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Show Summary
In this conversation, John Harcar interviews Ron Glasgow, a financial advisor specializing in alternative investments. They discuss the importance of incorporating alternative investments into portfolios for true diversification, Ron’s personal journey from a steel mill town to becoming a financial expert, and the resilience required to navigate life’s challenges. Ron emphasizes the significance of real estate in alternative investments and shares insights on building relationships in the financial industry. The conversation concludes with Ron providing his contact information for those interested in learning more about alternative investments.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Ron Glasgow (00:00)
Yeah, so man, as simple as it sounds, and this has come up a lot lately, you know, it’s been a rough year. I lost my mom fairly unexpectedly in June. A few weeks after that, I lost my sister completely unexpectedly. And so…You know when life deals that with you, you’ve only got two choices. can, we call the Marines, call it Mike and Ike it or you quit. And that’s it. Those are your choices. And the thing the Marines taught me was how to Mike and Ike it. I know that sounds silly. It’s like those little candies, Mike and Ike. That’s what we call it. Sometimes in life, the only thing you can do is put one foot in front of the other. And man, that’s all that matters. You don’t have to do anything heroic. Just keep moving forward. And if you keep moving forward, good things will happen.
John Harcar (02:17)
All right, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar. And we’re here today with Ron Glasgow with Glasgow, Glasgow Investments, is that correct? Hey, there we go, Glasgow Investment Solutions. And today we’re gonna really talk with him about how to add alternative investments into your portfolio. I think with the way the market’s been, the way our economy, I think that’s a good way to grow and diversify your portfolio.Ron Glasgow (02:27)
Glasgow Investment Solutions. Be sure Glasgow Investments gets it done.John Harcar (02:44)
I’ll let the experts speak on it. So we’re on, welcome to the show.Ron Glasgow (02:48)
Thank very much. Thanks for having me. appreciate the time.John Harcar (02:50)
Yeah, and I look forward to this conversation because this isn’t something that’s talked about a lot. We are starting to hear more within our community about getting some alternative stuff, but why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about you and then we’ll get into why people need to make alternatives.Ron Glasgow (03:08)
Yeah, sure. So I’ll try to give you the quicker version of my background. grew up at a Midwest kid. I grew up at a town called Granite City, Illinois, about seven miles from downtown St. Louis. Granite City is a steel mill town. If you’ve ever been to a steel mill town, you can understand why I joined the Marine Corps right out of high school.John Harcar (03:22)
I never have whywhy is that what’s what’s what is it about?
Ron Glasgow (03:25)
It’s soit’s funny we had a steel mill on one end of town and oil refinery on the other So I say I started smoking so I could breathe through a filter every once in a while It’s just your air quality was was not the best and You know, you just wanted to get out of there if you could and look, it’s my hometown. I love the people there They’re great, but it is a bit smuggy So I joined the Marine Corps, know, I was right after Gulf one I did not deploy so all the credit to the guys that went down range to the only ones that really matter in my opinion all I did was
John Harcar (03:36)
Got it.Ron Glasgow (03:52)
keepthe seat warm. But the Marine Corps was the thing I’m the most proud of in my life. That said, it’s not the highlight. I mean, you just can’t have a highlight be when you’re 21 years old. So when I was in was right during the Clinton years, they’re doing a lot of drawdown. So I got out, went to college, majored in finance and international business, ended up getting a job as a financial advisor in San Diego. I was a fairly fast starter, got promoted to the La Jolla office and ultimately went out on my own. And, you know, I opened Granite Wealth and Wealth Management.
named after my hometown of Granite City, show a little respect. And I thought I’d be a financial advisor forever. I got my CFP, I have a master’s in tax and financial planning. I thought this was my career path. And as we all know, life will throw you curveballs. And my dad was diagnosed with lymphoma and lung cancer at the same time. I ended up selling my practice, moved back home. The old man was a fighter. He had a 10 % chance to live and he beat them both. And ⁓ I got five extra years with my dad that I wouldn’t trade for anything. And I don’t think anybody would, nobody would.
