Zev Freidus began his real estate career in Boca Raton, Florida over 20 years ago. Long before the mass migration from the northeast, in the mid 90’s Zev had the vision to begin investing in residential properties in Boca. In 2005 Zev founded Boca Executive Realty with the mission of combining innovative technology with superior agents to become Florida’s most respected and trusted residential real estate brokerage. Over the coming 10 years he led the company through a period of hyper growth, which culminated in 2014 by selling a controlling interest in the company to a private equity group and rebranding as BEX Realty. In 2021 Zev launched ZFC as a full service boutique residential and commercial brokerage, specializing in real estate across the entire state of Florida.
In this podcast episode, host Kerry Barrett is joined by Zev Fredius, a business and real estate expert. Zev discusses his background in technology and real estate, and how he combined the two to create successful real estate brokerages. He shares his journey of realizing the value of investing in real estate and using technology to grow and scale his business. Zev also talks about his relocation to Florida and how he leveraged technology to stand out in a competitive market.
Transcript
Kerry: Thank you for joining us with this episode of The Kerry Barrett Show. Joining us today is Zev Freidus. He is a business owner, a business expert, and a real estate expert. Zev, welcome to the show. Instead of me putting words into your mouth describing who you are, why don’t you take a second to introduce yourself to the audience?
Zev: Sure. Hi, thank you for having me on. My name is Zev Freidus. I’m the broker for ZFC Real Estate. But I’m really more of a tech entrepreneur than anything else. My current business and my previous successfully built business were both real estate brokerages, but it’s all built on technology.
Kerry: So that’s interesting. Have you always been interested in technology? Did you know you were going to incorporate those two elements together or maybe use technology to grow and scale your business to the extent that you are?
Zev: I would say that I’ve always been a techie since I was a kid. I always knew that my career would be in technology. And you have to realize that I was born in the 1970s. I grew up in the 80s. Computers were just being introduced. So the idea of you’re going to have a career in technology was a foreign concept, not like today.
If you have a child and they’re going to college, you should tell them to study computer science, because that’s, where it’s at. But back then, this was a new frontier. But my parents even knew before I knew that I was going to be a tech person.
So I guess that’s always been in me. The real estate’s been in my family and in my blood also. My father, my grandfather, everyone’s, my entire family’s. Been one way or another involved in real estate. Always understood the value of investing in real estate. So I had these two separate interests that really Had nothing to do with each other.
Tech was a career choice and real estate was a financial planning investment mechanism. And then long story short, but around 2005 I basically quit my job in corporate America. So that I could focus on building my real estate portfolio.
And in doing so, I came to the obvious conclusion that was in front of me all along that I hadn’t thought about, which was to, take my technological expertise and apply them to the real estate industry. And that’s, where it all came together.
Kerry: I grew up in the seventies as well. And I’m with you on technological advancement and development. People always ask me, oh do I need a bunch of fancy tech to create video? And my answer is always, if you did, I wouldn’t be creating it. Because I’m not a techie. So I’m very interested to learn from you about how you leverage technology to grow your business.
And especially your first business, as it sounds like you were just beginning to bring these two elements together. So could you talk a little bit about how you brought them together and how you’re using it? And I guess maybe the follow-up to that is how you used it to make your business stand out because you’re based in Florida and there are a lot of real estate agencies in Florida. There’s a lot of competition.
Zev: I relocated to Florida from New York in the 1990s. I was already working in the city in technology. So I came down here. My main reason to move down to Florida was I was just getting started and I realized real quick that I could never afford a house in New York.
So I had my tech job in the city and I’d wake up at four in the morning and take a train and a bus into the city and make okay money and come home late and sleep a few hours and go back and do it all over again. I realized that it was a rat race and that I was never going to achieve the dream of home ownership. I had some family down in Florida my grandma.
