Outrunning Failures
Outrunning Failures: Your guide through the highs and lows of commercial real estate investing.
Join us as we delve into real stories of setbacks turned stepping stones, sharing invaluable lessons and strategies to navigate the market's unpredictability and turn failures into the foundation of your success.
Outrunning Failures
From Healthcare to Real Estate Investing with Christina Stevens
Today’s guest is Christina Stevens, CRNA, a Healthcare/Epic/Business Consultant, Transformation Coach and Corporate Housing Expert.
Christina shares with us her journey from Healthcare to Real Estate investing and the best advice from lessons learned!
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Creator/Main Host: Vish Muni
Show Advisor/Editing: DBT Marketing
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Welcome to another episode of Outrunning Failures. Today we have a fantastic guest, Christina Stevens. She has a, very exciting background. she used to be a full time medical entrepreneur and now she's a real estate entrepreneur. And let me not speak everything about her and let me welcome Christina. And to tell Christina, can you please tell us a little more about, a little more background about what you did before real estate, how you got into real estate and why real estate.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, absolutely. Hi. Thanks Vish. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me onto your podcast. And yeah, it has been a really fun and interesting journey. I've been a nurse for just shy of 20 years. Nurse, anesthetist, doing anesthesia for 11 of those. And how I got into real estate is I took a leadership role in healthcare and was working a lot of hours and got a little burnt out and thought what would I want to do with my time if it wasn't healthcare? I've been a nurse for you know, two decades, so what would my life look like without health care and what would I do? And I had another anesthesia friend who was buying duplexes and laundromats and I didn't fully understand why. So I just kind of watched his journey a little. Then he brought up rich dad, poor dad, and January of 2021. Steph, and I, my wife, we both listened to the book and it essentially changed our entire trajectory of what we're doing with our time, what we're doing with our money and how we want to spend the rest of our life. So we within about nine months of self educating and networking and going to conferences and that we bought two houses within 30 days of each other. One was a full gut rehab, one was turnkey. Grateful for that turnkey property because we poured so much of our life and time into that, brrrr. Or buy rehab, rent, refinance, repeat for brrrr. And then from there we thought okay, what do we want to do with these houses? And I had travel nursed for three years and I had the opportunity to take what I learned from that and having furnished housing when I was moving across the country, and put it into our business. So now we own a corporate housing business. And we went from, we scaled it this year over 4x. We went from two properties to nine properties in nine months. And yeah, so we're in the corporate rental, midterm rental space. And in addition to that we're in Multifamily, syndication, and then we'll talk about other asset classes as we go.
>> Vish:Well, that is fantastic and it's really impressive. Christina, how far have you traveled from being a, traveling nurse and being a nurse and then now with full time into real estate now, do you still practice as a nurse or are you taking a break from that?
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, so as of January of this year, I went full time real estate investing. that's how I was able to have the energy and time to travel. We live in Chicago, our business is in metro Detroit. So yeah, I have not been in the anesthesia or healthcare space since last year. And I'm not saying I won't ever give anesthesia again. it's definitely still on the cards. I'm still very credentialed at some places. But I'm very excited to be a full time real estate investor, you know.
>> Vish:Well, that is fantastic. So how does it feel to be a full time real estate investor? Because we are all so passionate about real estate and we wouldn't know when the time starts and when to stop. And we stop when we feel like stopping but we, we continue to work because there's no W2, there's no clock in, clock out. Yeah. And so that being said, you were so structured being a nurse for 20 years and now being a full time real estate. And at one point you also mentioned that you did the birth method. That's why rehab, refinance, repeat. And so tell us a little more about that.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, it is interesting going from a very structured nurses mostly work shift, work 7 to 3, 3 to 11, 11 to 7, 7 to 7, things like that. in anesthesia it was no different. for the most part you work the same time type of shifts. And I, will say going from healthcare to entrepreneurship, there's a lot of unlearning and it, I think just part of my scale or things that have kind of held me back in real estate investing is the unlearning process. You have to essentially strive for perfection in healthcare. Right. Especially in anesthesia. If I don't do everything exactly how I should, somebody's life might be at risk. So having to go and realize that in business and entrepreneurship that sometimes you fail forward. There's a lot of lessons learned that it's okay to make some mistakes in the entrepreneur space. still try not to, of course, but it's definitely been a learning curve just in that space and getting in the mindset that it's okay to fail forward.