John Harcar (04:22)
There you go.Awesome. ⁓
Ron Glasgow (05:37)
the same time, this was, puts you in a professional dilemma because I needed a job. mean, I’d only been a financial advisor and a machine cutter. That’s the only thing I knew in life. And ⁓ I knew I probably wasn’t going to be in St. Louis forever. So I ended up stumbling in with one of the best alternative investment companies out there. They no longer distribute in the financial advisor markets, but they were just terrific. They’re one of the pioneers of alternative investments, one of the pioneers of real estate alternative investments. And that’s where I learned real estate and alternatives.John Harcar (05:44)
All right.Ron Glasgow (06:06)
That career served me well. I did it for 13 years and then I ultimately decided to hang in my shingle for the second time. This time I actually used my name, Glasgow, and opened Glasgow Investment Solutions in January. And the reason you would come to me is because you’re just not getting diversification if you don’t have alternative or private investments in your portfolio. You’re just not. You have to incorporate those in some way to have true diversification.John Harcar (06:29)
Got it. I love the story. I see why you got out of the area you got out of. San Diego I love. I went to San Diego State. ⁓ nice. You’re awesome. ⁓ Why finance? I mean, were you always a numbers guy? is that something that attracted you? Did you have like a ⁓ huge goal in mind? Like I want to own my own financial company or what kept you that lane?Ron Glasgow (06:33)
heheI’m gonna ask tech 2, so did I, that’s where I my MBA.
you
Man, so when you grow up kind of poor, you want to make money. So I’m not going to lie. That’s a piece of it. You know, I never went without, but you know, I know what government cheese tastes like too. So you want to make sure you never go back to that. And, ⁓ you know, it’s, I’ve always geeked out on the investments. It’s a really weird thing. go, I guess some people like chess, you know, some people like woodworking. Some people, you know, like to work on cardigans. I could sit and read about investments forever. I always have been that way. ⁓ ironically, when you get a degree in finance, I had no idea.
John Harcar (06:58)
Yep.Mm-hmm.
Ron Glasgow (07:19)
what jobs were available. I ended up leaving my resume on a booth at a job fair. The guy called me, I interviewed, and turns out I got an internship with a major broker dealer or investment company. And I was a municipal bond trader’s liaison. So the beauty bond side of it I loved, but I was literally on a trading desk for 10 hours a day with two phones. And if you can probably tell just from knowing me the last few minutes, my ADD is not going to allow for that. And there’s no way I’m sitting at a desk for 10 hours.John Harcar (07:40)
Mm-hmm.Right.
Ron Glasgow (07:47)
a day. So very sooninto that internship, I realized the world of opportunities were out there and thought I’d be a good financial advisor. Applied for that company to Crosstown Rival. The Crosstown Rival hired me and they were expanding, so I made a beeline straight back to San Diego and started my career there.
John Harcar (08:03)
Got it. You’ve been up and down. You’ve been through a lot, it sounds like, right? And thank you again for your service, condolences for your father. What are some of the things that, and we’re gonna talk about that alternative investment part here in a second, but through all this time, like what are some of the things for you that kind of kept you going, kept you pushing? Like sometimes it might be a certain mindset, a process, a ritual that you do, something like that.Ron Glasgow (08:10)
Ciao.Yeah, so man, as simple as it sounds, and this has come up a lot lately, you know, it’s been a rough year. I lost my mom fairly unexpectedly in June. A few weeks after that, I lost my sister completely unexpectedly. And so…
You know when life deals that with you, you’ve only got two choices. can, we call the Marines, call it Mike and Ike it or you quit. And that’s it. Those are your choices. And the thing the Marines taught me was how to Mike and Ike it. I know that sounds silly. It’s like those little candies, Mike and Ike. That’s what we call it. Sometimes in life, the only thing you can do is put one foot in front of the other. And man, that’s all that matters. You don’t have to do anything heroic. Just keep moving forward. And if you keep moving forward, good things will happen.
