Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 199 with the amazing Rennie Gabriel, who is back on the show today.

Rennie Gabriel [0:09]
Hi, this is Rennie Gabriel! You are listening to the Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:18]
I’m really looking forward to this next conversation with Rennie. In the first one, we actually talked about his past where he went from collecting bottles to multi-millionaire and that he did only in a few years while earning $5,000 per month. He now lives on his investment income and donates 100% of his book, training and coaching profits to www.ShelterToSoldier.org where dogs are rescued from deadly environments and trained as service animals for post 9/11 soldiers who have returned with Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI). I love it when you are in a position that you can decide that you have choices in your life. The way to go there, we’re going to talk about it today with Rennie, is really important because you need to learn how to pay yourself first. So enjoy the next episode with Rennie. Hi Rennie! I’m so excited you are back today on the show. Thank you for being here.

Rennie Gabriel [1:25]
Oh, it’s my pleasure. I so enjoy our conversations.

Christine Schlonski [1:29]
Yes. And I love to talk about wealth and wealth building. It’s so exciting because one of my biggest values is freedom. When you have enough cash you have choices. I love for people to have choices that they make from their hearts. That they don’t make because they have to make them because there is not truly a choice.

Rennie Gabriel [1:57]
Yeah. So when you do it there’s a lot of pressure and it’s not fun.

Christine Schlonski [2:01]
Yeah, totally. For me, life is about fun and creating it the way we desire it. Because that makes us experience so special. When we get to the point that we can give back, that’s awesome. We always can give back but the more we have, the more we can give.

Rennie Gabriel [2:19]
Yes, absolutely right. Entrepreneurs became entrepreneurs for freedom. One of my coaches has a great expression and it goes along the lines of when he’s looking at doing something he asked himself a question, “Is this going to contaminate my freedom or contribute to my freedom?”

Christine Schlonski [2:44]
I like that question.

Rennie Gabriel [2:46]
Yeah, I think that’s a good question to ask from the standpoint of any entrepreneur who’s looking at a growth direction or a product line they want to take on or a client they’re going to work with. That question really helps create a lot of clarity. Is it going to contribute to my freedom or contaminate my freedom? There are clients that I’ve jettisoned because they were hurting my freedom.

Christine Schlonski [3:17]
Yes, yes. totally get that. So we talked in the last episode, we talked about that you became a good salesperson. What was actually like, what was the very, very first thing in your life that you’ve ever sold?

Rennie Gabriel [3:41]
I’m gonna guess it was when I got out. Oh, no, it was before I got into the insurance business. I was selling machines that would press people’s clothing. It was advertised on TV. Then I would go out to people’s homes with a demonstration of how this machine could press their clothing. Like, if they were to take it to a dry cleaner, and they could have this in their home for $400. My ineffectiveness at selling was that I was always having to discount the price because it was $400. This goes back over 40 years ago, but a good salesperson who was in the same company was selling more than I was selling, and he was always selling them for full price.

Christine Schlonski [4:37]
Did you have a meeting with him to learn?

Rennie Gabriel [4:41]
Say again?

Christine Schlonski [4:42]
Did you have a meeting with him to learn?

Rennie Gabriel [4:45]
Um, we did talk about it. I realized, yeah, I need to up my game, and I was able to give away fewer discounts. I did improve but I didn’t get to where he was. He was probably 10 years older than I was. I was in my 20s. The lack of experience that he had in terms of making things happen.

Christine Schlonski [5:13]
Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that story. When people listen, and I really, my desires for them to really get, you can learn this. The beauty of it, it doesn’t need to be difficult. It’s actually pretty simple. You can have fun conversations instead of sales conversations. When you really redefine sales for you. When you change your mindset. When you started to create your wealth, what would you say to a person who is looking into starting, saving or paying themselves first, are there any other elements that need to be considered to make that may be more fun or a faster experience? Some people think, if I put away like 10 bucks or hundred bucks or 500 bucks, it’s taken me forever, and I really want to get to that million. So what can I do? What will I see? What will I experience? What’s the reward because that’s definitely not a short term game to stay in the game?