I was a little familiar with the area and I did a little looking and realized that you could buy a house here. This was the 1990s before Florida, went through its huge boom. So I moved down here and bought a house and I bought a second house as an investment. So I took the down payment that I had for my primary residence, and I basically only used half of it, took a bigger mortgage, and took the other half so that I could buy a second home and rent it, so that was my first investment.
Wow.
Then I, ran out of down payment money, so I couldn’t keep buying investment properties, so I looked for a day job. Just a way to generate some income, and ended up working for a small local company that later got acquired by GE.
So I found myself working for one of the largest, if not the largest employer in America. And, I climbed my way up the ladder there. And I ended up being a product marketing manager for a hugely successful enterprise software product line, that GE produced.
So I did that for a number of years, traveling all over the world, it was a great way to see the world and make business connections. But I realized, after a few years that in doing so, I had neglected my real estate investing, goals.
So at that point I think I owned three properties and I’d been there several years and haven’t really done anything on that front. So I decided to do something bold and quit my job and, just focus on real estate again.
Now this time I got my license. And I did that because, while working at GE not only did I not invest in any more properties, but all my co-workers were always picking my brain, asking me, how do you own three houses when I’m still trying to own one?
I would explain to people about leverage and, all that stuff, all things that make investing in real estate, attractive. So I figured, okay, if I can just collect a commission, sell someone a property, then I can replace my paycheck.
I sold a house down the street from where I lived and sold another one. And then I realized something about the real estate industry, specifically the brokerage side of it. Which is that it’s really very primitive, even to this day. It’s come a long way since 2005 when I started, but even to this day, it relies largely on personal sphere of influence or networking, which is absolutely good stuff. But the problem is it’s very limited.
You can hand your business card out to everyone you meet and yes, everybody needs a house to live in and that’s true, but after all your friends and family are settled into their new home. You still need to make a living.
Kerry: Yeah. You’re hamstrung by your geography.
Zev: It’s your geography as much as it is personal, your circles. How many people do you know? You might know a lot of people, but still, people move on average once every five years. You can help all your friends and all your family settle into their new home. And now what? You can’t wait five years to do it again, right?
So you have to reach new people. So I got to this point pretty quickly, a couple of months in, and said, okay I’m a tech person. At this point, I had a lot of experience in marketing as well.
So I took the internet. I put together a basic website. I am hooked on the listings from the MLS. This was 2005 before Zillow or Zillow was just getting started. They were not available in our market. So I was really like a pioneer in taking the MLS data and publishing it on the web and getting it indexed by Google.
So I did that and, started generating leads off the internet. People whom I never met before would call me to see a house and I would take them and show them a house off the MLS collect a co-broker commission and go back to the internet and do it again.
Kerry: Wow.
Zev: And that very quickly became more than I could handle. So I did a very simple thing. Maybe I should explain a little bit about how the real estate brokerage business works. So the MLS, everyone’s heard of the MLS, but the MLS is really an ongoing co-brokerage system. So basically the concept is I have listings and you have listings, and I have buyers, and you have buyers.
But my buyers may not wanna buy the listings that I have, and your buyers may not wanna buy yours. My buyer might wanna buy your listing, and vice versa. So you put it on the MLS, basically, the whole purpose of putting it on them, unless it’s to let all the other brokers in the community know that you’re offering X amount of your commission to be shared with them. If you…
Kerry: If one of their purchasers ends up buying your property, is it like a finder’s fee?
Zev: The seller pays a commission to the listing agent and then the listing agent offers some portion of what they’re getting from the seller to other agents who have buyers too. And that’s what makes the world go around because I mean, you can’t list your house with the guy who happens to have the bikery house.
I mean, you try, you know, if you’re in a neighborhood and there’s an agent who does all the business, they’re the go-to person, that’s fine. But generally speaking, this industry, relies on co-brokerage. I simply would take buyers off the internet, show them listings off the MLS, and make money, but more than that, after I would sell them a home, I would turn around to the listing agent and recruit them.