>> Vish:that's pretty interesting because every day and every call and every project is not the same because, being an entrepreneur, it's like a weather reporter. I mean, those are the only people whose predictions can go completely wrong and still get to keep the job. Right.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, they still get a paycheck.
>> Vish:Yeah. And we as entrepreneurs and we want the project to go in a certain way, but, most of the time it never goes because it's, ah, there are always surprises at every corner and some things would go wrong as much as you don't want them to. That being said, can you share one experience, from all your investments and projects and real estate, which has, changed the way you invest and change the way you mitigate your risk? Just one.
>> Christina Stevens:Just one. Oh, man. So one of the things that I said before we started this podcast was in real estate that so many of the people on social media just talk about all their successes. And I'm so grateful that Vish has started this podcast to talk about things that didn't go as planned and how you dealt with it, how you mitigated the risk and, or how you cleaned it up. And, so if I had to only pick one Vish, which is a little bit difficult because there's things. And not all of it was complete failures. It was just oversight or hiring bad property managers. That's a big one. But I'm not going to talk about it today. so when I think about our biggest learning curve and what we would do so completely differently now in our real estate journey, a real estate investing journey was the house that we bought as a gut rehab Arbor property. we thought we're going to save so much money by doing all the work ourselves. We're going to learn all this stuff. We're smart women. Like, we got this. We can go in and demo like an expert. You know, somebody that actually knows what they're doing can demo in a day or, you know, a couple days. It took us five weeks to demo. We, didn't even have a sledgehammer. When we started our demo. We took apart an entire kitchen with a luxury vinyl plank mallet. So, if you're in the space or have ever renovated and you know what that little tiny mallet did? It took an entire spec house kitchen from the 1950s completely apart. But it took us weeks to do because we were just not prepared with the right equipment. we laid all the floor in the property. We did more work than we should Have. And when I really think about what we could have done if we just hired the who's. Right, the who, not how way of life or the experts, that probably our house would have been done in three or four months. And because we were doing it on nights and weekends after our day jobs, it took us 11 months. So again, if I had the opportunity to go back in time or do it again knowing all of this, that I would hire all of it out, I would check in, right, show up, make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, ask for pictures every day, make sure we have good general contractors, subcontractors. But, we got a little bit burnt out from that because we were just spending every single free second that we had over there doing the work. So that was definitely, I would say, our biggest failing, forward at this point.
>> Vish:Well, that's what I feel is you got to, we got to fail fast. And which looks like you did that. It's better than being in a real estate as an investor, as an entrepreneur for 20 years and then trying to do fix everything on your own. But in this case you quickly figured out, well, I think I did that and that was a mistake. Now you learn from it. Yeah, your time is more important now. Your time. Yeah, you need to, you need that. Whatever little rest you get, you need to, you need that time. Time away from work. And and So how did you learn how to rehab all this? YouTube University or the.
>> Christina Stevens:Absolutely, YouTube M University is the best university there is. yeah, we learned, Steph and me a little bit. But 95% of our house that we lived in, our primary residence, we did luxury vinyl plank the entire second floor. So we had already tested our hand at laying floor. So that's why we had the energy and I'm not gonna say expertise, but slight knowledge about how to do that. So we did lay 1,000 square feet of floor in that house. and then basic electrical. We just literally read the instructions on changing outlets, changing switches, plugs, all of that, plumbing we pretty much left to the experts. We had to get a new gas line. We weren't going to mess with gas, you know, things like that. But yeah, we did a decent amount of basic electrical. I will tell you, the house was wired so interestingly that I took the role of trying to figure out what wires go where. Even though they weren't colored appropriately for some of them. We had to swap some out. And there was a time where the hall light switch would turn on one bedroom, another bedroom would turn on the other bedroom. It was like this game of guess who. Of like how am I going to do this? I probably mess with those wires for a week, when probably I just would have hired an electrician and he would have had it done in an hour, you know. but yeah, we just decided we weren't going to take no for an answer and went for it. And I'm really proud of the work that we did and I'm grateful to also know what things cost because then if we were to ever rehab another property, we have by just doing one property, so much more knowledge than if we hadn't done it. So I guess that's the silver lining of the fail forward on our first property.