Rennie Gabriel [6:24]
It is a step by step process. When I started over at age 50, when I was broke, I was only earning about $5,000 a month, and I was using the concept pay yourself first setting aside $500 a month. I was putting it in some individual stocks I was buying. They were large-company stocks that would still be around a long time into the future. I wasn’t being speculative with it. But I also realized I have what are called control issues. If I own stock of General Electric and I didn’t think one of the products that they were manufacturing was of the right quality or the right design, and I wanted to tell them, they don’t care what I have to say. I don’t have some controlling interest in General Electric. What I realized is there’s absolutely no control. I can’t talk about who they should hire or how they should distribute profits or anything. But what I realized was if I had it invested in real estate, I could exercise my control issues. I could choose who’s going to rent it or where I was going to buy it, or if I was going to remodel it, or when I was going to sell it. I was in control at that point. What I was doing was, like I said, saving $500 a month. When I’d saved up $18,000 it took three years. As I said, this is the step by step process. I had $18,000, this is more in savings than I’ve ever had in my life. I’m 53 years old at this point. My wife had a person, she was in real estate, she had a partner in real estate and she said, “I found this three-unit building I’d like us to buy.” I couldn’t go 50-50 with them. I only had $18,000 for a down payment. So my wife came up with 18,000. He came up with the balance 36,000 and the three of us bought it together. So that’s why I say wealth creation is a team sport. It’s not a solo sport. We cleaned up the building, we re-rented it and multi-unit properties value is based on rental income. It’s not like a house. So the more rent you get, the more valuable the building. Well, in six years that buildings value increased by about $500,000, my little 18,000 grew to about 130,000 in value. And in the United States, they were able to do a tax-deferred exchange. And none of that money got taxed when we sold the building, as long as we bought something similar, and we bought a 15 unit building from that three-unit. You know, and over time, I borrowed money so that the three of us could make down payments on more apartment buildings, which we did. And in about eight years, we went from three units that we own to 50 units. Our net worth grew dramatically. Because of what we were doing. We bought buildings where we could add value, where the tenants were being taken care of, where they were happy to live in the buildings that we manage. They were happy to be in the environments that we created for them. They were good people. They paid their rent on time. They took care of the properties because we treated them like these were important people and they were. They were buying real estate for us.

Christine Schlonski [10:33]
Yeah,

Rennie Gabriel [10:35]
I tribute the sales background that I had to treat your customers like real human beings that you want to serve and I treated the tenants like real human beings that I wanted to serve and they treated us back with respect.

Christine Schlonski [10:53]
Yeah, I love that. I was just going to say, can we just take that concept and just put it into a ready to a business situation. If you seem like you are kind of building a house and you want the best tenants ever, because once you have a client and you serve them well, they will become fans, they will come back to buy more and more and more. It’s like they paying rent. They cannot move in with you. They’re so excited because you serve them so well that they want to like to buy everything you have. It’s just going to be one step at a time. So when we manage to have this great relationship then basically a client is just unlimited potential.

Rennie Gabriel [11:44]
Absolutely. When you’re in business and you serve your clients, like you really taking care of them. They want to buy more and more from you because they enjoy feeling taken care of. I’ve talked to others, and this does relate to business. Right now I’m in the real estate business and I’ve talked to other people who have a studio, buildings that have studio apartments, which is generally one person’s living in it. It’s small and it’s short term. If they stay for a whole six-month lease, it’s a long time. I have tenants who have been in studio apartments for 10 years, 15 years and 17 years on a month to month basis, and they don’t want to leave because they feel taken care of. When you have a business and your customers feel taken care of, they don’t want to do business with someone else. They want to continue doing business with you. They want to buy more from you when you have new products or new services because they’ve been taken care of in the past.

