From Corporate Job to Real Estate Investor with Alex Peransi

Mike Hambright (00:01.642)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show today. I’m here with Alex Peransi. We’re to be talking about a little bit about his story and just really kind of having a true North Star, like how to kind of set your destiny. think most of us get in this business for to achieve freedom, right? I mean, we all want financial freedom and then eventually you want to time freedom and you want control over how you spend your time and who you spend it with. And we’re going to talk a little bit about Alex’s journey today. So Alex, welcome to the show, buddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Peransi (00:27.84)
Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. Really appreciate it. Excited to be here.

Mike Hambright (00:31.658)
Yeah, glad to have you. hey, before we get started here, before we kind of get rolling in, tell us a little bit about you and your background. I you have kind of a, I refer to myself as a corporate refugee. Like I was climbing the corporate ladder before I found real estate. And truthfully, before I got fired from my dream job and then went to a tech startup, that was awesome. And then they filed for bankruptcy. And so I was on a path and then I realized I had no control over where I was going. I mean, other people were deciding that for me.

Alex Peransi (00:57.292)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (00:58.824)
And that’s how my journey started, but I know yours is different, but probably similar in that you just felt like you were unfulfilled from where you were. But would you mind sharing your story?

Alex Peransi (01:02.849)
and

Alex Peransi (01:08.524)
Yeah, absolutely. Similar background, corporate refugee. I definitely know how to spin a rat race all day long. So started off corporate journey. I worked at one of the bigger firms here. Some of you might know them, Coke Industries, a big oil and gas company out of college, great salary. And just started off as an accountant, as an accounts receivable analyst actually. So really didn’t know what I wanted to do at that point in my life.

Just, hey, just took really one of the first jobs that I could get that was good coming out of college. And then after that, I kind of bounced from job to job. I probably held a job around two to three years at a time until I ended up at my last job after eight years at a local payday company as an analyst. And just continuing that theme of I got a corporate job, but just something wasn’t right for me. I didn’t feel fulfilled. I go to work every single day. I was getting paid well, but I was like, I could be doing a heck of a lot more with

not only the intelligence that I have, but just the dedication that I put into the work that I have. So really just trying to find myself. I don’t think I’ve fully found myself, but I’m a lot closer to where I want to be at than I was even 16 years ago. So I’m just excited that I the opportunity to build with real estate now and pursue my dreams.

Mike Hambright (02:27.754)
Yeah, when you’re young, you know, I even if you’re like, I have a son that’s that’s in college right now, just started this year. And like, don’t really know what you want in life. Right. So it has to. And I think even if when you go out into corporate America, you don’t really know. Like, I think it I think we find some satisfaction in knowing that we like have decided what we want to do. But then you kind of do it. And you’re like, oh, this this isn’t all I thought it was. Right.

But you don’t know it until you do. I mean, that’s kind of how life works. Like you have to go through experiences. You have to kind of try a food to know if you like it or not. Right. And you’re like, I love this. Like I want come here every day or like, I don’t like this at all. Like I’m never coming back. Right. And a job is the same way or even an industry is the same way at many times, I think. So, you know, I think that’s pretty natural that people get into something and they realize that they’re destined for more than that. And it just takes

Alex Peransi (02:55.778)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (03:04.27)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:22.698)
It takes kind of figuring out what you don’t like really a lot of times to know what maybe you will like. So that’s awesome, man. So let’s talk about I mean, I guess was there was there a moment for you when you had kind of this epiphany of like, I need to go do real estate or I need to go do, you know, something else.

Alex Peransi (03:25.966)
Thank

Yeah.

Alex Peransi (03:35.95)
Okay.

Alex Peransi (03:42.668)
I think it was a few moments, but one that I can really point back to, towards the middle of the career that I had, I was working in corporate. I would go and take my lunch break and I would kind of sit in my car and just ponder about what else could I be doing with myself. My job was easy, I wasn’t really using any of my potential. So during my lunch breaks, I would spend time just learning. I’d go on YouTube, I’d buy different courses.

And I’ve tried so many different things. I was a social media marketer. I’ve traded Forex, like you name it, any online fad. I’ve tried it here and there, but something about an ad I saw, was some real estate investor with a Lamborghini, right? Looked at it and invested in his course. was like, okay, this guy’s doing well. Let me see what he’s doing. And bought his course. I’m not going to advertise for him right here, but it was good information. So learn from it.

And I really didn’t apply any of it until about four years after I saw the course. So, but then I was like, okay, there’s gotta be something to this real estate industry. I was on bigger pockets, just consuming as much content as I could. And then about four years after I took that course, I fully made the decision to get out of corporate and just become an investor.

