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Patrick Francey on Self-Mastery, Mindset, and Building Real Estate Wealth From the Inside Out

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Show Summary

In this insightful interview, Patrick Francey shares over 40 years of experience in business and real estate investing. He discusses the importance of understanding economic fundamentals, developing a resilient mindset, and practicing self-mastery to achieve long-term success. Patrick also highlights how investors can make smarter decisions by focusing on data, planning ahead, and building a clear vision for their future.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Patrick Francey (00:00)
    And I did, for some reason I said, how do you define success for you? And he said, how I define success, and he didn’t miss a beat, didn’t have to think about it. He says, when I open my eyes in the morning, I ask myself, am I living the vision for my life? And if the answer is yes, I’m successful.

    Quentin (01:50)
    Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. And you know what I’m going say. I’m excited to be here today. I’m having another fantastic guest. And you know what gets me excited is the fact that we get to look at people and what they do through their lens. Now know it may sound like a broken record. Y’all know I say this, but it doesn’t matter what we’re doing. We can all be doing the same thing.

    we are still going to do it a little bit different because we are unique. We are unique in our skill sets. We are unique with our tool bags. We are unique with our superpower. So we’re always going to bring something different to what we do. And so we know we talk to enough people where people are not doing the same thing. But I love when we just get a chance to just sit with people that are doing things at a high level. And today’s no different. So I have someone here, listen, 40 years in business, 20 years in real estate.

    Definitely get your pens and your pads out. Maybe that’s old school. Most most of y’all know AI transcribing probably by now, but either way get your recording devices out because I’m sure we’re going to learn something, some good nuggets today. So I want to introduce you all to Mr. Patrick Francey. Mr. Patrick, how you doing today, sir?

    Patrick Francey (03:02)
    Fantastic. Thanks for having me join you.

    Quentin (03:05)
    Absolutely. Thank you for being here. And listen, Mr. Patrick, I kind of just want to dive in. I would love for you to tell the people what your main focus is these days. would love, we love a little bit of an origin story. Like we love the hero’s journey. So like a little bit of origin story, how you got to where you are today. The crowd would definitely love that. And then where you are in the world geographically. so Mr. Patrick, sir, you have the floor.

    Patrick Francey (03:21)
    Mm-hmm.

    Well, thanks for that too. And I’m really happy to be here to share some of the insights that I’ve learned over many years of business. So I am a multiple business owner. Again, I’ve been in business over 40 years. One of my businesses just celebrated its 42nd year in business. You know, as a young man, as I shared a little bit briefly before we got on the show, I’m about to turn 68 years old. So 40 some years ago when I was in business and doing all the things that young men do in the world of business,

    trying to figure things out, a good mentor friend of mine, you know, one day, you know, said to me, what are you doing into the future? How are you going to exit this business? Well, it had never even occurred to me back then that I should be planning an exit strategy. It opened up the door of conversation. And the point of that is that what I started to notice and realize that the people who I admired, the business owners that I admired, in spite of how successful they were in business, and I mean, some of them were like,

    hundreds of millions, certainly many millions a year. And I went, what the heck? They all own real estate. And I thought, I should be paying attention to that. So it was early on, it took me a while for that to kick in, but to understand that comment about what is your exit strategy? What are you thinking about doing? Realizing that there’s no pension plan for me, I’m building my own. And so I started looking into investing in real estate, and that’s ultimately what took me on that journey.

    was understanding that as much as I had a very lucrative and successful business, I had to consider, you know, where was my future state in terms of whatever retirement might look like, you know, and it’s certainly how I saw retirement at 40 and how it is in reality at 68. going, gosh, why would I even think about retirement? You know, it’s just not what I want to do.

    So that was part of it. When I got involved with the real estate investment network, RAIN, which is now my current business, that was back in 2000. And I started investing in real estate

    back in 2000, primarily, and I shouldn’t say primarily, all in Canada, but different provinces of the country. And that just took me on the journey. And in 2008, so the Real Estate Investment Network was a small community back in 2000. And I got to know the owner then. ended up buying the business, long story, but I ended up buying the business from him in 2012, I think it is.

    And so the real estate investment network been around over 30 years. We teach investors. We’re primarily an education business. We don’t sell real estate. And what we teach is ⁓ number one, the how to’s, the actual mechanics of different strategies, whether it be buy and hold or fix and flip or multifamily, whatever you might want to do. But primarily we really cut our, what we’re known mostly for is our ability to look into the future and see where real estate is going.

    based on the economic conditions. So when we look at the fundamentals, and that’s all to say that, you know, the thing about being real estate investors is we’re investing primarily for the future, you know. We may do fix and flips if that’s what we want income today, we do fix and flips, but if we’re building for our future, we wanna know where real estate is going. We care less about where it was or where it ⁓ is today.

