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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Sai Donti, a successful real estate operator who scaled his business to seven figures at a young age. Sai shares insights into his four-step real estate process, the importance of networking, building a strong team, and the challenges he faced in raising capital. He also discusses the structure of his call center operations and the complexities of scaling fix and flip projects. Sai emphasizes the significance of finding the right people and offers valuable advice for aspiring investors looking to start their journey in real estate.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Sai Donti (00:00)
Yeah,the biggest issue is that people don’t know where to start, whether you have the cap door or not. I’ll tell you how I overcame that problem. I was more worried about networking and becoming the connector for other individuals. If you don’t know where to start, it’s not that you don’t have the resources. It’s just like I said earlier, you might just not be in the right room yet. Right. So if you want a way to start, you’re nervous. I’ll give you a way that no matter what you do, it’s not going to cost you money and you it’s really hard to mess up. Just go talk to people.
Go meet people, go to events, start calling people. Be a helping hand, offer the other person, hey, is there somebody I can connect you with? Become the individual that becomes the connector, but also become the individual who holds the resources. You’ll succeed no matter what.
Michelle Kesil (02:14)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Sai Donti who is an operator who scaled to his first seven figure business around 21 years old. And yeah, really excited to have you here today and to share all of your wisdom.Sai Donti (02:34)
Thank you so much, I’m excited to be here today.Michelle Kesil (02:36)
Perfect, so first off, for those who are not familiar with you and your work yet, can you share what your main focus is?Sai Donti (02:44)
Yeah, going into 2026, I’m glad we’re having this conversation at the beginning of the year, right? Going into 2026, my biggest projects and focus this year is real estate. I really think real estate is where the wealth is built and whole 2024 and 2025 is really just setting up all the visions and future goals that we had for this year that we’re in now. What I mainly do is I have a four system process. Number one is we have a call center within our business where everything is in-house. We create our own leads.The second thing is we have our own in-house team. We only focus in Georgia. That’s our primary market and that is where we flourish. We do really good work. So we close our own deals in Georgia. And then number three is we raise a lot of capital. We have a lot of working relationships. We have a lot of lenders we work with and we fund our own deals. And the final step is we do all of our construction in-house. We have general contractors who are partner leveled with us. We have a lot of subcontractors and a lot of great relationships when it comes to labor and vendors. And
In hindsight, just do A through Z all the way from getting the motivated seller and the lead all the way to construction and reselling the house completely in-house.
Michelle Kesil (03:49)
Awesome. And can you share a little bit about how you got started and how you created your business model?Sai Donti (03:55)
Sure. Well, truth is, the first way I got started was just by getting interested in real estate. I’m a big believer that you don’t build something if you’re not passionate about it because it’s going to crumble eventually. So I got interested in real estate at a young age. I bought my first property at 19 years old. And from there, I’ve always had a really big excitement for it. just like the idea of analyzing. like the idea of finding deals that possibly work.And as I scaled other businesses in the past, that’s how I was able to afford my first couple of properties just because I am very grateful I was successful in other businesses at a very early age. When I came to about 21 years old, give or take, I started networking really, really hard. One of the biggest business lessons I’ve learned at an early age is just network. If you don’t know something, the simple reason that you don’t know the answer to something is just because you’re not in the right room to hear the answer yet. So if you network,
really aggressively and get more people to know who you are or add them into your contacts and build relationships, you’re gonna be able to really scale just the knowledge that you have. So, also because of myself networking, I eventually met my first business partner in real estate. Me and him decided to go all in. I was already running a call center at the time for my own leads because I was closing deals that I was buying. He was a realtor in Georgia, so we decided, hey, let’s merge our talents together. You go close deals, I’ll produce the leads. From there, the story began. We started building up the call center.
He started closing deals and eventually we just started putting in the missing puzzle pieces, getting money and getting contractors and all the fun stuff.
Michelle Kesil (05:20)
Awesome. What have been some of the most important keys that have allowed your business to be able to grow, scale, and to run smoothly?Sai Donti (06:18)
Yeah, well, truth is I have really good team, right? Even in the call center right now currently we’re about 75 people under us and out of that 75, I mean, it would never work without especially the key five to 10 it started with. And what I mean by that is all the leaders, the managers and all the important individuals inside of the company who really keep this organized, but also let it run smoothly. Cause end of the day, you can only do so much as one person. One of the…Biggest key factors I’ve had is I’ve been very lucky that the individuals I got on board first and early in this company have been so duplicatable. I’ve been able to teach them all the leadership traits that I expect in any kind of leader. They have received all the knowledge very well, but more importantly, they execute it even better. And that’s the reason we were able to scale so quickly in my opinion, just because we have a great team where they understand what they need to do. More importantly, they have a passion for what they do.
