Modern Professional

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For many people, real estate is top-of-mind. Whether you’re looking for a place to raise your family, investing in rental properties, or building a financial foundation for your future, the real estate market touches us all. Like homes, entrepreneurial ventures are massive commitments that consume large portions of your mental and financial attention. When house shopping, mindset makes all the difference.

To explore this question, we turned to Ivan Estrada, one of California’s preeminent real estate experts. After graduating from the University of Southern California with a bachelor's degree in finance and accounting, Estrada worked in finance for a time before pivoting to a career in real estate. Years on, Estrada’s pivot has proven to be wildly successful, as he has become a top-rated real estate entrepreneur. Not only has he written a book on branding, but Estrada has also appeared on television shows such as Million Dollar Listing, House Hunters, and Open House. If anybody can help us connect the dots between real estate, homeownership, and entrepreneurship, it’s Ivan Estrada.

Diving In: When Should You Buy Something?

For many, the first set of questions when discussing real estate revolves around knowing when to act. There are so many factors when buying a home that it can be challenging to know when to act. The real estate market can be unpredictable. Buying at the wrong time could mean paying more than you want for a property, or even paying more than it’s really worth. With so many complications and variables, how do you know that you’re ready to buy? Is there a specific time to buy, an optimal moment, a triggering event? Or is there ever an ideal time to buy?

According to Estrada, people who are ready to buy are usually at a point in their life where they are seeing things on a long-term basis. Buying a home often signals that people are planning to stay in one location for a long time, and as such, buyers usually have stabilizing factors like a marriage, a good job, or children. Buyers often view the home as a retirement vehicle, since real estate tends to appreciate; just think of all the boomers who bought their houses for less than the cost of a Tesla Model S and can now sell them for obscene prices. The key idea, Estrada says, is that buyers are generally at a point in their life where they’re going to be stabilized for the long term. They’re ready to put down roots.

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Siew Pui Yi is a Malaysian content creator who has leveraged a massive Instagram following of 18.5M+ followers into everything from cosmetics brands to music. Siew’s career began at the age of 14 when she started working as a model. Enjoying her success as a model but wanting more, Siew joined a talent agency at the age of 18 and found work acting as a host on variety programs, where she would ask people questions on the street or narrate prank videos. The work was good, especially for someone so young, but Siew knew she could do more with herself than voicing YouTube content or chatting with random people. After closely observing the workings of the content-creation industry, Siew began independently producing her own content when she was only 19 years old. Before long, she made the leap to full-time content creation, releasing a line of content based on her modeling work. Initially, she produced both web-based content, such as Instagram photos, and meatspace content, such as books and calendars. Her strategy proved successful, and Siew soon had more than 600,000 Instagram followers. She describes her initial content as “very safe,” saying that she wanted to keep the content very much PG-13 in nature: innocent modeling fun targeted at a broad audience seemed like a great path forward. Until, abruptly, the equation changed.

Malice And Extortion: Siew Pui Yi Is Hacked

As her career began to take off, Siew became the victim of a serious cyberattack. After sending her laptop in for repairs, the machine was hacked, and Siew’s entire web-based identity was stolen. The thieves had access to all of her passwords and also gained access to Siew’s personal photo albums on Google Photos, which included many photos that she did not want to be released to the public. This created an opportunity for the hackers to blackmail Siew; they threatened to release her photos to the public or sell them to nefarious actors on the black market. Terrified, Siew went to the police for help...

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MP recently spoke with Anne Ruozzi, co-founder of Therapy Clean. Ruozzi was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, during the 70s, and 80s. She graduated from Boston University in the late 90s. Her first job out of college was with a luxury consumer brand startup in Boston in the personal care space. This was her exposure to a startup environment, and according to her, she fell in love with the rush of bootstrapping the company’s way up and the feeling of being part of something bigger than herself. Eventually, she transitioned into the corporate world and sold IT equipment for a Fortune 500 company. Since working in that industry, she believes that any successful person is a successful salesperson.

After a few years, she decided to take a leap into the unknown and work for herself. Not even a month later, she met her husband while skiing, and they partnered to start their own business: Eco Touch, Inc., the parent company of Therapy Clean.

Ruozzi has 25+ years of CPG, sales, and brand management experience, has achieved over $100M in lifetime sales, and likes to call herself a visionary for brand ethos and packaging.

Anne Ruozzi

When did you first want to follow an entrepreneurial path, and why?

I’ve always enjoyed the rush of having a small team of talented individuals come together to make something bigger than themselves. And to me, that is what entrepreneurship is all about. I never questioned being an entrepreneur. It may have something to do with the fact that I never saw anyone in my family growing up working a 9-5 job. My father was a small business owner who started from scratch and made a great life for himself, so he was my role model. However, I recognize that being an entrepreneur is challenging, and it’s not for everyone. It would be a lot easier to have a 9-5 job and go home and not worry about anything work-related...

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Defining your personal brand is no small task. It is what will define your day-to-day and will become how you are known to others. Your personal brand represents you to the outside world. It should consist of a well-cultivated, finely crafted combination of your personality, desires, and strengths. You must shape your brand around each of these so that is both genuine and valuable.

Before defining your personal brand, you must ask yourself who you want to be in this world. You can be anyone you want, but you can only be one person. Consider your best-case scenario thirty years from now. Do not think in terms of money. Everybody wants to make millions. Financial success is a byproduct, not a goal. Who do you see yourself as in thirty years? Do you own a media company? Maybe you are a successful florist? Or are you a venture capitalist? You can be whoever you want to be, but first, you must decide.

Once you have selected who you want to be, you must determine how your strengths can help you get there. Always consider the value you can add to others when defining your personal brand. You should not choose a personal brand that does not add value. People come to know and recognize you based on your brand. Your reputation builds as you add value to others. Look at your experiences and education and determine whether they enable you to add value to others under your selected brand. If you are a successful digital marketer but want to define your brand to represent sales, you are in trouble. Unless you are secretly a star salesperson or acquire the training and experience necessary to sell well, you will likely add little value, and your personal brand will quickly turn toxic.

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Every minute you’re arguing with strangers online is a minute you’re not playing with your dog.

Modern life feels frantic. There’s a ton going on: family obligations, activities with the kids, work, the side hustle, maintaining your living space and car, eating right and exercising, and so on. It feels impossible to keep up. You could use a life preserver but people just keep handing you bricks. But amidst all the frenzy, regardless of how busy you are, you should stop what you’re doing and go play with your dog. Sure, there are more important things to do. You likely have a long list of outstanding items that need to be taken care of. Between domestic chores and work items, life can feel overwhelmingly busy at times. How can we possibly justify taking time away from our assortment of very important tasks to go play with the dog?

You’re Not That Busy

We’re going to take a controversial stance here and say that you probably aren’t as busy as you think. If you sit back and think about your week, you’ll likely find that you had more downtime than you’d care to admit. Many office workers might admit that a fair amount of their day is spent looking busy instead of doing anything meaningful. The average American spends more than three hours a day aimlessly scrolling on their phone. We find time to watch TV shows and movies. But in the narrative we construct about our lives, we love to portray ourselves as frantically busy. This trend is exacerbated by a toxic relationship with work that places a lot of societal value on one’s productivity and almost none on one’s happiness as a human being. We cultivate images of busyness, but at least some of that is probably smoke and mirrors...

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