    And so we look at the economic fundamentals, knowing what drives real estate. And that’s kind of gives us the basis of how we teach our investor community to move forward and how to look at the world. Because you’re in Maryland, I’m in Canada, but the economic fundamentals don’t change. If I’m gonna go invest in Maryland, I don’t know that I’ve never been there, but somebody says, you should look at what’s going on in Maryland. go, okay, well, let me go look. And I’m gonna look at the economic fundamentals. And so I’ll take a break before I give those to you, Q. How would you like to?

    kind of how to move forward because once I get going on this, you know, hard to stop.

    Quentin (08:05)
    Yeah,

    I love it. So yeah. so remember what you’re about to say, cause I think we’re going to be able to weave it in, but I love, I love your journey. 68, man, you don’t look no 68. Let’s just put that out there. You look great, man. I would not have put 68 on you. 40 years of business, 20 years in investing. RAYNE been around for 30 years in itself. And I love RAYNE, the real real estate investment network.

    Patrick Francey (08:22)
    Thanks.

    Quentin (08:34)
    You brought the business. You think about excellent strategies. Like it’s so many things and maneuvers that you’ve been through within business and within real estate. So Mr. Patrick, I had this saying where I say destiny has no wasted moments. Meaning no matter what you’ve been through in life, there’s been a compound and amalgamation of just these moments that make you kind of who you are today. 68 years, 40 years in business.

    I would love to know what has these moments taught you about yourself? Has it taught you resiliency? Has it taught you discipline? I mean, of course, I believe it taught you like to be forward thinking, but I would love to hear in your words, what has these moments taught you about you?

    Patrick Francey (09:18)
    Well, it’s interesting you bring up the, you you use the word resilience, you know, certainly in the economic uncertainties that the world is living in, you know, whether it be Canada, the US, global macro, it’s all very challenging these days. You know, so resilience is something that I think people need to embrace. My wife who, Stephanie, who’s a world and Olympic class mental performance coach just back from the Olympics, who’s a matter of her fourth.

    And, you know, she actually teaches resilience, you know, it’s resilience by design. So you start to learn a couple of things. Number one, which is that, you know, when you go to the gym, you work out and you don’t get stronger if you don’t lift heavier weight. And I use that kind of metaphor, that analogy, if you will, in business and in life, you know, it,

    we want it to be easier, but the reality of it is, is we don’t get stronger. We don’t grow when it’s easy.

    We grow and we’re facing challenges and we have to lean into those challenges. We have to figure them out. We have to, how do we get through this? And those are like lifting the heavier weights and we come out the other side of that stronger for it, smarter for it, better for it. And yeah, maybe even got some wounds along the way, but ultimately, you know, those scars are part of the story. That is what you live through and got to, you know, I have my own podcast, uh, Q called the everyday millionaire, you know, coming up 10 years.

    And the Everyday Millionaire, I’m interviewing seemingly ordinary individuals who have achieved extraordinary results. within the Everyday Millionaire, I’m interviewing very, very accomplished people. And it’s interesting that every single guest that I interview, if I have a similar question to you and we get on this, they all talk about the number of times they failed, had to get up and go through it again.

    And again, I use that analogy of going to the gym. know, sometimes you go to failure or you try something and you go, it’s too heavy. But you don’t give up. You keep working at it until you get it. And that seems to be a pretty common theme through it all. So for me, you know, the lessons that I’ve learned along the way is number one, I love what I do. That’s what really drives me is being a contribution, ⁓ having significance in being and making a difference in other people’s lives.

    giving that guidance and now in a part of my life where I can actually say, you know, I’ve got some pretty good wisdom that I’ve gained over this many years and I can really see the advantages of that. So for me, it was really wrapping my mind around and it took me a while to figure this out that the challenges are just part of life. We don’t make them wrong. We actually lean into them and say, where am going to come out the other side better for it? If you don’t, if you can’t frame it that way,

    you’re just going to be bitchy and feel hard pressed and all the anxiety that comes with it. So it’s just a way to frame what we do. And that’s really what it is. We often talk about mindset. And mindset’s a really important part of it. I have to add one other component of it that maybe even your listeners can ask themselves. But I think about the thousands of investors that I’ve spoke to, one on one, one on many, on stage many, many times. And I think about

    Quentin (12:54)
    Mm-hmm.