Michelle Kesil (07:09)
Yeah, that’s awesome. What have been some of the main challenges that you faced and that you’ve overcome?Sai Donti (07:14)
Yeah, one of the main challenges that we face is early into the business, we had an issue when it came to especially raising capital, right? And the truth is, it’s so simple to raise capital, it’s just the part that we were over complicating it. A lot of individuals who want to invest don’t want to get all into the nitty gritty. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s some people who want to understand the logistics to everything and want to understand, hey, key by step, how everything works.But there’s so many investors out there that they just have money and they’re like, hey, Cy, how can I grow my money where I don’t have to be too involved? And that’s kind of where we actually call it the investor express within our business. So that’s where we came up with the investor express pitch where we started helping individuals get into real estate where they don’t have to spend their own active time. They can continue working their job, working their business, doing whatever they want to do while also securing a first or second lean position on a property. So they have a backed asset.
and they’re able to supply capital and make passive income on it. Now if they decide they want to get active and learn a little bit more of the business, they’re more than welcome to come out to the properties too. So when we simplified it down to the simple reasoning that hey, if you want to be passive, here you go, you got to lean and you can invest. Or if you want to learn the process so eventually you can do it on your own, come out to the properties and take this as tuition.
Michelle Kesil (08:30)
Awesome. Can you expand a little bit more about your call center and what that looks like?Sai Donti (08:35)
Yeah, so in the call center we have multiple departments, right? All the way from HR where we’re running interviews. I mean, it’s a very tight process that we have, even though we have quite a few people in there now and scaling aggressively, it is a very nitty-gritty process. We have a team of affiliates where their one and only job is to go post all over social media to get more applicants into the door. When applicants come into the door, they usually email us their resume, their information, know, a loom video, all those things.One of our HR department managers will go take those applicants and put them into an interview group session, which we run at this point almost three a week, where each interview is usually about 10 to 15 plus people. On average, we usually have about 50 to 100 people interviewing for this call center every single week. Out of that, we allow people into the call center if they have the talents that we’re looking for or if we think they’re going to have good potential. That’s interview number one. From there, they go to our training group one where we have a full-blown SOP.
And it’s just a course module. teach a lot of stuff, ethical stuff that we want to see inside of the call center, things you should do, things you shouldn’t do, scripts, all those kind of fun things. Once they’re done with that, they go to training group two. Training group two is where we give them access to our dialers. We kind of put them on a probationary period where they get to call for a couple days. If they perform well, they make it to our main team. Within our main team, we have multiple things. We have different teams, all those kind of things. just in other hindsight is…
We don’t want to overwhelm one person with the responsibility of a lot of individuals. So we like to break it down into teams. Each manager gets the X amount of people. And because of that, it keeps the process simple where callers are able to call their manager whenever they need help, schedule calls, they’re able to get all the assistance they need. The managers are not overwhelmed and everything is just overseen by rest of the leadership team. The final big thing that we have to this call center is our quality control department. There’s so many leads out there in a lot of companies where…
somebody will book an appointment and it’s just going to be on the other person’s calendar. We don’t like to do that. We’re big on the essence of volume, but we’re more big on the essence of quality, right? So whenever a lead is booked, we have a separate department, which is our quality assurance department. They will literally go and listen to every single recording, take notes on the call. And if it fits all of our quality control department requirements, then it will be placed on a calendar for one of the closers or a client that’s buying leads.
So you’re only talking to individuals and have individuals on your calendar that are actual motivated sellers with actual reasoning to sell.
Michelle Kesil (10:58)
Awesome, that’s so cool that you were able to structure a team in that way.Sai Donti (11:02)
Yeah.Yeah, absolutely. was a lot of work, especially in the beginning. know, I mean, we’re still in the process of growth. I mean, I don’t think a company ever stops necessarily growing, you know, but especially figuring it out early, was a lot of trial and errors. But like I said, I had a really good team that I started with where a lot of them stuck it out with us. So for that, I mean, they definitely get compensated now, I’ll tell you that. But you know, there was a lot of trial and error in the beginning and I’m just grateful for the people I started with.
