Navigating Life’s Challenges: Real Estate Wisdom from Brian Barbuto

Michael Stansbury (00:01.085)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Louis State Pros Podcast. I’ve got a special guest today. It’s Brian Barbudo. Brian, how are you,

Brian Barbuto (00:09.366)
I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Michael Stansbury (00:11.593)
Good, looking forward to hearing your origin story and how you’re helping people now. But first, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs. Two to five X their businesses to allow them to build the business that they’ve always wanted and to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Brian, tell me your origin story. How did you get started in real estate and real estate development? Where did it all begin?

Brian Barbuto (00:38.958)
So I grew up in the trades. I grew up as a journeyman early in my youth. I worked in construction on the weekends to make grocery money at 12, 13. Left home at 11. I was basically on the streets with one parent from time to time until I was about 14. was completely on my own.

was intending to be a developer early in my life. But then an accident at 18 when I was electrocuted went 23 feet head first off a roof onto asphalt. So I had to two pieces arrived at the hospital DOA and was told I’d never do much of anything but be a vegetable the rest of my life. Six months later became real estate developer. I had no choice. I lost all the physicality and it was, you go for it or never do it. So I became a developer.

launched my company at 20 at 21, built my first project. It was during Jimmy Carter’s era when my construction rates of interest went through the roof. ran out of interest reserve, almost lost the project, managed to get it finished and sold. As a result, became a workout guy for the bank and that led to more workouts. And two years later, I’d made enough money as a workout consultant to launch Primer Budocorp.

And then 27 became one of the notable builders within the BIA. Made the cover of the LA Times. People were calling me the golden boy of the building industry at 27, 29. Sold that company at 34, retired to one country. Four years later, got sued by RTC on guarantees that I placed on projects that I’d sold under all inclusive trust deeds. That ingenious idea that we’d come up with way back then. Lost everything after being fully retired at 34.

at 39 I was broken and had to start over again and started my second development company. So I’ve been way up, way down and I know what it means to get hammered. I mean not like drinking hammered but crushed into dust. So it’s all about survival.

Michael Stansbury (02:46.459)
So, So, you know, every origin story, I think, has the, I guess, the hero’s journey on there. tell me about the valleys. How did you manage, you know, obviously, being super, I guess, having the wealth taken away, you know, what was the valleys like for you? How did you move in the direction of

Brian Barbuto (03:05.624)
Okay.

Michael Stansbury (03:14.875)
It just got to reboot and restart again.

Brian Barbuto (03:19.042)
You know, God allows us to go through challenges in life to make us strong and wise and the world tries to bitter us through hardship.

But if we choose to see the good and the difficulty as a learning experience, it becomes just that. And so for me, it’s always been a decision to make my situation better by reflection and opportunity. And I think you’re either given that kind of gift of entrepreneurialism in your DNA, maybe before you were formed or in your early formative years. But I’ve been very blessed and very fortunate that even though

Like I said, I’ve been hammered quite a few times in my life because I’m a risk taker. I’m not afraid to jump out of an airplane at 17,500 feet. I’ve done it many times. I take calculated risks. I take risks where I’m betting on myself and my ability, not someone else. And I think when you get knocked down, you have to look at it and say, well, what did I do wrong? How can I learn from this? How can I grow?

my most difficult times, always been happy. I’ve always been glad to be alive and glad for the opportunity to do something else.

Michael Stansbury (04:36.057)
Well, it sounds like you had that perspective of being thankful even in those really challenging circumstances. And where does that come from? I if we’re not happy in our circumstances, what do we have to be happy about?

Brian Barbuto (04:53.964)
You know, I don’t know.

Like I said, maybe it’s just something you’re born with. really, really don’t know. I know that it can be cultivated and it can, you can decide at any point in your life, I’m going to press into this difficulty and I’m going to glean wisdom, knowledge, and I’m going to enjoy this hardship. And not that it’s that I’m enjoying the pain, but I’m going to enjoy what’s coming out of it. You know, squeeze a grape real hard and if you’re the grape, it must hurt like heck, but eventually become fine wine.

Michael Stansbury (05:22.145)
Right.

