Mae Paredes

For me, success is when I help someone come out from a really bad situation and they're able to move forward. I can't put a price on that. When I was able to pull a client out of foreclosure, even though my broker told me not to touch that deal because there were too many hairs on it, and I got her out of there - she became a close friend. That's for me, that's an icing. That's what gets me up in the morning. It pulls in all the experience that I've had, from being an investment banker to real estate, and seeing the bloodbath in 2008, and now being in underwriting - how do I put all of that together and come out of it when everyone's already throwing in the towel and saying this can't work? Sometimes I have to pull in other people to try to make it work, but when you have like-minded people that are trying to solve a problem and they come in and be a part of it, I can't put a pricing on that.

Find a mentor. Because without it, it takes longer. Education, you can't put a price on it. It teaches the basics, but it opens up your world to something that - I can't say that you need a master's degree necessarily, but I think if you can at least educate yourself on the basics, at least the fundamentals of finance, have an understanding of it. There's a lot of business owners I'm coming across that are good at what they do, but they don't know how to scale, or their books are a mess. They're trying to exit or have an exit strategy. Find a mentor or an exit strategy, and have a basic understanding. If you don't really care about your financials, at least align yourself with someone that will help you not just save money on taxes, but help you to grow and have an exit.

I can't stress the mentor enough. And find your purpose. Money can't be it. Money runs away from you, actually. You really have to love what you're doing to be successful. It can't be transactional. You have to have a purpose. What's your purpose? I look at the industry I was in, right? Investment banking, commercial real estate, commercial banking - that's a male-dominated field. I'm a minority, a female that came from the Philippines, graduated from BYU and have an MBA. Don't tell me what I can and can't do.

Not enough time. As I age, I used to want to do so much, but there's very little time. I want to pass my knowledge, my information, my experience to however many I can, and hopefully they make something out of it. I'm seeing some distressed properties in the market now. There's a lot of investors that have gotten themselves stuck at rates sitting at 3%, 4%, and trying to get back in, and they can't refinance the properties. We were expecting a lot of distressed properties to hit the market. What we're trying to do is, some of them, if we can sell them off-market and we form syndications, if we need other investors to try to save it, because it's not good for the community, it's not good for the market overall.

Relationship. I value relationship more than a transaction. What can I contribute? How can I make it better? Can I make it better? If not, who can I align this person with so we can make it better for that person? You have to be a purpose-driven individual, at least in my opinion. It can't be - or everything else is transactional and then very surface level. Most of my questions to the clients that I come up with is, what gets you up in the morning, and what keeps you up at night? Because then, the conversations are deeper, and having an understanding, how do I align with that client's needs, and can I make a contribution, or maybe it's not a fit, right? Do I refer this client to someone that can better suit, better serve him?