Christine Schlonski [12:58]
Yeah. Totally. And so when we look at all the amazing things you have achieved and then episode one you said it had a lot to do with mindset, with attitude, with getting rid of limiting beliefs or shifting that. What’s your biggest fear today?

Rennie Gabriel [13:22]
I can’t even identify a big fear that I have today. It’s not dying, hey, you know, if I die I die. I’ve done estate planning. My children and grandchildren will benefit from what I’ve built, and they’re good people. I’m thrilled with what they’ve created in their lives. I’m not worried about running out of money. I’m not worried about the stock market crash. If it does, it still has plenty. I’m not worried about earthquakes. We have earthquake insurance. I can’t even come up with a fear I have. Maybe they own, okay, I think I can come up with one. That I become mentally incapable. If I can’t think straight anymore, and I don’t even know it, that would be fear.

Christine Schlonski [14:17]
Yeah. Okay, so no, no business fear, no fear at the moment, just total bliss.

Rennie Gabriel [14:26]
Yeah, but I do have an upset that I’m not able to contribute the level of income I want or donations to the charity but that’s a solvable issue. It’s not a real fear.

Christine Schlonski [14:39]
Yeah. And do you even have bad days?

Rennie Gabriel [14:47]
I’m sure I do but I can’t identify with any of them. My wife has this comment about me. It’s just like, he’s steady. He’s just a steady as can be. I mean, my life is so blessed. I have wonderful relationships, I have prosperity, I have health, and I’m truly blessed. I mean, what would a bad day look like? You know, I stub my toe. Well, it’ll go away.

Christine Schlonski [15:20]
So what advice would you give to people who might have some bad days? Like how can they adopt such an attitude? Because I mean, it’s an audio interview, people couldn’t see you. It’s like you radiate, you look happy. It’s fun to talk to you. What could people do to get to that point where maybe they can feel that more often instead of being stressed over it?

Rennie Gabriel [15:52]
It goes right back to wealth creation is a team sport and when you are out of sync. When you’re feeling bad. When you have fears you want to have people you can reach out to. Whether it’s an accountability buddy, whether it’s a coach, whether it’s a mentor, it’s being able to have someone that you can talk to, because that reduces the fear and the upset and the concerns. Most of the time it eliminates it. But knowing that someone else has got your back makes a big difference. I don’t care where you look at it in business. I’m going to go back to the business concept and wealth creation is a team sport. I was an angel investor in the business and I started to learn what does it take to be successful in a startup business. In every successful business, I was learning about, there were two people involved. Now I know a lot of your listeners may be solopreneurs and that may be one of the first things that they need to change and bring someone else into the company who has the same vision that they have. Every successful business and I’m talking about. General Electric, I’m talking about Apple Computer. I’m talking about Berkshire Hathaway. Company after the company had at least two people driving the business. And they both had a different function. As an example, in Berkshire Hathaway, you have Warren Buffett, and I’m going to label him as a visionary. He sees what needs to be done. He knows what companies have value. He knows how he can grow the company. And then there’s a second person and his name is Charlie Munger. Most people have not heard of Charlie Munger, Charlie Munger I will label as the execution master and he’s a 50% partner in Berlin. Hathaway and no one know who he is. Why? Because he’s behind the scenes. So Warren is out front. Charlie’s behind. Warren is a visionary. Charlie is executing on Warren’s vision. When Steve Jobs had his visions, it was Steve Wozniak, who was executed on them. If you look at every successful business, from a startup stage, Hewlett Packard, on and on and on Disney, Walt Disney, Walt was the visionary and Roy Disney was the execution master. Over and over again, you will see, it was two people with a different skill set that took small businesses and made them enormous. Now if a solopreneur wants to stay small, and that’s a choice, that’s fine, but if they really want to grow their business, they need to bring in someone else. If they’re both the visionary and the execution master, they’re not going to be effective at growing the business, having it being profitable, creating the level of wealth where work becomes a choice instead of a requirement.