    Patrick Francey (13:11)
    We’re educating investors the same way. Like there’s a system, there’s a process. The how-to’s are really the easy part of it. And I think about this audience, and let’s say I’m talking to 500 people and we’re teaching and we’re doing all the coaching and all the stuff that we do. And I go, but why is it that only a small percentage of those people really take action and really do something with it? What’s the difference? Because everybody’s learning how.

    And then you start to understand a lot of it. I think mindset’s overused, but ultimately that’s what it is. It is our shift of how we view the world and why we would want to take it on. Because let’s face it, as you know, real estate is simple, but it’s not easy.

    Quentin (13:57)
    So well said. Thank you so much for everything you said. Thank you for so much for talking about the people that you interview on the Everyday Millionaire because mindset is something I talk about often here. Now, the people that I interview, goes from, it’s across the spectrum. It’s people that’s just starting up, some people that’s just ramping up to other ones that has done exit strategies for a hundred billion, right? I’m not a hundred billion, one billion. think that’s…

    the most I think I’ve heard, right? So I have people at different spectrums, but I’m always asking them about adversity. Like, how do you face adversity? What’s your mindset when you face adversity? What are these moments teaching you about yourself? Because no matter where you are on your journey, these are the different things that you’re gonna go through. And so I’m so glad you brought it up because I tried to reinforce it. sometimes, I haven’t interviewed somebody that gave me pushback.

    But I know some people think like, well, you know, they just starting off on their journey and they think that it’s going to get easier and it may,

    then also it may get harder, you know? And I love the fact your wife teach Brazilian because you’re going to need it on this journey. So I’m so glad you said it. I’m so glad because I try to follow, I try to treat everybody the same. Like there’s, there’s no big eyes, little use. Like we’re all just on this journey and I want to create a space.

    for people to naturally and integrally talk about their journey. Cause your journey is important. Somebody’s listening to what you’re going through and everybody needs to hear what you has to say. And somebody can, you know, get different pieces from it. So, man, I’m so glad you said it. So thank you so much.

    Patrick Francey (16:22)
    But it’s such an important part of the conversation. The technical how to’s are, I mean, they’re everywhere. You can get that from Chad GPT if you want, but you also have to have the attitude and the view of the world that says you can do this. You know, there’s you know, this many years in and as a, again, as a coach and as a podcaster and all the things that I’ve done in my life, you know, we talk about mindset too, is that we start to understand that there’s,

    What I’ve come to understand is that there’s iterations. So we go on this journey and we hear about personal development. know, there may be somebody’s using the term life coaching. know, they’re on the journey of personal development, self discovery, if you will. And then there’s professional development. How can I be a better leader? How can I be a better manager? How can I grow my business? But the real goal, I think that the most accomplished come to a place and this is where I’ve got to is and why I don’t use the term mindset as much.

    ⁓ in our world, although it’s important part, I don’t want to minimize it because I still use it. Actually, my wife and I do a podcast as well called Mindset Matters. It’s part of the Everyday Millionaire. But the point of it is that we come to a place where it’s about self-mastery. So mindset is external. How do you view what’s happening outside of you? How do you deal with the challenges outside of you? Self-mastery is more internal.

    Self-mastery is about understanding yourself so that you are actually can even shift your operating system, learn, grow those kinds of things. My wife and I launched a program not that long ago and I coined the phrase mind sway. You’ve heard of feng shui? Have you heard of feng shui? So feng shui, yeah, feng shui, right? It’s all about energy, it’s all about flow, it’s all about how your house isn’t cluttered and how you set your furniture. And I often joke with men, you may have not have hope.

    Quentin (18:04)
    Fungus away, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you. Yep, I got you.

    Patrick Francey (18:16)
    You may not have heard the term Feng Shui, but I’ll guarantee you your house has been Feng Shui’d. That’s just the way that it rolls, right? But I coined the phrase, mind shui, which is Feng Shui for the mind, which is clearing the clutter of the mind so that energy flows, so that creativity flows, so the thought processes that you have and the personal view of yourself flows.

    And so, Main Shui is also a way of being, it’s a way of thinking and it’s a way of understanding yourself. It’s a way of the self mastery, if you will, because really it’s always internal. And the most successful individuals that I know, and I’m not talking about, you know, there’s a virgin queue of success. And we all have a definition, hopefully you have some definition of how you measure your success and it’s different for everybody.

