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Show Summary
In this episode of the Investor Fuel Podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Aaron Gaunt, a successful entrepreneur in the wholesale real estate market. Aaron shares his journey from being a firefighter to becoming a full-time real estate investor, detailing the challenges he faced and the strategies he employed to scale his business. He emphasizes the importance of leadership, building a strong network, and overcoming obstacles in the real estate industry. Aaron also discusses his future goals for his business and the community he is building for wholesalers.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Aaron Gaunt (00:00)
So I got into wholesale real estate because, and again, I wanna keep this super short and simple, but I was a firefighter back in the day, and I, unfortunately, I’m gonna be pretty transparent here and vulnerable.⁓ I got a young lady knocked up. So, this lady I was dating, we were dating for about a month and a half. She actually became pregnant. And what I did is, long story short, relationship ended very quickly. She said I couldn’t be in, ⁓ our newborn’s life. And I said, absolutely not. I am going to be the father and present in my, this young, girl. And so I took her to a family court even when she was pregnant because she was making these threats. I knew I needed an attorney.
That attorney obviously is going to cost me a lot of money. Didn’t have the kind of funds I had available at the time. And so what I did is I decided to say, hey, how can I afford this attorney? That’s how we should always all start. Right. So my deeper why I read the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad back in the Navy, back in my Navy days when I was on deployment, never took any action back then, but I ended up picking it back up and I said, hey, let me read this book again. I do remember that this was another way to make some money.
So I said, how do I get into real estate without any money? I Googled how to do that. What came up? Wholesale real estate. I put $5,000 on a credit card to join Wholesale and Inc. back in the day. And two months later, got my first deal for $20,000
Michelle Kesil (02:57)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Aaron Gaunt who’s been making serious moves in the wholesale space. So excited to have you here today, Aaron. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching your wholesale business. So let’s dive in.Aaron Gaunt (03:22)
Thank you so much for having me on.Michelle Kesil (03:24)
Absolutely. So just first off for those who are not familiar with you and your world, can you give a short version of what your main focus is?Aaron Gaunt (03:33)
Yeah, we specialize in wholesale slash novation real estate here in the Southern California market, specifically the Inland Empire and Los Angeles, which some would say is the most competitive market.Michelle Kesil (03:45)
Awesome, I love that. And yeah, how did you get into this business?Aaron Gaunt (03:49)
So I got into wholesale real estate because, and again, I wanna keep this super short and simple, but I was a firefighter back in the day, and I, unfortunately, I’m gonna be pretty transparent here and vulnerable.⁓ I got a young lady knocked up. So, this lady I was dating, we were dating for about a month and a half. She actually became pregnant. And what I did is, long story short, relationship ended very quickly. She said I couldn’t be in, ⁓ our newborn’s life. And I said, absolutely not. I am going to be the father and present in my, this young, girl. And so I took her to a family court even when she was pregnant because she was making these threats. I knew I needed an attorney.
That attorney obviously is going to cost me a lot of money. Didn’t have the kind of funds I had available at the time. And so what I did is I decided to say, hey, how can I afford this attorney? That’s how we should always all start. Right. So my deeper why I read the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad back in the Navy, back in my Navy days when I was on deployment, never took any action back then, but I ended up picking it back up and I said, hey, let me read this book again. I do remember that this was another way to make some money.
So I said, how do I get into real estate without any money? I Googled how to do that. What came up? Wholesale real estate. I put $5,000 on a credit card to join Wholesale and Inc. back in the day. And two months later, got my first deal for $20,000
I paid most of it to my attorney and then I used the rest for marketing and then I kept it going.
And then so moving forward, fast forward six years later, I do have full custody and full legal, full physical custody of my daughter. I’ve been a full time dad since day one and she lives with me and now I have two other kids with my beautiful wife.
Michelle Kesil (06:23)
Wow, that’s such a powerful story. Yeah, it’s amazing how you got into this world in such a unexpected way and everything ended up working out for you. It’s beautiful.Aaron Gaunt (06:26)
Yeah.Yeah, it was, I was a forced entrepreneur, I guess you would say. I feel like I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur because I never liked people telling me what to do, even though I was in the military and I was in fire where people do tell you what to do all the time. But I was, I’m not a person of rules. And so it was definitely a good fit for me at the time. And now I’ve been super focused. I quit the fire department about a year and a half into it.