Mike Hambright (05:03.294)
And did you did you make the jump before you’d even done a single deal or were you kind of dabbling and doing some stuff on the side and proving it out or you just went kind of cold turkey?

Alex Peransi (05:11.726)
No, I’m definitely a proof of concept kind of guy. My last job I had, I wholesaled and invested for a good year and a half before I quit. I needed extreme proof of concept. My very first deal took me about 60 days to get from start to finish.

And then I probably did a good 10 to 15 transactions before I felt like I could do this full time. I saved up money. did things quote unquote the right way, know, build an emergency fund.

Mike Hambright (05:36.49)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most most don’t. But yeah, that that’s pretty good proof of concept. Enter 15 deals and as a former, you know, I was I was a finance guy as well. So as a finance or a county person, I understand I can tell you’re analytical, right? Like you want to you really want to understand it before you go all in. And so that’s that’s not a bad thing. Yeah, yeah. So.

Alex Peransi (05:46.358)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (06:00.111)
yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Mike Hambright (06:07.786)
So talk about the vision, because I think a lot of people get into it, especially if you’re following gurus and lambos and stuff like that. I mean, there’s probably a handful of people that could be. So I won’t even take any guesses. It’s probably somebody that I would know or we know of. But at any rate, like you get sometimes attracted to that that dream and you tie your you kind of tie your own wagon to that dream. Right. But you don’t know the full story. Right. So it’s just a lot of it seems better. Maybe maybe.

Alex Peransi (06:20.45)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (06:29.986)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (06:35.462)
Easier than it is once you get in the business and it gets hard right and so my guess is there probably been some phases of your life where it’s like you were you started as a solopreneur working really hard and then you had to start building a team because you realize that you just built another job for yourself is that resonating a little bit?

Alex Peransi (06:52.113)
that, man, that hits home real bad.

Mike Hambright (06:54.76)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s that’s most people’s story, quite frankly, is that you get in and you’re like, OK, even if you’re making more money than you ever made before, it’s like, OK, what, you know, what happens if I leave? What happens when I get sick? What happens if I want to go on vacation or whatever? talk about kind of, you know, I guess the phases of your business kind of from starting as a one man band to where you’re at today.

Alex Peransi (07:13.742)
Yeah, I mean, like I said for the first year, year and a half, just me, probably until like I got about a year, year and a half in, I really started looking at like I need a virtual assistant. I’m the one cold calling. I’m the one putting leads in. I’m the one running appointments, sending contracts, TC, Dispo, like every single department in a business, like it’s not sustainable, right? So I did that, brought on my first hire, which was an admin.

Mike Hambright (07:17.514)
We’ll be right back.

Alex Peransi (07:42.895)
virtual assistant, and they took a lot of the workload off of me that I just, frankly, didn’t have time to do. And then I ran that model for a good two years, looked at, if I really want to scale this business, I’ve got to have help. So the second hire I made, it was an acquisition manager actually. So he helped me run appointments, because we had a lot of appointments coming in. I couldn’t handle it. I was running maybe two to three a day by myself with one VA and some marketing systems in place.

But probably at a good three, the three to four year mark, I really started looking at, all right, I can’t be everything. The next hire I made was a transaction coordinator. That helped us coordinate a lot of it, because I was the TC until, again, I feel like any, at least in business, right, you can’t delegate something that you don’t understand. I like to do the activity before I give it to somebody else and document it. So hired the TC.

which then kind of promoted into an office manager, operations manager, and then continued to scale and then hit another wall. Once we did over 60 to 80 transactions a year, I realized I needed more support. So then we brought in lead managers, a disco manager, and ultimately right now with where my org’s at, it’s stayed pretty flat. I know what I want out of this and it’s really about just making things efficient moving forward. And I’m at 12 out of 10 person team.