Christine Schlonski [19:15]
That’s such great advice, especially for solopreneurs to look for ways to partner up with somebody.

Rennie Gabriel [19:26]
That’s where I’ve identified where I failed. My art gallery business failed because I was a solopreneur. My pension administration company grew because we had three partners, we had different functions, and we sold it off to a public company.

Christine Schlonski [19:43]
That’s interesting. That’s probably really something people can take to think about how they can leverage their time because as a solopreneur, you probably do most of everything yourself. Not all of their time is invested wisely because your strings might be in other departments. But you still have to do all the rest.

Rennie Gabriel [20:07]
Exactly. A good example is someone who does their own QuickBooks, instead of hiring a bookkeeper. If you look at it from the standpoint of let’s say the solopreneur has a product, of service, and that when they’re in the selling mode, and they’re let’s say they’re earning $100 an hour or $150, $200 an hour makes no difference. $100 an hour, fine. When they sell their product or their service, and then they sit down and they’re putting the information into QuickBooks and they’re writing the checks to pay the bills. That’s a function that a $25 an hour or $35 an hour bookkeeper can do. But instead, they are spending $100 an hour efforts to pay the bills. Because if they were instead in front of clients, they’d be making $100 an hour. No, they’re sitting and doing bills and giving up $100 an hour to pay bills, instead of paying someone else $35 an hour. If they paid someone else they could be out making the $100 an hour instead.

Christine Schlonski [21:20]
Yeah, that’s such a good point to make. And thank you for explaining it so well, because that’s something the concept that people don’t get and that was something I struggled with at the beginning of my business, like wanting to have control. Then you know, also you know, kind of understand but once you understand how it works, you can really see that you outsource it because it’s not worth your time. And your business grows faster because now you can spend your time with something that’s; a.) more fun and; b.) you are so much better at it and; c.) it gets paid so much better than what you pay another person to outsource. What you don’t like anyway. So, yeah, awesome. So what would you love to leave our listeners with?

Rennie Gabriel [22:10]
Something similar to the first interview, and that would be that if they go to the https://wealthonanyincome.com website, and click on the link that says free gifts, they’ll have all sorts of business building tools that will support them. There are videos that they can watch, there’s a free summary of my award-winning best selling book. And I send out an email once a week, attitudes of the wealthy and it’s a series of 30 emails, then I go into the myths that people buy into, like, I need to pay the debt. People have these misunderstandings and they’ll have the opportunity to examine them and reframe what they’re doing.

Christine Schlonski [22:57]
Awesome. Well, thank you so, so much for investing your time with us today. I just love this interview. I just love talking to you. It’s so much fun and so valuable for everybody listening in. So people hop on over to https://wealthonanyincome.com I definitely have it right in the show notes, where I will provide all the links to Rennie so you can connect on social media, have the homepage and everything is just one click away. Thank you so much and have an awesome, awesome day.

Rennie Gabriel [23:35]
Thank you, Christine. So much fun to be with you.

Christine Schlonski [23:38]
What another inspiring conversation. I hope you loved it. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/ Find the podcast tab, grab Rennie’s wonderful gift, and also have a look at his TEDx talk with every click he gets on the YouTube channel. He will actually give $1 to the wonderful organization www.ShelterToSoldier.org And you can be helping Rennie and the organization by just watching his amazing TEDx talk. So hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/podcast. And while you’re over there also sign up for the empowerment notes that will keep you in the loop, will give you the updates on Heart Sells! Podcast and the wonderful guests who are sharing their stories. Also, I will share things that I usually do not share on social media to inspire you, to empower you, to kind of give you what I have learned over the years in high ticket sales, and also some tips, some advice, some inspiration on how you can embrace sales, redefine sales so that you can live your life beyond your wildest dreams. Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and I’m saying bye for now.