⁓ that’s a whole nother story as well on how I got my first deal, how I was able to scale, ⁓ even throughout, even, even throughout the fire department days where I was cold calling, I was driving for dollars. We, we’d literally leave the firehouse and I would, pin properties and direct mail them and, from, from, from houses that were just caught on fire. I was, I would talk to homeowners while I was at the department. I got talked to by my fire chief to say, Hey, you can’t be working on your business here.
Michelle Kesil (07:07)
Yeah.Aaron Gaunt (07:28)
But when I was able to do it, I had one of my mentors at the time and he told me to say, hey, it’s time for you to go do this on your own. It was very scary because if you’re if you know that, you know, getting a firefighter position at a fire department job, there’s a lot of qualifications, a lot of work. And so it took me a lot. You know, it was a lot of work to get into the position that I was at. And but it was pretty cool to say, you know what? I’m going to go do this on my own because I need and also I need to be a full time dad. I had nobody else to really take care of me and take.take care of my daughter. But I had a $50,000 in the pipe. Once it hit my bank account, I went into the fire chief office and I gave him my two weeks notice. And I was off on my own and did this full time. like I said, now I’m able to tuck in my daughter every single night. I’m able to wake up with her, take her to school, and I take her on all kinds of cool trips. And same with all my other kids too, so.
Michelle Kesil (08:19)
Amazing, so beautiful. How, yeah, you mentioned you have stories about how you scaled and got your first deal, so I would love for you to expand on that. Like, how did you get from just starting out getting kind of thrown into this world to where you are now?Aaron Gaunt (08:33)
my gosh, it is frustrating to get your first deal and then to try to keep the deals coming. So how I did that is I remember at the time, I remember at the time I was pulling cheap lists from, I think it was like PropStream or ListSource and those are still great lists that you could go ahead and do, but with the guy with little budget at the time, I was taught how to drive for dollars.And what I did is I started driving for dollars and like super aggressively. I drove around all the neighborhoods looking for the ugliest houses. And that was that created the list that I needed to really keep the deals flowing. Those were those like those low hanging fruit. So at the time when coal coal outreach was a little bit more bigger, such as coal calling SMS, we were able to keep the deals coming until we were able to afford inbound marketing, which was the PPC.
really scale our direct mail and then a little bit of radio and so forth.
Michelle Kesil (10:02)
amazing. So where are you at today with your business? Like what does that like version of your business look like now?Aaron Gaunt (10:10)
Yeah, so scaling forward, right now we have three. So now, so I’m the CEO of Seller’s New Day here in the Riverside County area in Southern California. I have three acquisition reps. Usually we like to always have four, but we have three right now. I have one disposition person who’s been with me for a few years. I have a fantastic transaction coordinator that’s with me in office. And then my current wife is also my partner.She is a freaking killer on that side. So I really helped get the deals on the board and then she helps the other side and gets them to the close.
Michelle Kesil (10:43)
Amazing, such a beautiful partnership and business. What’s like been the key to keeping this business running smoothly?Aaron Gaunt (10:50)
leadership.Michelle Kesil (10:51)
in terms.Aaron Gaunt (10:51)
For the last three years,I was obsessed with leadership. So there’s a difference between the military firefighter type of leadership and an office environment leadership. I’m gonna tell you that right now. I mean, there is some differences. Let’s just say it was quite a bit of a learning curve. I have a high standard, so did we back in the department. But when you come into an office space, we’re dealing with a lot of people that…
might be a little bit more, I guess you would say, softer and you got to come up with a little bit more different approaches. And so I think we’ve really nailed that down ever since where basically we have our one-on-ones, encouragement, praises, get the people up and going and really extract the genius from the people that come into an office space. So a few books that I read along the night, I keep them on my shelf right over here. The book, Multipliers, Sales Management Simplified, How to Be a Great Boss.
Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Sailing, Hire and Keep the Best People, and The Sales Accelerator Formula are some of the books I reread constantly to help me be that best leader to really drive results and revenue through all my team members.