Because I would explain to them that this buyer is a stranger to me. I just got them off the internet and I got many more where that came from. And you can have them because my interest here is not really to drive around with buyers and show them houses for the rest of my life. I’m trying to build a business. So the rest, as they say, is history. I built that business to be 250 realtors working for me in six offices and doing over 20 million a year of commission.
Kerry: You obviously leveraged technology to grow, to bring in new realtors, clearly to find buyers and bring both of those elements together. Then you sold it. Why did you sell it?
Zev: Ah, that’s an interesting question.
I sold it for personal reasons. Let’s just say my personal life and I just felt I maybe was, watching the store as best as I should be. And, I felt that maybe it made sense to bring in investors. You could take the business to the next level. So I sold to a private equity group in 2014 and they absolutely did take it to the next level. Today, the company is a nationwide lead generation company and they’re doing wonderful.
Kerry: Can I ask you, and listen, we’ve all, I think, been in the spot where we’re realizing, oh gosh, I’ve let a couple of maybe me personally, I’ve let a couple of things fall through the cracks. I absolutely understand where you’re coming from. It’s very easy as a business owner, and entrepreneur to spread ourselves thin.
So I guess maybe the other question rather than why you sell it, is what did you learn from selling it? So many of us have goals to start a business, exit, maybe start another business, and exit. What did you learn from that process?
Zev: So there’s a lot of lessons, to be learned. I think the number one thing I would say is that before you sell your livelihood, you should have it figured out at least at a high level in your mind what you’re going to do next. Unless of course, you’re of retirement age, that’s a different situation, but I was, in my early forties.
And it was too soon to retire. I just figured I’d find something else to do. I’ll come up with another business. I’ll do something. Use the money to invest in more real estate. But I didn’t really have a plan on what the next chapter of my life was and I think that, if I could do it all over again, I would make sure to know what my next move is before you sell the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Kerry: Build yourself a little bit of a runway, I guess maybe is another way of putting it. So…
Zev: Well, not really. I mean, runway, yeah, I got paid handsomely for the business. I had all the runway I needed, but I didn’t know where I was trying to take off.
Kerry: Yeah, there you go. That’s a better analogy. So what did you end up doing?
Zev: Interestingly enough, after just about six months of retirement, I was recruited back to my old company. So I came back and worked for them for a number of years. it’s different working as an employee than being a business owner. And I focused on investing, buying more properties. So that part was all good.
Two years ago, I parted ways with my old company and started a new brokerage business that I’m running now, which is basically built on the same premise, which is to generate leads for your agents, support your agents, and grow your agent’s business. and in doing so, you earn a piece of their commission, right?
So we didn’t talk about this, but the way the brokerage business model works is agents work on a split, right? So you hire an agent and they generate a commission from selling a house and they get a percentage of that. And a percentage of that goes to you, the house.
In traditional brokerages, it’s really, basically a race to the bottom. Because whatever percentage of agent production you want to take for being the house, there’s a guy down the street willing to work for less.
As is the case with any business, if you’re competing on price, it’s always a race to the bottom. But if you are adding value, someone’s told me that in the presence of value, price is not a concern, right? So if you take an agent and say I’m going to double your business, but I want a piece of your business.
Well, now, you know, you might have a slightly lower percentage of a much bigger pot. Now that was the premise last time. That is still the premise this time. I made a lot of superstar agents last time. My goal is to do the same this time. It is more competitive now, generating leads online, and ranking on Google for keywords, which real estate is a much different animal than it was in 2005.
And it’s much harder, definitely, and much more expensive. But, at the end of the day, approximately the same number of people every month go to Google and search for those same keywords related to real estate in our area as they did back in 2005. And you still have 10 results on the first page, granted that page is dominated by portals like Zillow and Realtor.com.
But there’s always a handful of local brokers on the first page of Google on any keyword. And the search volume is the same. So that tells me that I might have to fight harder to get there, but when I do, it’s going to be the same business model.