>> Vish:That's a big learning experience. At least now you know the GCs, you know what GCs are talking and how much they're charging. They're not going to take you for a ride.
>> Christina Stevens:Sure. Yeah.
>> Vish:And you know how much it's going to cost to rehab a property at least may not be to the last penny, but at least overall, at least you're more, far more acute than anybody, a lot of people. So that is good. So with real estate, being a full time real estate investor now, do you have any specific asset, class in mind? I was I could gather certain things from after knowing you and after met you and a few times that you are, you are also looking for creative financing most of the time and then you have short term rentals and then you also work in multifamily syndications and you also raise capital and you're very pretty much into fitness and you also love traveling now you have so many things going on. So which asset class do you prefer and why?
>> Christina Stevens:So the asset class that I continue to come back to and that I spent a lot of last year focused on is actually self storage. So one of the things about scaling our midterm rental business I had the mindset of I'm good at it, we've already done it successfully. So I'm just going to take my proof of concept and run with it. And that can be my active income while I'm not doing any anesthesia or healthcare or anything. all of last year I was working with a partner specifically on underwriting and putting offers on storage facilities. we got one very close we got under contract and one in Michigan, which I was excited about, that's home for me. And there ended up being A legal settlement. And because it was my first one and I have this low risk tolerance or risk adversity on something I'm doing for the first time, again, unlearning that perfectionism of healthcare. it was a little bit too risky for me and so I was able to pass that one off to a friend of mine who owns I think 13 storage facilities now. so I'm very grateful that when I brought it up to him, he was like, oh, there's legal settlement. What is it? And I told him what it is and he was like, oh, that's it. And like, this is how as you grow as a real estate investor, your risk tolerance goes up. I'm just not there yet. but yeah, I, have gotten to the space where I want to buy something that is a business and real estate. And so self storage is in my wheelhouse. I've also been looking at two laundromats in Michigan. partially because it helps. It's a solution for my business. We do a lot of laundry, a lot of sheets and blankets, towels, rugs. so if I can kind of vertically integrate a laundromat, as well as market to other midterm short term rental operators locally, that we can do wash, dry, fold, pickup, delivery. so yeah, my asset class, current, state outside of midterms has been something that has a business and real estate attached to it. So storage and laundromats.
>> Vish:Well that's fantastic. I'm glad you picked one asset class and while you're working on the others now, you also mentioned at some point that you have a partner who helps you. It's not just you working on the real estate part of it. Now how did you find your partner and what role does your partner play in your real estate investing?
>> Christina Stevens:You're talking about for self storage?
>> Vish:Yeah, in your real estate investing on a day to day basis. Because real estate, you quickly realize it is not a one man show. I mean you can't do it all by yourself. When you all did the complete rehab, you figured out it's a, you need to hire right professionals and you need to have a right team. But you had a partner, Stephen, in the whole process, in the mix while you are rehabbing the thing. And then is Steph your partner in real estate business? And what do you think? How did you find this partner for business from the, for the business point of view? Because I work on my own most of the time. Yeah, I have partners from. I find partners at the mastermind groups. And how did you find your partner for real estate? And what role does your partner play?