    I don’t look at success and I’ve certainly interviewed many, many hundred millionaires and beyond. But I look at that and I go, okay, well, financially, check. But when you kind of know a little bit more and you look behind the curtain, life’s a bit of a shit show. They’re dealing with a lot of stuff and divorce and dramas and all the rest of it. So to me, do I measure success that way? No, mean, ⁓ dollars and cents are a bit of your scorecard.

    you better be clear on how you define success, which means relationships are, I think, are an important part of anybody’s life. know, business is an important part of your life, how you are as a leader. So these are all things in the space called development. What does all this got to do with real estate? Well, it also is about how you approach your real estate journey and how you take it on. And when you have, and you start to engage in the thought process of you are the source of your success.

    not the real estate market, not the economy, then we start to just look at the world through a different set of eyes.

    Quentin (20:11)
    I mean, you see this big smile. The smile is because you’re literally doing my show for me. Like when I tell you, like these are the things that I talk about on a constant basis. ⁓ You’re just so eloquently saying it. I mean, I’m sitting here, I’m taking notes. I’m like, yes. And it just reinforces. And I’m glad people are watching this because if y’all follow me, you know he’s reinforcing so many different things that I talk about. Cause I, you know, I tell people when you know who you are, you know what to do.

    You know, just be 1 % better than you were yesterday. It’s just these little things like, if you are a business person, if you are an entrepreneur, one of the constant things in your business is you. You are the constant that’s in your business. So when you talk about self-mastery, I mean, sometimes you gotta learn to move yourself out of the way. Sometimes you gotta learn to partner up with somebody because you’ve been trying and you know that’s not your strength. But all of these come.

    If you don’t have self-mastery, none of that stuff comes. And so even the version of success, how that looks for you. so, I mean, you said so many things. ⁓ Me actually, yes, sir. No, no, please. No, no, please, sir.

    Patrick Francey (21:15)
    I’ll give you, sorry, go ahead.

    Just before I lose the thought, I ⁓ had a guest, I rarely ask my guests how they define success. Early on in my show years ago, I used to ask that question and it would stump people and I was always a little bit surprised by that. But I’ll give your listeners a definition for success that I really liked. it was just, I don’t remember the guest’s name, very accomplished.

    And I did, for some reason I said, how do you define success for you? And he said, how I define success, and he didn’t miss a beat, didn’t have to think about it. He says, when I open my eyes in the morning, I ask myself, am I living the vision for my life? And if the answer is yes, I’m successful.

    And if the vision includes a lot of money or a little money, if it means a big business or a little business or…

    He’s more about, I hanging out with my family? Am I spending time with my wife? Am I respected as a leader within my business? So he looks at, he has a vision and then he wakes up in the morning, he checks in. Am I living the vision? Because as he has learned, as I have learned, his life is short. And we can say, well, one day I’ll be happy. When this happens, I’ll be happy. He doesn’t look at it that way.

    He looks at it and says, I living the vision for my life if I’m not put in the correction? And then carry on. So it was just a really kind of cool way to define success. He didn’t put a number on it, nothing. He just said, am I living the vision? Guess the message there for anybody is what is the vision for your

    Quentin (22:52)
    And the money, the businesses, all these things are just tools for you to live your vision. Just a tool. And that tool can be replaced. You can be very proficient in a tool one day and put that tool down and come proficient in another tool. It’s possible. But just work the tool that you got. And these are just tools for you to live the vision that you have planned for your life. I absolutely love it. I do want to ask quickly about brain. What is the next goal?

    Patrick Francey (23:15)
    Mm-hmm.

    Quentin (23:18)
    for rain, what is the or or even some people don’t believe in gold. Maybe it’s just a standard. So what is the goal? The standard? What are you looking to solve a scale next with rain?

    Patrick Francey (23:25)
    know, RAINN has been a community for many, years. It’s just a subscription-based business, know, it’s inexpensive, 50 to a couple hundred bucks a month, you know, to be part of the RAINN community. But ultimately what we’re doing there is we’re teaching people how to invest in real estate the right way based on the economic fundamentals, not the emotion. So we always go back to a fundamental, which is invest based on data, not on emotion.

    Quentin (23:49)
    Is

    this the five points you’re about to give us? It was five points you said, was it five? Maybe I misheard. But I thought, okay, I’m sorry.

    Patrick Francey (23:55)
    No,

    The key points is to teach people how to invest in real estate based on the economic fundamentals, not the emotion. And so, you know, what I wanted to get back to on this is that when you look at real estate, when we look at the economic fundamentals, we say, well, where is real estate going? What do we need to know about that? And there’s what we call the real estate success formula, high level. What is the GDP growth of any given region?