Kerry: It’s really interesting. I want to ask you before we move on to sort of the business element, what made you leave corporate, I guess, for the really the second time and start a new business again, was it just that sort of underpinning of entrepreneurial spirit that it seems like you’ve had perhaps even from your family to some degree, what made you start that second business?
Zev: To get back into the real estate brokerage business now?
Kerry: So you sold your first business in 2014 and then started back up again, a few years later.
Zev: Two years ago correct? What made me get back in?
Yup
At the time it had been about eight years since I had sold and honestly, haven’t found a better one, I don’t want to sound greedy. I haven’t found a better way to make a lot of money.
Kerry: Yeah. Listen, that’s what we’re all in the game for that. So that doesn’t sound greedy. That sounds smart.
Zev: But there’s more to it. I also felt that there was a need for what I offer. Since the last time, since 05. The first time I started this business, a lot has changed in the industry. There’s been a lot of consolidation. And there’s a small handful of very large brokers, nationwide brokers, that have gobbled up a lot of the local independent companies along with their agents.
And now the entire industry is really controlled by a small number of big companies. And these big companies are very profitable. I’m not here to criticize what they do. They’ve built things much bigger than what I built, so I’m not here to say it’s bad. But from the agent’s perspective, I think that anytime you have a big shift in an industry, then it always leaves some kind of vacuum.
So I feel that, with all the consolidation that has occurred in the business, there’s a real void in, local, small boutique, knowledgeable brokers that can really help their agents grow their business, versus working for some national company where the people in charge are not even in your city and definitely don’t know anything about the homes that you’re trying to sell.
Kerry: Where would you like to see this business go? Would you like to sell it at some point? Do you see staying into it until you’re ready to retire? What’s your dream?
Zev: Yeah, no, this time I’m not gonna sell it.
No, this time I hope to build it and then, at some point when I do get to retirement age, it would be my goal to, work with family members who can step in to continue to run the business.
Kerry: Got it. Let me ask you, let me backtrack a little bit before we get into some other advice. I’d love to offer business owners and entrepreneurs who are listening. But in terms of the way that you were able to incorporate and then leverage technology for growth, as of this recording, we’re seeing an explosion, particularly in AI, how do you see technology?
This is a big question. How do you see technology, maybe even specifically AI being used to grow and scale and make your business stand out? Do you have, specifically particular ways or things that you’re going to be experimenting with as this AI boom continues?
Zev: So look, AI is the big buzzword of late. What is AI? Well, If you boil it down, what it is, it’s a computer program, but unlike previous computer programs they were programmed to do certain things, you push this button, it does this, you put this input, it gives you this response, and that’s all pre-programmed.
Really, what differentiates a computer program from AI is the fact that AI can learn and adapt itself without a computer programmer. So with a traditional computer program, if a human interacts with the software and you don’t get the desired result, the programmer goes back in and tweaks how the computer responds to the human.
But AI, the main difference is that, let’s call it the algorithm itself is adaptive. And when you go to ChatGPT right, and you ask it to do something. You think you’re getting free brain power from AI, and you are. But really, that AI engine is getting as much out of that interaction as you are.
That’s the power of it. I think it will definitely, change the way search engine optimization is done, which is the core of what I do, right? It’s all about generating leads online. To do that, you have to rank at the top of Google for the keywords related to whatever it is that you do.
And that’s very competitive. and, I think AI is going to change, how exactly it is to be seen, but a lot of the work that is very tedious and time-consuming can be really solved with AI. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Google adapts to that because really the key to Google’s search product is trying to avoid manipulation.
That’s really, really what it comes down to, right? They can’t tell you the secret sauce or everybody could just manipulate it to be at the top. But that obviously doesn’t work because there’s only one number one and one number two and so on, right? It’s a very secretive thing. They don’t tell anyone.
There are hundreds of factors that affect your rankings and everyone’s trying to reverse engineer and figure out and AI will I believe, make that process obsolete, but there will still be a need for a search engine.