And the only good thing about our
is if you get through them, you’re so much stronger and you know exactly who’s on your team. Like I know who’s on my team right now. I know who’s gonna ride or die with me no matter what. And man, I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have the friends and family that I do.
John Harcar (09:20)
Yeah. And I like to touch on that when I talk with folks because I think it’s extremely important. Most people on, you know, in our social media world only see all the glory, all the glitz, all the glam, all the end product, but they don’t see these ups and downs, the peaks and valleys, the stresses and all that stuff. So you get into, you start finding out about real estate and alternative investments. Okay. So what interests you about having that real estate piece of that?Ron Glasgow (10:20)
Yeah, so the real estate opens up. The real estate is one thing that opens up everything and all the original alternatives are real estate. It comes back to there were four companies that launched the four non-traded REITs. Some of them started as limited partnerships. But man, talk about opening up the world because people don’t really realize this. I’m actually working on a marketing piece now I’ve been a little lazy on. But when you look at all the investments, the traditional traded investments, they all go back to stocks and bonds. Almost every single one. Maybe some commodities if you’re doing that. But I mean, people haveJohn Harcar (10:28)
Mm-hmm.Ron Glasgow (10:49)
havemutual funds, ETFs, close-in funds, SMAs. You have all of these boxes. And that’s all those are, boxes. The whole stocks are bonds. Well, man, that’s a problem.
there are 40 % less publicly traded companies today than there were 30 years ago. So your honey ground is about half. 87 % of companies that make over $100 million in revenue are private. So now your honey ground’s been reduced by half and your game is a lot smaller than it used to be. So you’re just not going to get the same volume for it. On top of that, you have seven stocks that on any given day can account for more than a third of the total stock market’s value. I mean, even the Wilshire 5000 is 3,400 stocks to put in perspective.
They don’t even have 5,000 of them anymore. if you’re just thinking that that’s going to give you the same diversification it did the 90s, you’re sadly mistaken. Companies are not going public very often and they’re trying to stay private as long as possible. So you’ve got to venture into those private markets. There’s a lot of ways to do that. I personally love real estate and credit, especially real estate. And the reason is real estate’s a little bit more forgiving. If you buy into a real estate investments, unless there’s some kind of Chernobyl, there’s almost all
Always a value there because you have
John Harcar (11:58)
Sure.Ron Glasgow (11:59)
an actual tangible object. Now I’ve seen some things that really didn’t work out, which are very one in a million, but real estate is a great way to diversify. Then you have credit as well. Credit comes in all forms. Clarellized loan obligations, B loans, Vesity loans, all these things, but it’s just different ways to borrow money outside of bonds, which is just a loanership investment made by a company. You’re just borrowing in a different way. On top of that, there are oil and gas programs, which frankly I bring in a team for that.help me because especially here in Texas you got some pretty knowledgeable people. I want to make sure I’m not slipping up so we do oil and gas. And man, you can even get into, you can buy whiskey or wine or all these crazy exotic things that I avoid, but the world of alternatives is fascinating. I do try to stick to the ones that are the most prudent for everyday investors though.
John Harcar (12:43)
What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes that investors or they make when they try to get into alternatives on their own?Ron Glasgow (12:50)
Yeah, they fall. The brochure. Don’t read the brochure. The brochure is beautiful, right? The brochure has the big pretty pictures. Throw the brochure away. You’ve got to read that PPM or the perspectives, but it’s the PPM. That 400 page document, this horrific that even as much as I love investments, I hate to read. You’ve got to read that because you’ve got to understand exactly what you’re investing into. And the other thing is you’ve got to trust but verify a great tenured company or sponsor for whatever reason we call sponsors.a great sponsor could have a bad deal, okay? And you’ve got to be able to try to see that and step over it. Conversely, you could have a bad sponsor or an untested, a new sponsor, they could have a terrific deal. And I’m still gonna step over that one. If you wanna buy that one on your own, okay, that’s your risk profile, I’m not. Because I wanna make sure somebody’s there to answer the phone in five or six years if something goes south.