    Okay, gross domestic product. In other words, what is the economic health of a region today and going forward? Is it looking up? Are we going to be growing as a region or are we staying flat or politically did somebody move in and we’re going to take a shot for the next few years? So we look at GDP. When we have positive gross domestic product, then we know what happens. have population growth. And the reason we have population growth is because we have job growth.

    and people move to where the jobs are. Now, people moving into a region, especially immigrants, they’re gonna come in and they’re not going to buy. They don’t have a credit rating. They probably don’t have the money. They may or may not know that they’re gonna have a job. And culturally, where do they wanna live? They don’t know. They wanna be able to live culturally within their hood, speak the language, eat the food, religious practices, whatever that might be. That takes a couple of years. So when we start to see

    gross domestic product is growing, it’s maybe above the average of the state or the country, whatever it might be, then we know we wanna see population growth for sure. And we wanna see that unemployment or employment is strong. Now those three basics are not all of it, but that’s three that you have to consider because we want people…

    that are coming there and are working. We want our tenants, if we’re an investor, we want our tenants to be working, that’s it. We also wanna have demand. And of course, when you have people moving into a region, there is demand for living accommodations and rental accommodations because they need a place to live while they get settled, while they find a job, while they get a credit rating, all of the things that go with it. So that’s kind of at the end of the day, we know that pattern. The opposite of that is true.

    You know, when you go upside down, you go into negative GDP, we start to see population lead. We see unemployment start to go up, which means we’re challenged because then vacancies go up and then rents come down. So there is a very clear formula to any given region and economic health. And so we’re always looking into the future. And so when we get into new areas, new cities that are expanding or ⁓ cities with a

    big vision because they’ve got a new ⁓ government, new mayor, whatever it might be, with big vision and they’re actually taking action. Those are great opportunities for us to lean into for future states.

    Quentin (26:58)
    I love it. I love it. I wish I had more time to talk to you, because I feel like there’s so many things we can talk about. So much business stuff we can talk about, life stuff we can talk about. Man, I could pick your brain as a husband and say, man, give me some advice when it comes to my wife or husband. I’m talking so many things, but I really appreciate you being here. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, Mr. Patrick, how can they reach out to you, sir?

    Patrick Francey (27:07)
    Yeah.

    Thank

    The simplest way, there’s two, you can info@reincanada, [email protected] is great, or [email protected]. Send an email, drop a note, follow me on ⁓ tedm.ca, T-E-D-M.ca, that takes it to the podcast. So I’m around, Google me, LinkedIn, Instagram, ⁓ I’m out there somewhere.

    Quentin (27:56)
    Absolutely. Well, listen, let me say three things to you. First, definitely thank you for your time. You could have been anywhere in the world, but you gave us your time. You know we can put a premium on our time. So I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you for being here. Secondly, thank you for your story, your narrative. I tell people all the time, I put a premium on stories. Stories have a way to plant a seed and we may never see

    the growth of that seed, but it’s still down in there and something comes along and water that seed. And then somebody just sprouts and spring forth and starts to grow. And you never know. If we follow the tea leaves, it can be linked directly back to the stories, the different things that we talked about. So thank you for your story. And lastly, I can’t say most importantly, but it means a lot. Thank you for your mindset.

    Thank you for the way you think. And I promise you, this is what I say all the time, Mr. I mean, it goes right along with so much that you said, but thank you for your mindset because you brought that mindset to this platform. And I really greatly appreciate that. So thank you for coming through, Mr. Patrick. I appreciate you, sir.

    Patrick Francey (29:10)
    Well, thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. you know, interesting analogy of planting the seed, you know, the nature of what I’ve done for so many years and who I am as a man, as an individual. I love planting those seeds. And if I ever get the opportunity to watch how that unfolds, it’s always just a bonus.

    Quentin (29:27)
    Yeah, me and my, have a group of just accountability brothers that, you know, we just do life together. We have a saying where you say some plant, some water, but then the increase is out of our hands. So, I mean, if I’m a say this style, I really say, and hopefully it’s not offensive, but we say some plant, some water, but God gives the increase is out of our hands. And so I just thank you for planting. I thank you for watering and then increase. It would be nice if we seen it, but sometimes we can’t see it. And I’m okay.

    Patrick Francey (29:49)
    Beautiful.

    We just don’t.

    Quentin (29:57)
    Come on, write me that. Absolutely.

    Patrick Francey (29:57)
    Yeah. We just have to have faith. Yeah.

    Quentin (30:00)
    Listen, y’all heard Mr. Patrick. Check the show notes. Everything he said is in our show notes. So please get in contact with him. Please go check out the Everyday Millionaire. Please. But definitely make sure you are subscribed here, because I keep promising you we’re going to bring up incredible people just like Mr. Patrick. So sir, thank you again. And everyone else, listen, y’all have a fantastic day.

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