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, absolutely. So Steph has, been and is 5050 partner with me in all of our corporate housing business. but she actually is working on her own journal planner business right now. So, ah, it's all me because I went full time real estate, all of our midterms, currently all of our corporate rentals. I'm handling all the hospitality communication. We do have a boots on the ground team. So we have a property manager, handyman and a cleaner. I also hired a virtual assistant to help with some of my social media management. and so I do have a really fantastic team, that aren't partners, you know, equity partners or anything like that, but they do work, help move the needle and it gives me the opportunity to have an out of state business and have it run really successfully. as far as storage goes, I had a partner, he's also working on owning and operating a virtual assistant business right now. So he kind of stepped away from storage. But the two of us actually hired a virtual assistant and then would do spot checks for skip tracing and things like that. And our virtual assistant learned how to do back of envelope underwriting, would vet our deals, would go in and do heat maps for us for storage. So without that with everything else I, was running at or doing last year, I was still working full time. it would have been really, really stressful and hard to be able to get as much of what we got done done. And I do agree that partnerships through masterminds and that's how I met Demonte, my self storage partner was through a self storage mastermind. are great because you already know that you're like minded by meeting at a mastermind and then you have the opportunity to just see how people work with other people and operate when a question is asked what they say or how they think. And Dimonte was an amazing integrator. he's a visionary too, but I definitely a little more visionary. So he did a lot of the back end, all the spirit spreadsheets, things like that. And it was a great partnership. And I do think that it's important to not always feel like you're on an island or you know, go it alone.
>> Vish:Well, I'm pretty much with you on that because I started real estate by investing in duplexes. And me and my wife started a company called Duplexaholics I love that. And most of the lenders would ask me three times, are you sure that is the name of your company? Are you sure that is the name of your company? And then because that was pretty close to alcoholics or something like that.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Vish:Yes, that is pretty much, the name. Because I had to show them the legal documents and I also told them how we came up with the name Duplexaholics. We still have that company after 15 years. Wow. And because me and my wife want to buy one duplex a year as long as possible.
>> Christina Stevens:Okay.
>> Vish:It's a pretty simple, goal to buy one duplex a year. I mean it went fine for the first five years, six years. But then I started running into trouble in terms of dealing with the property managers and lenders and maxing out all my credit cards. And I didn't understand all these things because I was just going through the school of hard knocks.
>> Christina Stevens:Our next.
>> Vish:Yeah. So. And only then I had to look in the other direction. And so who are these people buying this, multi million dollar apartment deals. And yeah. How are they buying it in the first place?
>> Christina Stevens:Right, right.
>> Vish:so, so that was a game changer for me. That was a game changer. So. And that is when I realized I need to have a team of people. I can't do this all by myself. So. And not just doing that. And that one taught me to pick and choose what is my superpower. I don't need to be doing everything. And that is how I discovered. Well, I need to allow networking. I ah, like talking to people like you to find out. Because everybody's journey is different. Completely different.
>> Christina Stevens:Correct.
>> Vish:And what the world sees is only a good side of it. Nobody knows what you've been through to be where you are. And that was extremely important to me and that changed everything. And thank you for sharing all your experiences. But so let's say if you were not doing real estate, if you're not doing nursing and you had all the money in the world, what would you be doing?
>> Christina Stevens:I'm very mission driven and service driven and so the first thing I would do if I had all money in the world is retire. Our parents, we have four sets of parents, unfortunately due to divorce and remarriage. But also I am grateful for every single one of them. my stepdad is actually my property manager and my handyman. So somebody I know love and trust. very grateful for that. But outside of that, I think One of the things people don't talk about as entrepreneurs, that we all feel very strongly about putting our money into good, good things. It's not just the selfish need for a, massive amount of wealth. We want to go actually change the world. Right. We want to go and help other people and serve other people. So for me it would get, it would open up doors of opportunities to be able to go and serve in places that are not as well off as our country or you know, having a first world country opportunity like we do here. And I just went to a conference yesterday and one of the guys has bought and sold over a hundred businesses after scaling them and you know, making an immense amount of profit. And one of the things he talked about was, you know, my money bucket was full, but my spiritual and my emotional bucket were empty because I was just making a lot of money and didn't, wasn't going to put it into good causes or good use. and has since created a company to go and a not for profit company, a non profit organization to go and help people with clean water, food, education, things like that. And so when I think about being very mission driven in that space that we can go and actually do good for the world, that is definitely right up my alley of being able to do mission trips or go and just see how other people live and pour into them in whatever space or category they need it. You know, some people just need clean clothes, clean water, clean food. Other people need education. And so that's definitely on my list. And because I do love traveling, as you mentioned, that it fills my bucket of being able to go to other places but then also serve people while I'm there.