Michelle Kesil (11:44)
Right.And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?
Sai Donti (12:06)
So when I originally started this call center, my biggest thing was obviously solving, right? Because before we had a system that we could scale, we needed a system first, right? So now we’re at the point where I have a pretty decent system in place. Everything is tracked, all the KPIs, we have a lot of different requirements, we have different departments, different managers, we even have a director of operations now. So we have got to a pretty well standpoint. Because of that end of 2025, my biggest goal was getting myself out of the call center.so that I could focus in actual real life in the United States so that I could actually focus on scaling what we’re doing as an operation here. By the way, our call center is majority of course off shores. So I mean, we have people from Pakistan, India, we have people in Nigeria, Philippines, like almost any country you can think of, we probably have had somebody or have someone. So.
My biggest thing was we were able to solve the issue of me getting out the call center. So now that I can focus in Georgia, I’m able to put my time and attention now to just raising capital and actually scaling our operations of fix and flips and all those things.
Michelle Kesil (13:04)
Awesome. And what does it look like to scale that operation of fix and flips?Sai Donti (13:08)
Yeah, well, the first thing I’ll say is it is a lot more paperwork than I would have ever thought, right? And it’s not just because of submitting information, Scope of Works, and all those kind of fun things to lenders, but it’s also understanding that, hey, wow, there’s actually multiple parts to this business. I spoke about the call center and how we systemize that, but there’s so many other systems within a business that’s never spoken about, especially if everything’s in-house. For example, if we go to our closing team.Well, that’s another system. That’s a whole different department inside of a business. Now we have to start getting KPIs. We have to start getting scripts over there, making sure we’re able to track performance. Then if we go to our construction side, well, that’s another game ball, right? Because now we have to start making sure subcontractors, general contractors, they’re tracking the work, they’re staying within budgets, all those kind of fun things. So yeah, it’s a very fun process, but when it comes to the actual scaling, the systems part of it, it’s something that is delicate, but you also got to be okay with.
failing a couple times. That’s just part of the game. The quicker you fail, the faster you succeed.
Michelle Kesil (14:03)
Definitely. Is there a story that you can share about when you failed and you pivoted and you learned from it and then it led you to success?Sai Donti (14:11)
yeah, actually this is do you want to keep in real estate or do you want to go to a different business? How do you undo it? I’ll give you a couple stories. Sure. I’ll tell you a recent story then back in October. We actually just recently bought a property. It was in Rex, Georgia and in Rex, Georgia. We said the whole story of this. Basically there was a landlord, her husband, unfortunately recently died and she got a hold of all the properties. She’s never been a landlord before and she had about eight ofMichelle Kesil (14:18)
I real estate if you have something there.Sai Donti (14:38)
We were fortunate to work with her on some of the other properties and when we finally got to the fourth property with her, there was a tenant in there that has not paid her in the last two years. And because of that, she was about to go in foreclosure. We helped her out, gave her some money so she could stay out of foreclosure and it was a whole battle with the tenant, but we finally got her out. On the day of closing, we had a final inspection and the house was empty. As soon as we closed on the property and we went back to the property,All the doors were bolted. We could not get in, right? That’s because somebody came in, squatted in the property and literally bolted the doors. Fast forward on the story, we come to find out it was actually her son that came back to the property, the tenant son. And he was in his 40s, had kids, had a wife, all those things. And by the way, they were convicted felons, all those kinds of things. We had the cops involved to trespass them. They would not leave because they were professional squatters. This was not their first time doing it. We went to court.
against them and you would never think somebody that’s squatting would actually come to court and they didn’t until they did. The last time, so the judge actually calls
The first time called nobody answered so you know 15-20 minutes passed and he asked for the so-and-so squatter’s name a second time all of a sudden they rise and we’re all mind blown. They start arguing with us and start actually fighting that they legally are supposed to be there printing out fake leases all those kind of things.
When we finally go to mediation with them, oh my god, that’s where we figured out the mother who actually left at first was the real responsibility behind this. Coaching her son on everything to say, all those kind of things. When he finally settled with us, she got pissed and left the court. She didn’t get pissed because he settled, she got pissed because he didn’t settle for enough. We settled with him for $1,500, she wanted us to settle for five, $6,000 just to get him out of the place. He was actually semi-reasonable and eventually got out.