Brian Barbuto (05:28.208)
And so that’s kind of, know, different people are different. I had a sister that was four years older than me that, you we had the same childhood experience. She decided to slit both her wrists at 16 years of age, or 15 actually. And, you know, that’s just a different attitude. I’ve always felt like, gosh, I don’t care how bad it is, there’s an opportunity here to make something of it. But in any event.

You know, in fairness to your audience and to you, I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about what I came to honor your show and to maybe hopefully give and share some wisdom with your listeners with regard to building a portfolio and being successful in life. And that’s what I think is most important is be able to look in the mirror in the morning and say I like you and I feel good about you. I you. I trust you.

Michael Stansbury (06:16.533)
Yeah.

Yeah, I like that. And I’ll get into some of the mentorship that I know that you’re doing now. But in 2025, real estate, you look at the landscape and you’ve been in it since the Carter administration. Where do you think the focus should be? Where do you see things? Where are some low hanging fruit for real estate investors? it, know, just keep to the fundamentals or is there something else on the cusp happening that we need to be aware of?

Brian Barbuto (06:25.646)
Thank

Brian Barbuto (06:49.202)
I think that’s a great question. It’s a pretty deep answer. One of the things I think is really important is balancing growth and lifestyle, you know, the quality of your life and continue to grow your net worth.

you know, being mindful of not overspending, not overindulging, living conservatively enough that you’re not diminishing your growth through your spending, but that the growth is a surplus of, mean, your spending is a surplus of that growth. And I think, you know, being cautious about where you, you know, where you hold your liquid assets, how you hold them, how you save them for investment into real estate, where to go.

you know, like right now I think the low hanging fruit as you call it is.

entry level housing. think it’s the safest place for the small investor because if you’re going to go it on your own, which is often a better place to be because you avoid all the costs of somebody else’s management leadership. know, everybody at some point can afford entry level housing. So if you’re at the very bottom of the pyramid, you’ve got a portfolio of assets that are comprised of housing that everybody can afford. You’ve got something that is always going to be occupied.

So that’s a great place to park real estate investment money. While you’re waiting to have enough, you know, having it in Golden Treasury is really smart. But that is where I would say, and then secondarily, to turn that single family that you own into more than a single family, getting some income out of it with an ADU or a conversion or, you know, the SB9 capability of dividing the property and getting an additional unit for inventory and

Brian Barbuto (08:39.824)
income. I think are all things that you should do even if you don’t have to but that boost your net worth and boost your liquidity and your cash flow. think with what’s coming as I think is what’s coming on the rise it would be pretty tough. Everything we can do to get ready for that storm and is good. Wise.

Michael Stansbury (08:59.059)
I like it. So I always love to ask the question for some of the folks that have been in real estate and done something. So I’ll let you pick this question. It’s a two-parter. You get to pick. It’s kind of like a choose your own adventure. right. Tell me about maybe your best deal that you ever got. And you can share the numbers if you’d like. if you don’t want to do that, tell me about the most creative or a fun story about developing or real estate that

you think would be good for our audience.

Brian Barbuto (09:31.662)
Yeah, I think probably the funnest thing that I ever did was maybe one of the most creative things I ever did. And that was a project that was a beautiful freeway frontage for a housing community, a great traffic, an ideal site in the the empire of Southern California, great market.

But it wasn’t very deep. was very, very wide. had power poles that ran through it, making it very difficult to develop. And I would drive by the property from time to time over a period of about five years and see a prominent name, a development company coming soon, housing project. And a year and a half later, a sign’s up. You kind of dilopidate it. It goes down. A new sign comes up. And I watched that take place for quite a while. And when I thought, gosh, I need to go over look at this thing and figure out why that was being able to develop it. So looking that over,

and coming to terms with the fact that it was an ideal 50 unit, but it was zoned 10,000 square foot lot minimums and it was zoned for equestrian, was gonna leave it with the diagonal power lines that ran through it. If you got nine lots out of it, you’d be doing good. So a lot of creative thinking, I came up with an idea that I would build single family, small lots and a common area equestrian facility. And so we have 54 lots out of with a common equestrian.

to satisfy the equestrian need. But the most fun part of the project was going to the city’s study session and having the city council and the planning commission and equestrian commission.