I don’t think that people will just talk to ChatGPT instead of Google. But I do think that the engine behind Google that decides what to show you as results, can certainly be Improved using AI and the process of, us SEOs trying to improve our website, might become obsolete.
If that happens, there’ll just be some other angle. There’ll still be Google, there’ll still be search results, and there’ll still be people like me that want to rank. But the process, instead of counting how many times it says a word on a page, might go away right. AI, and it’ll be something else.
Kerry: We’re always learning lifelong learners for sure. I don’t want to say how to brush with you having a connection to a celebrity in certainly the entrepreneurial world and the coaching space. Tell us a little bit about your connection with Tony Robbins. Did you know where I was going with that? No?
No?
Zev: No, and to be fair, I won’t say I have a connection with Tony Robbins. I’ll tell you, not sure what you heard, but I’ll tell you my Tony Robbins story. And that must be what you’re getting at. Back when I was living in New York before I moved down to Florida when I was just getting started, and I mentioned to you, you know, I was working and trying to figure out how to get ahead, and it wasn’t easy in New York.
I had no money back then. And I saw an infomercial maybe 4 o’clock in the morning on TV, with some guy I never heard of, Tony. And he was selling his product called Personal Power. Which was a 30-day audio cassette program that promised to transform your life spiritually, financially, emotionally, and fiscally, or something like that.
Big promises, and I remember watching this and thinking I don’t have a few hundred dollars to waste on some, program. I had tried programs before and they they were always a waste of money. So I was like, I can’t afford to do this again. But I watched the infomercial, it was like an hour long, and at the end of the hour, I said to myself, this guy has already given me a few hundred dollars worth of actionable advice just during this infomercial.
So it has already paid for itself. So I’m gonna buy this program. And I did, and I listened to it on the way to work every day, did the exercises. And it really did change my life. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it really changed my life. That was a turning point for me, where I started being successful.
It changed my thinking. And Tony, again, really heard of him back then. This was when he was really just getting started. But I was a big fan. I found myself asking myself all the time when faced with business decisions, I would literally be like what would Tony say? Like he was my mentor, but he didn’t know I existed.
Yeah. Long story short, I left New York, I came to Florida, I had my years at GE, I started my business, and more years went by. Became pretty successful. I was in a much different place in my life, and people would ask me, about celebrities, are there any celebrities that I would want to meet, or anything like that.
Mind you, during these years, the business was booming. People would see my name all over the internet looking for real estate, and they’d call the office all day asking for me by name, but I didn’t work with clients.
So the receptionist knew to take those calls and just redirect them to an agent. Find out, where they want to buy or sell and get them to an agent. Not to me. And I literally remember telling people that If the President of the United States calls the office to talk to me, just transfer him to an agent.
I don’t care about celebrity status. But I always said one caveat, I’d love to meet Tony Robbins because he really changed my life when I was getting started. Life goes on, selling houses, doing my thing, running my business. And I get a call at 11 o’clock at night on a weekend. It’s a transfer from the office.
So I look at the phone, it’s ringing and I’m like, anyone who calls the office at 11 o’clock at night on Sunday and goes through the directory and chooses the option to transfer to the CEO in my experience has not been the client that you particularly want to work with.
Kerry: Are you saying they might be a little high maintenance in general?
Zev: Honestly, not even not that they were Armenians those types of calls were usually…
Kerry: Emergencies?
Zev: No, you’re usually just people who are completely inconsiderate
Kerry: Oh.
Zev: Usually it would be like a renter who doesn’t qualify and has no money. But a normal person, calls in the morning, or you go to the general mailbox, or you leave a message, or you don’t go through the directory, finds the owner of the company, and transfers it to his cell phone at 11 o’clock at night on Sunday, unless you’re really inconsiderate, right?