Good thing is he got out, but that was not the end of story because once we got into the house, we found a bed that was covered with full blood. We got really nervous right there. We found a of credit cards that were torn up inside the house. There was a lot of wild things that happened inside of that property. The biggest lesson that we had with that property is never get too excited too early. The reasoning is as soon as we closed, we thought, oh, we’re in. Who would have known within two hours, a life changing event could happen there that delayed the whole property by another two months, right?
It was just a story after story. And definitely because of that, we learned a lot of safety measurements that we’re going to start taking forward, you know, as an installing cameras right away, making sure that there’s just different things on the contract so that the seller is more responsible to get people out of the house and all those kinds of fun things, you know, it was definitely a learning lesson at end of 2025.
Michelle Kesil (17:53)
Well, that is pretty wild, I can imagine.Sai Donti (17:56)
Yeah.Michelle Kesil (17:56)
Yeah, it’s crazy. Some of the things that you don’t expect that you’ll have to overcome.Sai Donti (18:01)
Yeah, absolutely I agree.Michelle Kesil (18:02)
Cool. So what are some goals that you have for 2026?Sai Donti (18:06)
Yeah, for 2026, it’s actually a really, really big goal that we have within the company. We want to do 80 flips by end of the year, right? For 2025, we ended off pretty well. And this year we want to focus just on full scale. Just the month of January, we’re already going to be closing on two properties on January 15th. And we’re on a heavy start. Actually, October 30, sorry, December 31st of 2025, we put a property under contract. So that was a green light for us. We’re like, hey, even ending out the year strong.We want to finish out 2026 incredibly strong with scale so that it just sets us up for the future.
Michelle Kesil (18:38)
Definitely. Is there any sort of like systems or structure that you are needing to implement in order to have that success?Sai Donti (18:45)
Yeah, the biggest system and structure I’ll say is actually just finding the right people at this point. Because end of the day, you can have all the systems in place that you want, but if you don’t have the right A and B players beside you, it’s just not going to work. It’s easy to break a system. It doesn’t matter if the system works or not. If you don’t have the right people to work the system, it’s going to break every single time. And right now we have a pretty good working system. It’s just, can we find the right people quick enough to make it work?Michelle Kesil (19:09)
Definitely and are you like hiring for your call center? What does that process look like?Sai Donti (19:15)
⁓we’re always hiring. We’re hiring in every kind of department you can think of, whether it’s a closer, whether it’s a GC, whether it’s a caller. We’re always hiring because the biggest thing is we never want to shut out the doors because if that A level person comes through, we don’t want them to miss the opportunity over here.
Michelle Kesil (19:30)
Awesome. What are some advice that you could share maybe for people that are earlier on in their journey looking to start investing?Sai Donti (19:36)
Yeah, the biggest issue is that people don’t know where to start, whether you have the cap door or not. I’ll tell you how I overcame that problem. I was more worried about networking and becoming the connector for other individuals. If you don’t know where to start, it’s not that you don’t have the resources. It’s just like I said earlier, you might just not be in the right room yet. Right. So if you want a way to start, you’re nervous. I’ll give you a way that no matter what you do, it’s not going to cost you money and you it’s really hard to mess up. Just go talk to people.Go meet people, go to events, start calling people. Be a helping hand, offer the other person, hey, is there somebody I can connect you with? Become the individual that becomes the connector, but also become the individual who holds the resources. You’ll succeed no matter what.
Michelle Kesil (20:18)
Definitely awesome. Is there anything that you’re particularly looking to grow into this year that you’re excited to share?Sai Donti (20:30)
Yeah, biggest thing is I guess for my sense is just stepping more into a leadership role for myself whether it’s for this company or future things that I do. Just being a better role model for all the individuals within the call center especially a lot of the people that look up to me or the individuals that come to me for advice. I just want to continue growing in a personal aspect but also a business and money aspect so that I can continue being a better person for the individuals that talk to me on a daily basis or just watch my stories, my social media, all those kind of things.Michelle Kesil (20:57)
Awesome. Well, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?Sai Donti (21:03)
Yeah, my Instagram is Saidonti, as well my email is [email protected].Michelle Kesil (21:14)
Perfect, appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. Thank you for being here.Sai Donti (21:19)
Thank you so much for having me.Michelle Kesil (21:20)
And for the listeners that are tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Sai who are building real businesses and we will see you on our next episode.Sai Donti (21:32)
Bye guys.