Basically it ripped my face off and say you’re never gonna develop a property, anything but five or six equestrian estate homes. So what we did was we went back and said thank you very much. Made up 10 or 12,000 flyers and said coming soon if you’re interested in a home on this site, send us in the little stamped thing on the back and we’ll send you some information. We had about 3,000 respondents because we put the flyers every equestrian facility, every liquor.

Brian Barbuto (11:37.916)
store or question people might frequent.

And we got a big clientele of people interested in the homes, started corresponding with them, invited them to come out to an event where we would hold a raffle. And oh, by the way, that’s the first night of an official city council hearing to talk about the project, call KTLI News, had the news come out, went to the high schools and had them make up flyers. I support this project and all different kinds of backdrops and trained for a couple of computers that we gave to our department.

Michael Stansbury (11:59.0)
beautiful.

Brian Barbuto (12:11.824)
and had all these people in the park, gave them all the signage that they needed and said, if you really want to be in the roughly, you got to come into the public hearing and say, I support this project. And walked in and had about 300 people, maybe 400 people in the chambers who were jumping up and down in favor of the project. The city council folded like a cheap suitcase and said, we love this idea. And yeah, got the project approved and.

Michael Stansbury (12:37.066)
Brian Barbuto (12:40.622)
Yeah, I’ve made a whole lot of money in 10 months, but it was fun. It was fun to outsmart a group of people who were just.

not really thinking about what was in the best interest of the community, but rather what was in their best interest in terms of they only wanted so many equestrian properties. But in actuality, at end of the day, we gave 54 people who would never be able to have a house with a horse on it an opportunity to have a home with a horse and a paddock on their property, which was within a 50 yard walk from their home every day. And so we blessed 54 people with the opportunity to have a

home, beautiful home and a place for their horse. The project was very successful.

Michael Stansbury (13:25.671)
What a legacy to it’s really such an interesting way to solve a problem, right? Okay, well, what do we know? We have lots of interest in this. So how do we leverage all that? That’s a beautiful thing. And it speaks to the power of just creativity and being able to see something through. Because I mean, there was no guarantee that even though that you had all those people there that the city council would approve you.

Brian Barbuto (13:46.318)
it.

Michael Stansbury (13:54.884)
would have proved you guys were taking a risk. But like you said at the beginning, Brian, you’re a risk taker. You jump out of airplanes. This was something that you were gonna see through and see if it worked. And so that’s a big nugget for our audience about taking risks, but also just seeing it through to the finality of it, which is great. That’s a great story. So Brian, one of the things that we talked about earlier, we always talked about this.

Brian Barbuto (14:00.188)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (14:24.619)
We talked about this. We have a pre-show folks, so we talked about some things, but what’s really interesting about you is you are mentoring young men or mentoring men that need it. What is the biggest challenge, Basar, that the culture of men today as you’re talking to these men and what are you doing to people with their lives and how they’re going about their day-to-day, their daily method of operation, their daily lives?

and in there and how they’re thinking about their future.

Brian Barbuto (14:58.776)
Big question and try to make it as succinct as I can. Every man has the right and the responsibility to self to determine what they define, how they define success. I mean, the word is easily defined by Webster, but their own personal.

hold on their own personal idea of success. They have that right to say, this is what I see as successful. Detaching that from what their peers think is successful and what the world thinks is successful, how they see their own success. And I think that helping men, the men that I mentor, helping them to define their success.

look at their circumstance and identify the roadmap necessary to get to the place that they want to be is part of it. But the other part is accepting failure along the way because nothing, no one can be 100 % successful all the time. mean, no quarterback, every pass is not caught and is on the dime.

Nobody gets up to the bat up to the plate to swing the bat and it’s a home run every time. And you could say strikeout as a failure, but it’s not. It’s the next step to the home run or the base hit at the appropriate time. It’s honing in that skill. And so I teach guys how to navigate success to equip them to be stronger, smarter, more self-evolved and failure.

and falling down, how to learn from it and to see where they played a role in their failure and how they might have sabotaged themselves or the deal that they were trying to put together out of self-doubt or disbelief in themselves or some other personal issue because what I’ve found is most of how we feel about ourselves comes back around to how we succeed or fail in life.