So when I would have those kind of calls, I would not answer. And I don’t want to come across as wanting to answer my phone, but we’re talking about, I’m running a company with 250 salespeople. I don’t work with clients. It’s 11 o’clock at night. It’s Sunday. There’s no one in the office, and someone’s choosing to transfer to my cell phone.
I’m like, I don’t have to pick up the phone right now. So I don’t, and it goes to voicemail, and I click play, and I knew instantly the voice because I had spent years listening to Tony.
Oh my gosh.
So I knew he said hi, this is Tony Robbins and I’m moving to Florida I found you online and I want to talk to you about buying a house.
Kerry: Oh my gosh.
Zev: I knew his voice immediately. So I called him back and I had a great conversation with him. And I did set him up with one of my agents because I stayed true to myself.
I’ve always said I’m a non-competing broker, right? So I’m the broker for everybody, right? In this business, you have one broker who oversees many salespeople. I’ve always promised my agents I am a non-competing broker. So, in some companies, the broker is also doing his own sales and he takes all the best, opportunities for himself.
But I stay true to my promise to my agents. I could have taken Tony. I would have loved to work with him and he seemed to, like to talk to me about real estate, but I gave him to one of my agents and took him around. I did meet him in person at some point, we did sell him a house. So my agent sold him a house and I did meet him in person.
I had a very nice conversation with him. Let me just tell you one little, cute part of this story. 1996, I decided, it was right before I moved down to Florida, I decided I was going to listen to his program again. I had listened to it in 1994. I decided in 1996 to listen to it again.
And I think it’s like day three or day four in the program. Tony has this goal-setting exercise. Where he tells you to write down on a piece of paper your goals. And I remember clearly he said, be specific. He said, if you want a nice car, he says, don’t write down on the piece of paper, fancy car. He says, writes black, Mercedes S Class.
And I remember sitting there, in my apartment in Brooklyn, with no money, and a pad of paper, and I wrote blue BMW 7 Series.
And the person I was with at the time laughed at me and said this is ridiculous, you can’t pay your bills, you think like writing things on a piece of paper, you’re gonna, it’s gonna come. Fine, I continued the program, finished it again, the second time, and moved to Florida and things got better.
I’ve always leased my cars. I just think it works out better to lease than to buy. You lease for three years. At the end of the three years, you’re tired of it no matter what it is. You want something else. I worked my way up from, a BMW 3 Series to a 5 Series to an SUV, whatever.
Eventually, I got my goal of the blue BMW 7 Series. And to me, this story is not about, hey, I had a nice car, like whatever. It’s nice to have nice things. It’s about, I set a goal and about, you know, it was at least, it was probably 10 years later, more than 10 years later, that actually reached that goal.
So that car, was symbolic to me because that was the goal I set and I actually reached it. So much so that at the end of the three-year lease for the first time ever, I went back and said, I want the same thing. It has to be blue.
Kerry: Yeah.
Zev: I did that for another three years. I went back and did it again. So for nine years, I had that blue BMW seven series, because that was the goal. I set it many years earlier.
Kerry: I love what you’re saying there because it really is about when you do make a promise or you set a goal, let’s say for yourself, no matter how many years you pursue that close to 10 years, it sounds like,. But every time you stay consistent you keep those sorts of promises that you’ve made to yourself. Whether It was the steps that you were going to take to reach that goal, through the journey of getting there, it builds on itself. It builds not only confidence, but it creates its own momentum, which as business owners and entrepreneurs is so important.
Zev: I’ll just finish the story with this. I hadn’t really thought so much about the car I was driving. When it came time to go car shopping, it was like, that was the car. I mean, Obviously, when I set the goal, I obviously liked that car. So it wasn’t such a stretch to get that car, right?
But it was meaningful because I hadn’t really stopped to think about it until the day that my agent called me and said, I’m showing Tony houses. He wants to meet you and I’m going to bring him to the office. And I said, you don’t have to bring him to the office, I’ll come, just tell me where you are, and I’ll meet you at one of the showings.