>> Vish:Well, that is, that is fantastic. so at least you like to give back to the community. You like to help people who definitely don't have the same amount of luxuries. What we take it for granted out here.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah.
>> Vish:And there's a lot of people who could probably live a better life who are dreaming about what we are living. That's a dream life.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah.
>> Vish:that's good to know. So with that, I always feel that you're in fitness and so I feel that entrepreneur is more like going to the gym. Nobody sees how many times you failed, how many times you hurt yourself and how you force yourself to get to the gym and everybody would only look, oh wow, you got, you look great. And they think that going to the gym one weekend you're going to get that perfect body. But but Nobody would know how many, how long you've been going there and how many times you failed, how you hurt yourself. But, the reason, why I look at it is entrepreneurship gives you the failure first. And you go to gym, it's going to hurt you first before it gets stronger. Right. If you give up on the first sight, of pain, first sight of injury, you're not going to get anywhere. You're not going, you'll have to cancel your membership. But, how I look back is, if you look back worldwide, it is the same thing. I tell people, hey, if you're regular to the gym, please don't go to the gym in the month of January. Just stay away. Right?
>> Christina Stevens:Yes.
>> Vish:Because that is a living example of people who get excited, who have too much to drink on the new year resolutions, or Thanksgiving all the way to Christmas and New Year's, who made a lot of resolutions thinking that they're going to get a perfect bodies on January 1, they would go join the gym only to fail because there's no failure there. But they need to get past the pain. But we as entrepreneurs, we've been through pain all the time. We are still being tested. It's not over like you spoke about, the storage units. I mean, you panicked because there's a lawsuit, but you spoke to the right person and they told, there's no big deal, just get past it. That is coming in a different way. It's testing us. So we learn from all this, but there's no looking back. Now. You quit your W2 and you're fully committed to this. Now, that being said, what is the next, what are you planning to do with real estate? You want to scale, the assets under management, or you want to increase your revenue, or you want to increase your cash flow, or you want to become an influencer? What is your plan?
>> Christina Stevens:Or do you want to become an influencer? I love that. inspiring people is definitely something that I feel strongly about, but not from a place of just being a full time influencer. And when I think about kind of what my next goals, or visions are, I, do. I'm very grateful for our corporate housing business and what it has done for me. But I would say the biggest thing it's done for me this year is given me the confidence to scale something. So when I think about starting this year with two, and I am not anticipating taking any more this year, so let's say ending this year with nine, the systems, the process and the operations that had to go into Being able to do this, I essentially took a hobby, business that I did as a side hustle and turned it into a profession, and created a six figure business in nine months. So the confidence it's given me to be able to go take that exact thing and put it into storage or laundromats or business buying, real estate, buying things like that, it gives me the confidence and permission to go and know that I can scale anything that I feel strongly about. So, far, kind of the next leap, at something I do want to do bigger and think bigger, Take the confidence that I've gained this year and put it into bigger asset classes and build partnerships and raise more capital and do all of the things that allow me to actually get to my end goal. at the conference I went to yesterday, somebody said, do you want to be the same person you are today next year? And I sat with that for minutes like, oh, God, no, I don't. You know, and as entrepreneurs, if you're not growing, you're dying, right? So when I think about a year from now what I want to be doing, I think I will underestimate what I'm capable of. But I also know that being where I'm at Now, even in three or six or nine or 12 months from now feels uncomfortable. So I have to push through the discomfort of growing from where I'm at to where I'll be. and yes, like I said, I'm looking specifically at storage, laundromats, things that have real estate and business together, but also being willing to be more vulnerable to have strong partnerships and do things with people so I can move and scale that much faster.