Brian Barbuto (17:14.8)
own personal belief is. I’d rather be a great father than a great businessman. I’d rather have children who could say my dad was a great dad than a bunch of people. I built homes and sold homes. You could. We would say he was a great builder. Yeah, I to build a great house. I people to like my homes. And so I’ve tried to do that, but if I have to choose between the two, I’ll take choosing to be a great dad. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Stansbury (17:42.299)
Yeah, the one of the things I liked about this, you’re talking about things that last right and and it’s those relationships that we have with our with our spouses and our kids that is the most important. But men tend to think their purpose when we’re misaligned. It seems like we work, we get our identity and what we do. And sometimes that

we prioritize things in life upside down. And it seems like you’re helping them kind of reorder the loves of their lives, right? Because I love what I do, right? I absolutely do. I enjoy it. I have a good time and it doesn’t seem like work. But if I neglect the most important things in my life, then really,

Brian Barbuto (18:24.888)
No.

Brian Barbuto (18:29.772)
Enjoy.

Michael Stansbury (18:42.277)
You know, I’ve misappropriated my the way that the I need to reorder my life if that makes sense Yeah

Brian Barbuto (18:50.858)
Absolutely. Yes, it’s the IQ, the EQ and the LQ. I mean, the balancing that love quotient along with the EQ and the IQ, you know, so that there’s a balance in how.

we see the world and how the world sees us and what we leave behind. In my early career, if you got in my way, I ran you over. I was not very nice and probably had too much desire to prove that I had value by being successful.

And yeah, I regret it, but that’s part of it was part of my process and part of my journey. Now I realized that I’d rather stop and help the guy out of my way or find that he’s in my way because I was going the wrong direction. And he was there to help me see that I needed to change my direction than to just run him over. But it’s all these things take time to learn and we all need mentors. We all need people who’ve been through the process. So I believe that.

part of growth is having a mentor and having mentees, people that you’re mentoring. And you need one more person you can talk to from time time. You can bounce your struggles on and say, how does this measure to you? You know me, what do you think? And I had a real good friend of mine once about something I was leading a charge on a project. he said, and I love this guy, he’s one of my closest friends. He said, yo, Brian, you were born to lead?

That’s the way God made you. You’re a leader. You gotta be careful because if you lead, you gotta make sure you’re not heading off a cliff because there will be people that…

Michael Stansbury (20:54.826)
Wow, that’s a great quote. If you’re a leader, you have to have, and you’re leading other people, you have to have their best interests in mind. So you mentioned that mentors need someone to be mentored by and then mentees. Who’s been an impactful mentor for you in your life?

You can talk about somebody maybe that was early on or maybe even somebody recent and what was a big takeaway from that relationship?

Michael Stansbury (24:01.405)
Yeah, so I heard this quote this morning actually and now I just popped in my head. was by a guy I was listening to his talk. He was preaching on the gospel and he was like, you know, if somebody were to come up to me when I was not a Christian and tell me, here’s what you get when you become a Christian, you get help, wealth, and you get all these things.

and you get taken care of and you know, your life is happy and you get contentment and all these things. You know, if somebody would have come up to you and said, yeah, I’ll sign up for that. But in the actuality, what you get is you get Christ, you get him. And all those other things, they may happen or they may not, but what you’re going to get is Christ. And you’re gonna have to get to know him through maybe

Maybe have a little suffering or a lot of suffering or maybe you know You’ll be blessed and maybe at point at some points. It will seem like he’s not blessing you So it was interesting that you codified that and that you became a Christian and then life kind of threw you a Pretty big purple

Michael Stansbury (25:22.426)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (30:47.317)
Well, Brian, thank you very much for being part of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, folks. Find them on LinkedIn. We’ll have them in the show notes, the information there so you can reach out to him. And again, folks, like and subscribe, and we’ll see you next time on the Real Estate Pros Podcast.