Mike Hambright (09:10.472)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Yeah, one of the challenges you’ve I think we talked a little bit ahead of time, you probably going through this phase is like you realize, you know, you you’re teaching a lot of people how to do things and you and you know how to do it or you at least know enough to kind of be dangerous as they say, right, like how to do it. And so you’re trying to teach people how to do a job and you could step into any of those positions if you need to. That’s actually one of the challenges of being a real estate investor or really an entrepreneur is if you just have one person in each of those roles, like it’s easy if

Alex Peransi (09:25.699)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (09:40.17)
if they are sick or they get fired or they quit or they get hit by a truck or something like that, you get pulled back in and now you’re doing that job. Right. And so that’s one of the challenges. And I think a lot of people, you know, then start to realize like, in order to really build out a team here, like I have to become a better leader. Right. I have to become a better leader of people. And it’s a, it’s a struggle for people that came up being a hustler and doing all the work. It’s hard because in your mind, you’re like,

Alex Peransi (09:48.418)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (10:08.83)
probably the best at all those roles, but you clearly can’t do all those roles if you want to run a business and not have a job,

Alex Peransi (10:16.204)
Yeah, and I would even say the hardest part about this business has been the last couple years just trying to develop as a leader and really motivating people conveying the vision like where are we going and can you get me there and it’s not just about what they can do for me but what what can I do for them as a leader to help them excel so nobody teaches you that stuff you got to seek it out

Mike Hambright (10:17.79)
So, no.

Mike Hambright (10:36.682)
Yeah.

No, you have to you have to learn it on your own or obviously surround yourself with people that had done it before. mean, one of the challenges is and I, you know, this is I still struggle with all this stuff is like, how do you the people that that were trying to hire to work for us could get a job that probably pays them the same and has great benefits for like a huge company. Right. And so it’s like, how do you find how do you make sure that you don’t just hire the people that nobody else wants? Because they’re like, you know, who who wants to come work for a 10 man

Alex Peransi (11:02.147)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (11:10.474)
a 10 man team that probably doesn’t have. don’t know your situation with probably doesn’t have great benefits and stuff like that to compete with the Amazons of the world and the Coke Industries of the world, right? How do you find those people? And it can’t. It’s not that you can’t pay kind of market rate. I mean, you’re going to have to do that. But how do you how do you inspire people to be excited to be part of a small team? You know?

Alex Peransi (11:12.322)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (11:28.974)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (11:34.063)
I guess a good question. And I read a book, it was called The Dream Manager. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but right, that book really helped me look at leadership in a different way. Like leadership isn’t, yeah, it’s accountability. Yeah, it’s essentially telling people and holding them accountable to what they’re supposed to do, but you can’t hold someone accountable if they’re not bought in. And for me, meeting with people one-on-one, like that was probably one of the biggest game changers is sitting down, can’t.

Mike Hambright (11:34.73)
you.

Alex Peransi (12:03.16)
really build a relationship with somebody unless you know them. You know what they want, what their desires are, what their goals are. So I implemented that book and it’s a super simple concept. It’s, you know, what do your people want, right? And how can you help them get there? Like very similar to what you would do on an acquisitions appointment. It’s like, does what you have and what you provide help that person get from A to B? And if it doesn’t, it’s not a good fit. But for me, I try to get to know my people.

Like I have one gentleman, his name is Alex, and him and I meet one on one and I know what he needs out of this career enough to know I can hold him accountable to what he promised himself, which helps kind of light a fire under his butt. like, okay, I know I said I was gonna do X, Y, and Z, Alex, and you’re reminding me why, and then that helps him become more bought in. And I think it’s gotta come from a genuine place too. It just can’t be artificial. People can see through BS, right, so.

Mike Hambright (12:42.762)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (12:59.507)
Right.

Alex Peransi (13:00.651)
taking an interest in your people.

Mike Hambright (13:02.846)
Yeah, in your experience, how do you because you’re essentially finding out what other people’s goals are, right? And then you have to kind of the sum of all their goals needs to meet or exceed your goal, right? So how do you how in your experience, how have you built a team around, you know, understand what their goals are, but knowing that if they hit their goals, you will hit yours.

Alex Peransi (13:10.634)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Peransi (13:29.868)
Yeah, like how did I do that you’re saying?

Mike Hambright (13:32.212)
Yeah, just talk about like kind of any lessons learned or things that you’ve kind of done to do that. Because if obviously if you hired one acquisitions person and their goal is to buy one house a month and your goal is to do five, well, you know, he might be happy, but you’re going to be disappointed and it’s not going to work out right. So obviously as a company you have specific goals that you set and you kind of cast that vision that they’ve bought into. But how do you make sure that your goals are aligned like so that everybody wins?

Alex Peransi (13:36.643)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (13:52.739)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (14:00.918)
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously having conversations, but also just being clear about expectations. Like, yeah, this is a business where I want to help you achieve what you need to, but at the same time, this is what the business needs from you in order to get there. So then we start to set standards and have KPIs and stuff of that nature. But really just conveying that, I think I learned this from one of my mentors. And as a CEO, you’re more of a CRO than anything. You got a chief reminding officer.