I left the office to go meet Tony for the first time, and I realized as I pulled into the showing that I was driving a blue BMW 7 Series. And that’s brought it full circle. When I met him, I told him my story, and his reaction was that the reason he still does what he does is that every day he meets people with a story.
Kerry: I love that. And I’m so glad that shared it with us. Let me ask you one other question, and this is perhaps a large question and there’s probably, it’s probably constantly changing. But in terms of your sort of top three pieces of advice that you would give to other business owners who are, first looking to scale and then perhaps looking to sell. What would those top three pieces of advice be?
Zev: The first piece of advice is you really need to ask yourself why you want to sell. And are you sure that’s the right move? Because the reality is when you start a business. It’s good to have purpose and there’s every business has its story of how it came to be.
But at the end of the day, you’re trying to make money. And when you start out, you’re not making a lot of money and you’re doing a lot of work. And then, as it succeeds, you start being rewarded more for your time and effort.
You have to be careful that you don’t fall into the trap coming from that place where it’s all about the money because if you sell you get a lump sum of money and here I am trying to make, X amount of millions a year and now someone’s offering me five or ten times that.
Why not if the whole, idea here is to make money I can just basically fast forward right because typically when you sell the company, it’s sold based on a multiple of earnings. So you’re making you know, whatever you’re making per year, they’ll pay you X times that right?
If your whole focus is to make as much as I can this year in this business as well I’ll give you ten years worth. Then you think, wow, that’s life-changing and it is. But that really shouldn’t be the reason to sell because what you’re selling really is futures, right? You’re selling time.
So you have to ask yourself, where am I going to be at the end of that amount of time? So for example, if you sell your business for five times earnings, then you have to ask yourself where you can be in five years. In five years, will you have replaced that income? Because if you have not replaced that income, in the number of years they paid you for, then you’re coming out behind,
Kerry: Very good advice. Yeah.
Zev: Just simple math. If they pay you five times earnings, at the end of five years, if you haven’t replaced that income, then you could have had the income out of the business.
Kerry: Sure. That makes sense. Absolutely. Do the math.
Zev: Secondly, as I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, I think it’s very important to know what your next mission is before you exit this one. Because It’s not so easy to find a purpose that motivates you to go create something. It takes a lot to create a business, and what sometimes you, what I didn’t realize until after was that when you have a whole bunch of money in the bank, it becomes harder to find a purpose, to go create something.
Kerry: Third piece of advice.
Zev: I’d say if you do sell, I think exit quickly and don’t look back. And this is not, a reflection of anybody, but it’s very different to, be the creator of the enterprise versus being employed by and not being in charge of something that you created.
It’s a tough thing. It’s a tough transition for everybody. So I think, I’d much rather see a business owner hire the best CEO that money could buy. I don’t care if it costs you half of your bottom line profits at the company if you could keep your company and not have to show up and get paid half of what you were before forever and maybe the new CEO grows it and then it doesn’t even cost you half.
But even if it does, might be a better option than cashing out because you’re only getting, like I said, X number of years worth, and then after that you get nothing, so I would really tell people to think long and hard before they sell, but if you do, you’re out.
Kerry: Yep. it. Make it quick rip off the bandaid and don’t look back.
Zev: it’s just diminishing returns If they pay you x number of years, then you give them back x number of years Then you give away your
Kerry: Zev, it has been fantastic speaking with you and learning from you, not only about the process of buying and selling but certainly how to leverage technology. If people are interested in talking to you, perhaps working with you, where should they find you? How do they get in touch with you?
Zev: Sure easiest ways on the web zfc.com
Kerry: Very good. Zev like I said, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time and your generosity of knowledge as well.
Zev: Sure. Thank you. Appreciate it.’
Places to follow up with Zev:
Website: zfc.com
Twitter: twitter.com/ZFCRealEstate
Instagram: instagram.com/zfcrealestate
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/zfc-real-estate