>> Vish:Well, that is, that is fantastic, Christina. Thank you for sharing that. And, you did mention at one point that, if you had all the money in the world, there were. There are two things which is, which almost brought tears to me. But, one of them is, he told me you're going to retire your parents because there are four sets of parents. But, not everybody thinks about that, but that is something. And the way you give back to the community means a lot. Means a lot. And also that is what drives us every day when we get up in the morning till we get to bed. Because we don't need any inspiration, we don't need any motivation. And I, mean, the external influences are okay, but there's nothing. It's like having a soda because it's, our having a donut because it's going to go. The crash. The crash is going to come sooner or later.
>> Christina Stevens:Right.
>> Vish:But apart from that, keep that going. And that is extremely inspiring. Thank you for being, sharing. that and one other thing is I know you also, you like to network and you like to influence people to take action. And at some point I think you started a meetup group which I know you guys meet on the weekends. Right. Is that still going on or, Can you tell us a little more about that?
>> Christina Stevens:Sure, yeah. my partner in that again, like growing in partnerships. Andy Rosenberg was my partner for Simply Sundays. That when we started it it was because I went from having a leadership role where I could kind of block out my lunch break and come and when I got to going back to giving clinical anesthesia, leaving
leadership, that my lunch break was sometime between 10:30 and
2:30. And I didn't have that opportunity to always be able to show up to the weekday daytime meetings. And Andy reached out and said, where are you? I'm used to seeing you twice a week. Where are you? And so yeah, we decided to take meet up on Sundays for the nine to fivers, the people who couldn't come to things during the week. And we ran it very successfully from September of 2022 until I think it was July of this year. So over two years that we ran the, our meetup. And because we initially started it just thinking we'd do pure networking and then we started bringing speakers that we got to a place that we felt like it had kind of run its course. Andy isn't currently actively investing in real estate and it was specifically for real estate. He's doing oil and gas and all these different really interesting things. Started a family office, things like that. And because our initial audience was newbies, all the way up to, you know, multifamily syndicated general partners, we pulled a lot of really interesting people. But I scaled a midterm rental business. I wasn't even doing commercial real estate this year. So we felt like it was, it had run its course as a, ah, cre esque meetup. but I do feel like the people who it put us in front of and we became friends with that, we've continued to just like flourish in those relationships. And I, do think at some point I will start another meetup, monthly meetup. I just want to make sure it's in the right space. And at this point because of what I've spent this year, I would actually like to do it based on process systems and scaling in a business specifically to real Estate because mine is still real estate based. but just giving people permission to take something that they love and they're passionate about and scale it, without feeling like they can't and giving people the confidence and inspiring people to go that path.
>> Vish:All right, that's interesting. So, so what's next? Are you planning to start any other mastermind or planning to start any coaching program or how can people reach you?
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, no thanks. I I'm currently in sub, two so Creative Finance. I know you mentioned that. I'm also in something called owners club and it's about how a lot of us go into entrepreneurship with the anticipation of owning businesses or owning real estate. And what we end up doing is working 24, seven in our becoming just high level workers. Right. 40 hour work weeks for 24, seven hour work, weeks. And so taking ownership of what you do and being able to automate, delegate and put people in the right seat, is something that's important to me. So I'm in that mastermind right now. as far as how you can find me, I am on all the social medias. I would say I'm most active on Instagram. My name is TheChristina Stevens I also do have a YouTube, same handle, where I talk about midterm rentals, midterm rental arbitrage, scaling a business and I will continue to add to that. And I'm also on LinkedIn. You can look me up at just under Christina Stevens.
>> Vish:All right, thank you for sharing that, sharing your contact information Christina. And and once again I need to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to, to join us on this podcast, Outrunning Failures. And your feedback does mean a lot and I'm sure it's going to impact our listeners a lot. And once again thanks for joining us. And we, we all need to remember that setbacks are only opportunities and stepping stones and it's up to us how we use them. And now there is no looking back. If you're going to look back and stop doing. It's like the fitness. You don't want to give up, you only want to get better by the day. Right. That one little pain in your back or one little pain in your knee is not going to stop you from. So it's going to slow down but it's not going to stop. You only come back with much stronger. Right?
>> Christina Stevens:Absolutely.
>> Vish:So let's get this going. Thank you once again.
>> Christina Stevens:Yeah, thank you Vish, you're fantastic.