You gotta constantly remind people about what the expectations are and hold them accountable to what not only you want, but what they said. And I think one of the biggest nuggets for me is people should set their own standards and you hold them to that because authorship is ownership, right? If somebody says it themselves, they’re more likely to follow through with that promise than if you just tell them what to do. So that’s one thing that’s helped me out tremendously.

Mike Hambright (14:59.55)
Yeah. And I think that’s another challenge for, don’t know you’ve had this experience, but in my experience, a lot of folks like me or like you that have like smaller teams or when you’re coming up, have smaller teams is you have a tendency to tell people what to do more. Cause you kind of, cause you did, like you talked about, you did that role first. So you tell people like how to do it. And sometimes what ends up happening is we build teams of people that are not, are not good problem solvers.

They’re just good at doing, they’re good at kind of completing tasks, right? So they don’t, so they’ll do the thing, but they’re not thinking about necessarily how to do it better, how to do it better, how to do it better. They’re not trying to evolve at a high rate because you’ve solved all the problems. So every problem they have, they come to you because, you’re the guy that told them how to do it instead of like instilling in them. I need you to do this, but I need you to continuously level up and do it better and better and better. You coming back so that we can level up as a company, right?

Alex Peransi (15:28.558)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (15:35.406)
Thank you.

Alex Peransi (15:52.397)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Peransi (15:57.421)
Yeah, mean, one of the, cause I struggled with this problem for, I think, way too long. Jumping in, solving people’s problems, and I’m not saying I’m perfect, cause I still do it, but I think challenging people to come up with a solution is like really key. Probing and asking them questions like, what did you try to do about the situation already? Did that work? Give me three ideas that you have on any solutions and which one do you think is the best? You’ve probably heard this way of thinking, but.

Mike Hambright (16:24.338)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (16:25.368)
pushing back on people instead of solving it for them.

Mike Hambright (16:30.046)
Yeah. Yeah, I used to one of the things that I did was this is many years ago. Now I used to have like, you know, open, especially when more people were in the office, like I was less of a virtual team. And now I’m I have a much larger team than I used to. And they’re all over the world. So they’re just being like readily available, like anytime you need anything, come to me. And the problem is, is people if you give people that the risk is that people always come to you for a solution instead of trying to figure it out. So the moment I said, well, hey,

Alex Peransi (16:31.15)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:58.994)
I have office hours like twice a week on Monday and Thursday for a half hour. And if you’re stuck on anything that you can’t figure out, then come to me. And it gives people time to try to figure it out on their own so that I’m not solving every problem. And so that’s certainly one of the things that I’ve done. Yeah.

Alex Peransi (17:03.266)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Peransi (17:07.342)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (17:13.614)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, the open door policy can hurt you in the long run.

Mike Hambright (17:20.682)
Yeah, you have to be careful. And honestly, as a leader, it derails you if you’re just being peppered all day long with solving problems that weren’t on your to do list for that day, you never get to the strategic things that you have to do. yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the challenges? I know it’s been a challenging couple of years. Can you maybe kind of share some of the things that you’ve overcome over the past couple of years and maybe share some lessons learned with folks that are watching today?

Alex Peransi (17:29.423)
Okay.

Alex Peransi (17:46.007)
Yeah, think, you know, one of the biggest things I learned as far as when I first started to today is my one of my very first hires, I talked about an acquisition manager I brought on and it was we had more of a we had a really good relationship. We were friends, but we were also coworkers. And then as your business begins to evolve and you have those relationships that you started with and you start to have uncomfortable conversations, it’s a lot harder.

when you don’t set expectations and really work through issues with people. So I think if I could go back, I would have done a really better, really a much better job at setting better expectations and holding someone accountable. And again, it’s not to say that you can’t be friends with the people you work with, but there’s definitely a boundary that you shouldn’t cross. And just being mindful of that, because if you get too close, again, it brings up the emotional aspect of decision-making, which…

Emotions and business really seldomly go together. And again, I don’t think you can remove emotion completely, at least for me. But again, just being forthcoming upfront, setting expectations, I think that’s key. Another big lesson I learned is you may think you have a good relationship with someone enough to not put things in writing, but definitely get contracts and agreements. There was a…

Mike Hambright (19:09.693)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (19:13.494)
someone that worked for me in the past, were one of my managers and super good employee. Ended up building a partnership with them for another business. And we had absolutely, we had very, very little in writing. And then it blew up in my face about two years ago. So if that could have all been avoided, had we worked out the hard part at the beginning. So again, setting expectations, getting things in writing and you can hold someone accountable to what they said versus.