Michelle Kesil (11:57)
Amazing, yeah, it’s so powerful what that leadership role can trickle down into the rest of the employees. So I love that aspect of this. So let me ask you this, what are you most focused on solving or scaling next?Aaron Gaunt (12:14)
I would say deal flow. So we do about 100 deals ⁓ a year and I would like to get that up to 200, 300 deals a year just by not necessarily bringing on more people but by elevating the genius in the current team members. I know that we can stay lean and mean and do a lot of things. So our wholesale business has about 4 million a year. I really want to scale this business up to 10 million a year by going deeper into our market and not wider.Michelle Kesil (12:41)
Yeah, what does that look like? Like what are some action steps that get you in that new route to go deeper?Aaron Gaunt (12:48)
Yeah, making sure our four acquisition reps are fully trained and onboarded and super driven and scaling, pretty much scaling the marketing.Michelle Kesil (12:57)
Yeah, yeah, marketing is such an important piece of business. Absolutely.Aaron Gaunt (13:01)
Sure is.Michelle Kesil (13:02)
So every business owner has moments where things get real. Maybe a deal goes sideways or you have to pivot fast. Would you mind sharing one of those moments for you and how you overcame it?Aaron Gaunt (13:59)
Are you talking about like kind of like it’s just like a downfall or hardship? man. Yeah. Have we have them every day in this business. So let me give you one example that, that we’re actually not, I mean, we’re kind of, we’re pretty much past it, but it’s, it’s kind of an interesting story. We did a deal back in February where this, so we had this lady, she lived in a condo, I think it was somewhere in LA and she reached out, she reached out to us through a PPC ad. So, and it was, you know,Michelle Kesil (14:05)
Right?Aaron Gaunt (14:25)
Joe, it was this lady, let’s call her Jane. Jane, Joe at, know, 123 Main Street, they said, needed a lot of work. And so we were immediately at that appointment. We went to that appointment. She said, I am, I’m getting divorced, property needs a lot of work, and I’m going to be moving out of here. Long story short, so we get them on our contract. We sell the deal. We close on the deal. I guess we find out later that this lady was under a, I guess she was, she fell under fraud.I guess some famous actor, like, again, and now this wasn’t the real actor, was like AI generated fraud. And I guess this person told, this con artist told this lady, the seller, to give him like 80 grand. You need to sell this property and you need to give me 80 grand, da da da da. Well anyways, long story short, she, ⁓ we sell the property, as far as I understand, she gives this guy, this con artist, like 80 thousand dollars.
So she ended up, I guess, staying at the property, squatted at the property. The buyer that we assigned it to now has go through this eviction process. And I guess her daughter gets involved and tells us, hey, you conned my mother out of her house, da da da And that was not the case. that’s the beautiful thing about documentation, ⁓ calls recording, et cetera. That’s what I think that everybody, if who’s ever listened to this.
If it’s not recorded or it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. So just remember that, because long story short, she, ⁓ sued us, for fraud and that, you know, again, we weren’t the ones who, who, who scammed her and she had, I guess they went to like the news and all these, ⁓ media outlets and was trying to throw our name under the bus. And so lately I’ve been getting a lot of people, a lot of news, what would you call it? Journalists, guess.
reaching out to us through our website saying, hey, can I hear your side of the story? Why did you take this old lady’s house and so forth, right? So it wasn’t a fun time, but my attorney gets to respond to all of these news people and long story short, they never air us. They kind of tell a story that this lady fell under this type of fraud.
⁓ But our name was never thrown in there because the story was straight that it would happen. We had nothing to do with that We have all the documentation that it was a clean sale. She wanted she wanted out She said she was getting divorced from her husband and whatever she did with the money after it has nothing to do with us She wanted us to reverse the sale. It’s just but that’s just not how that works. Unfortunately But we wish her the best and we hope it does suck that it happened But there’s really nothing we can do at that time
So anyway, so yeah, we begin a lot of people trying to put us all over the news and stuff, but didn’t didn’t go through.
Michelle Kesil (17:00)
Wow, that is crazy.Aaron Gaunt (17:03)
Yeah, that’s crazy. It was annoying too. ⁓Michelle Kesil (17:06)
I’m surethat’s not something that you’re wanting to spend your time and energy on.
Aaron Gaunt (17:12)
Yeah, I gotta pay myattorney to go have all these conversations.
Michelle Kesil (17:15)
Yeah, well, that’s definitely a challenging obstacle to overcome, but I’m glad you guys were able to not get spread out on those news outlets. Me? No.Aaron Gaunt (17:25)
Have you ever went through anything like that?You never had a deal that just went super sideways?
Michelle Kesil (17:30)
Well, I’m not an investor, so that’s the starting point.Aaron Gaunt (17:33)
No,not an investor. Do you want to be an investor? You’d already just like interviewing investors.