John Harcar (13:39)
All right, got it. So someone comes to you and they want to get into alternatives, right? Like what are some of the first steps? know, bring this or let’s sit down and talk about your plan or goal for this or how does that all play out?Ron Glasgow (13:53)
Yeah, so this is one thing where I try to be different. I am a certified financial planner. So planning is in my DNA. That really should start it. So when someone says, I just want to get alternatives, my immediate question is going to be, why do you want to be an alternative? What do you want that investment to do for you? I prefer to take it that way. However,Look, not everybody’s willing to do that. You don’t know me from Adam Maybe you maybe you’re very very astute and you’re just coming to me saying look Ron I know what the hell I’m doing. I just need to help some help getting started alternatives. Will you help me with that? I’m gonna say okay I prefer to do the planning side of it
But it’s your money. I’m here to serve at your convenience and the promise I’ll make you is I’m never going to chisel you. I hate chiselers that keep trying and chiseling and chiseling over time. I hate that. I’m never going to do that to you. So if you just want me to help you get started, I would say, do you have a preference? Real estate, credit, oil and gas, something else? If so, then we’ll start there and just go down the path. And it’ll be largely educational at first. If I have something that you want to buy, I hope you do. If you just take that knowledge and go somewhere else, well, that’s
my cost of doing business. hope you remember me and send me a referral down the road.
John Harcar (15:42)
Right. How are you generating your business? Is it primarily referrals? it, are you going out and actively marketing for?Ron Glasgow (15:46)
So it’s a mix.know, it’s funny and we talked about this a little before the podcast.
Getting good people on board is a little tougher in 2025 than it was the last time I did this. It really is. So I thought when I started, I have a very big network here in Texas. A lot of it’s veteran based and I never prospect veterans. I do the planning forum within Reason for Free, but I won’t prospect them, but they’re a great network to have. So I thought I would rely on my network, do client events, and then hire somebody to that internet stuff. And that’s how I looked at it. Like I didn’t know SEO meant search engine optimization six months ago. I had no clue.
John Harcar (15:54)
Mm-hmm.Ron Glasgow (16:19)
Because the last time I was a financial advisor the only social media was myspace, right? It in private equity is private. We don’t have it So I figured I could hire someone to do that and hiring someone was an absolute disaster So I realized that internet stuff really needs to be the driver So now you know, I have a podcast channel so you find Ron Glasgow. I’m starting out a podcast channel a YouTube channel I just did my first new spot on ticker news Hopefully I get picked up by MSNBCJohn Harcar (16:24)
Right, yeah, yeah, back then.Ron Glasgow (16:47)
I should be on News Nation this week. So I’m just trying to get out there any way I can to let you know this is what I do. And look, I’m not for everybody. ⁓ I’m looking for a couple dozen clients that see the world the way I do, that just say, I think I can enhance my portfolio. And by the way, that’s what it’s about, enhancement, not just replacement. And hopefully share the same values. Then hopefully you give me a call and we can work together. If not, I understand. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.John Harcar (17:11)
Is real estate your favorite alternative or do you have a is it okay?Ron Glasgow (17:14)
It is by far real estate.I really like credit too, but I’ll say it credits been like this kind of hot button thing. The thing you got to remember with alternatives, there are only so many good deals out there. mean, every one of us could go buy Apple stock if we want and Apple stocks are great stock. There’s only so many good real estate sales and only so many good credit deals. So when something gets overheated, you really need to maybe pump the brakes, take a little extra time to do your due diligence on it because people are going after those and prices do get bid up to
John Harcar (17:21)
Mm-hmm.Ron Glasgow (17:43)
levels at times. You got to be cognizant of that.John Harcar (17:44)
Yeah.Well, sounds like, I mean, it sounds like your business is running great. know, what’s been kind of the key to keeping that machine running smoothly? Or has it been running smoothly? Is that the real question?