Well, I remember it this way and no, I actually said it this way, so.

Mike Hambright (19:47.208)
Right? No, I can’t tell you how I’ve talked. I’ve talked on this show and obviously in some of my circles so many times about partnerships and it’s really like a marriage. Like if you have people that work for you or certainly a business partner or in a marriage is like I’ve seen so many fail and it’s always because of it’s either it’s either like lack of communication or and it’s another common one is just

Alex Peransi (20:12.248)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (20:15.53)
expectations that somebody was going to do something they didn’t do. Or that, know, especially if you’re in a 50 50 partnership, which is quite frankly, it’s tough. But where somebody thinks, I’m doing 70 % of the work, but I’m only making 50 % of the money. And those things tend to kind of simmer. And then they fester and they get worse over time if the communication isn’t there. And so then it just gets to a point to where, you know, if you’ve ever known somebody that’s in a relationship where all of sudden, like,

Alex Peransi (20:18.882)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Peransi (20:30.947)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (20:37.166)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (20:45.578)
the woman decides she wants to divorce or wants to leave the relationship. But that decision was really made like a year ago and it just took a while to kind of execute it where there’s like no chance of it getting resolved. And so I think if you just have a clear communication process like, hey, I mean, you get your oil change like every 90 days or something like why not have a maintenance meeting on your relationship to just say, how are we doing? What can I do better? You know, what are there? Is there anything like

Alex Peransi (20:49.336)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:13.098)
Is anything on your mind right now that we should talk about now and just kind of get off of our plates? But few people actually do that. They just wait until it gets so bad that there’s kind of no turning back, you know.

Alex Peransi (21:22.51)
Yeah, yeah. And there are signs along the way. You just have to pay attention enough to know. Like, as long as you’re proactive with those conversations. I mean, not to say that it’ll be smooth, but it’ll be definitely a lot better than a nuke blowing up the relationship. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:38.334)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if anybody’s listening to this and you’re in one of those relationships and it feels like things aren’t going well, like it does not get better with time. Like those things don’t solve themselves. So you got to be proactive. And even if it’s painful, just say like, Hey, let’s have a conversation here. Like where are at? And just reset expectations and be open-minded because if you want to be in that, if you don’t want to be in that relationship, that’s a different thing, but you should still have that conversation too. Like don’t wait for it to blow up, like be proactive and try to manage, manage out of it, I guess, or whatever.

Alex Peransi (21:57.251)
Yeah.

Alex Peransi (22:08.684)
Yeah, 100%. It’s better to deal with it today than tomorrow.

Mike Hambright (22:13.684)
Yeah, for sure. Well, Alex, if folks want to connect with you, so you operate in Wichita Market, right? Wichita, Kansas Market. If folks want to connect with you in any way or maybe talk about opportunities to work together, where can they go to connect with you?

Alex Peransi (22:20.108)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Peransi (22:28.3)
Yeah, I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. You can find me Alex Peransi. Name’s kind of different, so make sure you look at the notes to see how it’s spelled. But yeah, you can DM me, message me. My phone number’s on my Instagram account. Open to collaborating. You know, we do deals in Kansas and nationwide, too, so.

Mike Hambright (22:48.562)
Okay, cool. Yeah, I’ll add, we’ll add links to your Facebook and Instagram profiles down below. Thanks for sharing your insights and letting us get to know you a little bit better.

Alex Peransi (22:52.728)
Perfect.

Alex Peransi (22:57.58)
Hey, I appreciate it, Mike. It was a pleasure.

Mike Hambright (22:59.966)
Yeah, thank you, buddy. Everybody, hope you got some good value from today’s show. I think at the end of the day, Alex’s story is not that different from a lot of ours, right? It’s like we know what we want and you pivot and you ebb and flow and try to get there. And so I think the key thing is, I’ve talked about this a lot lately, is a lot of people give up. They try something for a couple of years and they quit and they move on to something else. But that thing, if it’s gonna be meaningful to your life, it’s also going to be hard. So you can’t really…

Alex Peransi (23:01.795)
Thank you.

Mike Hambright (23:26.73)
keep starting over and make any get anywhere in life, right? You have to kind of keep doubling down surrounding yourself with the right people and just pushing through and getting better and better and better. And someday you’re going to look back and people will say, well, it looks like it was easy for you. And they’ll have no idea how hard you worked. But the key is to stick with it and not give up. So keep pushing through. That’s how you get to the next level. So appreciate you guys. We’ll see you in the next show.