Michelle Kesil (17:38)
Yeah. ⁓I’m open to becoming an investor. Yeah. I live in California in NorCal. I’m like in the South Bay.
Aaron Gaunt (17:43)
There you go. What market are you in?Do you really? Where at?
South Bay.
Michelle Kesil (17:53)
like San Jose, like neighboring areas.Aaron Gaunt (17:55)
Yeah, Igrew up in a Antioch.
Michelle Kesil (17:57)
Hey, cool. No?Aaron Gaunt (17:59)
Do know where that’s at?You said in San, so you live in San Jose, I actually am from Antioch. Do know where Concord’s at, like Walnut Creek? Yeah, so go a little bit more east and that’s, look on the map. You’re like, that’s, Antioch, Pittsburgh, Concord. Yeah, so I grew up in the Bay Area myself.
Michelle Kesil (18:06)
Yeah, I do.Okay. Okay.
Okay, cool. I love that. Amazing.
Aaron Gaunt (18:19)
Have you ever been part of the hype you movement?Michelle Kesil (18:21)
My high school self knows.Aaron Gaunt (18:22)
I graduated at 07, so I was at the peak of it.Michelle Kesil (18:25)
Okay, yeah, I graduated high school in 2014.Aaron Gaunt (18:28)
Okay, so yeah, you kinda heard some of it.Michelle Kesil (18:31)
Yeah,yeah. Oh, that’s funny. Amazing. So yeah, when it comes to like your current business, are there any goals that you have for where it’s going in the future?
Aaron Gaunt (18:45)
Yep. And I kind of mentioned it. You we want to get this to a gross revenue aspect of 10 million. ⁓ The cool thing with an arm market where there are so many deals, we are in probably the biggest market there is in all the United States. The population here in Southern California is just ginormous. So we’re working very hard to go deeper. Again, not wider. A lot of people think that, you know, we do 10 deals a month and thatThat’s it. And they think that now we got to go try all these other markets. Absolutely not. We actually want to get to 40, 50 deals a month just in our own market. And our assignment fees here are about $42,000. So that’s it’s definitely doable.
Michelle Kesil (19:23)
Yeah, absolutely amazing. Yeah, and are you guys selling to investors that are in other markets or keeping everything more local?Aaron Gaunt (19:33)
Yep, we love our Southern California buyers here. I did a whole year when I went nationwide and what we did is we’d buy a bunch of these small, know, middle of nowhere kind of houses. And, you know, we did in the seven figures at the time. Unfortunately, I mean, you’re talking about a lot of skinny deals, hard to move. But if you could go ahead and you could build the relationship with your buyers in your own market, you get a property or a contract, you get 10 offers on that property and you could really bid out those properties high. So.And also with the price points of our houses here in California, I mean, we do probably a six figure deal, the two six figure deals a month here.
Michelle Kesil (20:09)
Yeah, that makes sense. California is its own little niche.Aaron Gaunt (20:14)
For sure, I love California.Michelle Kesil (20:15)
Yeah, definitely. Awesome. So when it comes to growing your network and building new relationships, what do you feel has like made the biggest difference for you?Aaron Gaunt (20:27)
building my network and just really go giving. So what we want to do is we will help out a lot of investors in our area. So me and my wife are realtors, but what she does is she’ll go ahead and she’ll go ahead and list a lot of our network’s properties. So if you have a property here in California, reach out to my wife. She is a novation-friendly realtor and she’ll go ahead and list your novation deals.Michelle Kesil (20:49)
Love that. Awesome. So yeah, before we close out here, if people want to reach out to you, connect, collaborate, learn more, where is the best place they can find you?Aaron Gaunt (21:01)
Perfect. Yeah. get the best place is follow me on Instagram at Aaron L. Gaunt on Instagram. ⁓ And then one thing, like I said, that I’m excited about is the community that we are launching, which is the wholesale gauntlet pot. And you can find a podcast that I have as well, but the wholesale gauntlet community is where we help wholesalers get from dry months to one deal month to consistent deal flow.Michelle Kesil (21:23)
sounds like a powerful community for people to join. yeah, thank you so much. really appreciate your time, your story and perspective. It was great having you here.Aaron Gaunt (21:33)
Awesome, thanks so much, Michelle.Michelle Kesil (21:34)
Yes, and for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure that you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming with operators just like Erin, who are building real businesses, and we’ll see you all on our next episode.