Ron Glasgow (17:54)
Yeah, no, no, you know, I Youknow overall yes, it’s been smoothly. Um caffeine is a big component of that, you know You’re not getting a lot of sleep. Um, I would love to have somebody to bring on that I knew I could trust right away I will get to that eventually but um
John Harcar (18:01)
Yeah.Ron Glasgow (18:11)
Really the thing was just figuring out exactly where I wanted to go and then carving out that time to make sure it runs smoothly. It’s all about developing a process.You can never develop them and let the business run you forever or you can take that extra time to develop the processes and it’s hard like when you know I can just do this and get it off my desk, but you take the extra two hours to make a process out of it. That’s hard at times, but that’s all about a year in that’s all starting to come together and now you know I actually went away with my wife for a birthday for the weekend. You know that’s we haven’t done anything like that in a while. So so it’s starting to come together and I can breathe a little bit.
John Harcar (18:41)
Yeah. Right.And I agree 100 % with the process part. So many entrepreneurs say, hey, I got it. It’s all up here. Well, that’s great and all. But what happens if something happens to you? I give a nugget saying, hey, when you’re doing anything on your computer, just get Loom. Record it. Stick it in a chat or GPT. It’ll pop out the, it is done. So AI, yeah.
Ron Glasgow (19:01)
Yeah.Yeah, AI is a godsend. AI has helped tremendously. thank you. Chad, GPT,
and Grok.
John Harcar (19:12)
So I know a lot of people listening here either earlier in the journey or maybe looking to level up their business. And I think they’d benefit from hearing this. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what has been the biggest difference for you?Ron Glasgow (19:26)
Man, as simple as it sounds, it’s the way I start my due diligence too. You got to care. People know if you care. And so when I start looking at a company I want to work with, I prefer the smaller ones that are still owned by a couple individuals, but that’s not realistic. I mean, there are huge great companies out there where then you try to get to know the key executives.But the only thing I’m looking for first, do you care? Are you trying to make a good investment that clients will make money with? Are you just trying to make money? And there’s a lot of people in this business just trying to make money. If that’s all you care about, I don’t care how smart you are or how good your idea is, I’m probably going to step over it. Because when something goes wrong and something always goes wrong, you’re not going to be there to pick up the phone when I need you. And I try to bring that to my clients, you know, do you care? I mean, I care about you and I care about my revenue and my name and all that.
Of course I do immensely, but I really want the things that I recommend to enhance your life and help you to live a better life. Because man, it’s hard out there. mean, every day we’re getting more expensive. Every day, no matter, you have this term, high net worth. And high net worth isn’t a super rich person anymore. High net worth is somebody that’s just scraping by sometimes if you’ve got four or five kids.
John Harcar (20:29)
Mm-mm.Yeah,
yeah, that’s 100%. And I love your servant heart, that’s true. I think that is the difference, especially in the real estate world, right? There’s a lot of people out there just looking for the money, not caring about the person that they’re dealing with. Before we wrap up here, if someone wanted to get in touch with you, they wanted to talk a little bit more about alternative investments, they wanted just to kind of pick your brain on some things, what is the best way for them to reach out?
Ron Glasgow (20:55)
Sure, so glasgowinvestments.com is my website or just ron @ glasgowinvestments.com. That’s my email or 866-DFW-ALTS if you can remember that. So I was lucky enough to get that phone number.John Harcar (21:08)
Awesome. Well, you know what, Ron? I appreciate you coming out here. I appreciate your story, your perspective. And I think our listeners got a lot out of what you talked about. Guys, I hope you took some value from this. Ron, I appreciate your time again. Thank you so much. And guys, we’ll see you on the next one. Cheers.Ron Glasgow (21:23)
Thank youvery much. it.
