly and we bring in some of these families who are quite frankly billionaires, but they talk about why they’re investing in things like grease trap roll-ups or grease will always be around as long as they’re human, consuming food, there’s always going to be grease, right? And a lot of the real estate deals which are, or other things that don’t have at least a 40 year time horizon.

Mike Hambright (31:08.462)
That’s awesome. Well, Sal, know, thanks for sharing. We could talk all day about this. I know you’ve got a book that you’re willing to share with folks. If they want to get that, how do they get the book?

Salvatore Buscemi (31:17.025)
I’m going to give autographed copies to anyone who wants, who’s listening to this, of Investing Legacy, how the .001 % invest. And I’ll also put in a version of Calling the Capital, the little handbook that I put together with the case studies of how I was able to raise money really fast for our deals on hot summer days when nobody wanted to pick up the phone. There’s a lot of tips, tricks, and strategies that I put together for that. If they email me at sal at investinglegacy.com, that’s sal at investinglegacy.com. I’ll make sure you get a copy of the book.

If you want it autographed, let me know if you want it autographed. I’ll send it out to you. If not, we can send you the digital versions too as well. And I did narrate it myself on Audible.

Mike Hambright (31:58.316)
Nice. Nice. Cool, buddy. Thanks for sharing some insights with us today.

Salvatore Buscemi (32:04.033)
Michael, it’s a pleasure and a privilege. Anytime, I’m here for you.

Mike Hambright (32:07.01)
Hey Sal, one last question. Where do you think the climate is going in the market ahead here over the next couple years for raising money?

Salvatore Buscemi (32:14.689)
I think you’re going to start to see after the next six months to a year, you’re going to see that there’s going to be an influx of capital flying into this country from other countries. And I think the current administration has put their stamp on approval that they’re now selling five million dollar visas. And the only reason why somebody would spend five million dollars is to be able to invest in U.S. assets. The U.S. will always be a safe place for people to invest. I think there’s going to be some turmoil in the housing market because of higher interest rates right now. There’s also sort of like a Mexican standoff where the boom

don’t want to sell and you know there’s not enough you know people who are emerging home buyers are not going to be able to afford it because interest rates are around seven right now so until things happen and there’s more of like a detente in the housing market if that’s what you’re talking about it’s going to be rough i think it’s going to be it’s going to be more of a buyer’s market as time goes on but i also think if you’re getting into certain assets such as multifamily now’s the safest time to get into it right now interest rates are higher everything is priced in it levels that it should be historically and that’s going to

at a lot of value and if you’re able to communicate that, is your next three and a half years are yours to lose.

Mike Hambright (33:21.614)
Awesome, awesome good stuff. Thanks again Sal, good to see you

Salvatore Buscemi (33:24.341)
Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Michael Hanbrick. Thank you.

Mike Hambright (33:26.048)
Everybody, there’s a lot of ways to invest in capital or invest in the market and a lot of it requires you raising money. So if you feel like you’ve got some things to learn or you feel like you’re great, you can always level up. Definitely check out Sal’s book. put a link down here in the show notes so that you can send Sal a message. So I know he’s sitting in front of his inbox right now waiting for those messages to come on in. So make sure you send him a message. So appreciate you guys. We’ll see you on the next show.

Salvatore Buscemi (33:48.251)
I am. I am.

Salvatore Buscemi (33:53.291)
Thank you, Michael. Take care.