Leaving Corporate to Build a Self-Storage Empire with Fernando Angelucci

Tim Melanson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Work At Home Rockstar podcast. Today’s guest, we have the CEO of SSSE, and what he does is he specializes in using creative deal structuring to purchase cash flowing assets and to build ground up institutional grade self-storage facilities. I’m super excited to be rocking out today with Fernando Angelucci.

Hey Fernando, you ready to rock?

Fernando Angelucci: I am, Tim

Tim Melanson: Awesome. We always start off on a good note. Tell me a story of success that we can be inspired by

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So, um, I think the, the biggest success I had was leaving the corporate life and deciding to chase my dream. Um, I read a book by Tim Ferriss called "The 4-Hour Workweek," and it had a very interesting exercise in it, which was called the fear setting exercise. You know, I was so afraid to leave my engineering job.

Um, I didn’t know what would happen. You know, what if I would fail? And basically what the book said is put basically two lines on a piece of paper, number them from zero to [00:01:00] 10. The top line is, what is the worst thing that could possibly happen? Zero is nothing changes. Uh, 10 is you die. Nine is you go to prison for life.

So there, there’s your range. Now score it. Then go to the second line, also zero to 10. This is what is the best possible thing that can happen? Zero is nothing changes. Ten is you’re living your, your absolute dream life. And so I had ended up doing the, you know, the mental gymnastics, and really the worst thing that could happen was I put it as a three.

I, I still had my degree. If it didn’t work out, I could always go back into the job market. If I was tough on cash for a little bit, I’m sure I could, you know, stay with friends or family, et cetera. But on the positive line, it was a nine. Uh, I should have put a 10 knowing what I know now, but it was a nine.

I said, "Hey, three to nine, that, that makes the most sense." So I ended up quitting, um, basically jumped out of the plane and built the parachute on the way down. I cash advanced almost $100,000 off of 12 different credit cards to [00:02:00] start the business, and then, uh, never looked back. Um, today, uh, I run a, a self-storage private equity company.

We’ve done over 55 transactions across 26 states, over $240 million. I travel nine to 10 months out of the year, uh, working from virtual offices, if you will. Um, and it’s… I’m living my dream life.

Tim Melanson: Wow. So you didn’t, uh, burn the candle at both ends and keep it, keep the job and work at the same time? You just went all in

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So, you know, I started just a little bit, so maybe a couple months doing that, and I r- I realized how much output that I was being able to achieve just in the nights and weekends. And I realized that the longer I keep this up, either I’m gonna get burned out from the business that I wanted to create or the job or both.

And that was not a healthy strategy. So instead of trying to keep my foot in both sides, I figured the best thing w- to do was just focus [00:03:00] 100% of my, my attention on the one thing that I wanted to do that I think would move my life forward, and that’s, that’s what I did. So I, I did some real estate on the side for a couple months and then decided to quit.

And the way I quit was a way that made sure that I’d have no way to come back to that same company ’cause I, you gotta, you know, you gotta set, you gotta set the ability to, to hold yourself accountable. And if you always know that there’s a way to go back, um, you’re not gonna really try as if it’s the last possible thing that you can do.

So I had to make sure that, um, there was no other option but success.

Tim Melanson: Wow. That’s awesome. Well, I mean, that’s a really cool exercise that you got into. I, I’m wondering, uh, how did you find the book?

Fernando Angelucci: I’ve, you know, since I was a teenager, uh, I never thought I liked to read, um, but then picked up a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert [00:04:00] Kiyosaki, and then that’s when I discovered the kind of, I hate this word, but kind of self-help books. Books that are not fiction or, you know, things that you can actually apply in your life to make your life better.

Um, maybe sales psychology, personal psychology, mindset, et cetera. So I just started going down that, that rabbit hole of, you know, buying one book, reading it, finding it fantastic, and a lot of these books, they usually reference other books. The authors will reference other books in their books. So then I start buying those, and then all of a sudden in a couple years I have multiple bookshelves filled and, uh, Tim Ferriss’ was one of the ones that I had gotten early on.

I think I was 19 when I read his first book

Tim Melanson: Wow. Okay. Wow, that’s awesome. Yeah, I was in probably my early 20s, so just a little older than you when I started getting into the self-help stuff, and I just remember, like, people, like, thinking I was so weird, ’cause I was always reading these, like, business books instead of the fiction that they’re reading, right?

And they’re like, "Uh, when you say you like to read," they’re like, "Yeah, but [00:05:00] that doesn’t count." I’m like, "It, it counts, I think," you know?

Fernando Angelucci: I agree.

Tim Melanson: That’s awesome. Now, okay, so, uh, along with the good notes, sometimes there’s some things that don’t go as planned when you’re, when you’re setting up your business, when you’re getting moving, and I don’t like to call them failures, ’cause, I mean, they’re all, all learning experiences, but

Fernando Angelucci: Right

Tim Melanson: they are what keep people out of the game a lot of it, a lot of times, right?

They’re just scared about that stuff happening. So I like to, I like to bring a couple of them up or one of them up that might be a bad one that might scare somebody, but you can… You’re still here, right? So can you share a, a story with me?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. Um, you know, I think the, one of the biggest challenges people have when they go into, you know, business, working from home, being a business owner, is thinking that they should do everything themselves because they wanna keep the max amount of profit that, that, that they can. And the problem with that is as you start scaling, you start [00:06:00] burning out, and now that thing that usually made you excited to wake up in the morning, the thing that, that got you out of bed, becomes something that you don’t look forward to doing anymore.

And that’s usually because you’re overworked and you’re not using systems and processes and procedures in your business to either, you know, automate, eliminate, or delegate tasks to people that have, uh, lower per hour, uh, value on their time. So one of the, the first times I burnt out, uh, I was in the single family home space and, uh, buying, fixing and flipping, wholesaling single family assets, not, basically not building up the team like I should have, and I was working too many hours.

You know, I, I went from working a 60 hour per week corporate job to working 80 to 85 hour per week. Basically, I built a job for myself. It wasn’t– I couldn’t call it a business because I wasn’t an owner. I was basically just the, the main [00:07:00] employer, one of the main employees. And then I got burnt out, and it, it, it really made me want to quit and go back into the corporate world.

Um, but luckily did a reassessment, got, um, got some third party advisors into the business, showing us what we’re doing right, what we were doing wrong, where we can put systems and processes, procedures in place. And from that point on, we started to scale pretty heavily until we decided to finally, uh, get into the commercial real estate, um, space or self-storage spec-specifically

Tim Melanson: Hmm. When you say we, who was we at the time?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, so when I started the business, it was just me, and every time I would get a quick win, you know, a small check here or there, 6,500, 10,000, I would take a picture of it and I would send it to my best friend that, uh, was my random, uh, randomly assigned roommate in college freshman year, uh, Steven. So eventually, you know, s- Steven was being a g- good guy about it.

He didn’t like his [00:08:00] job. He wasn’t making a lot of money, and, uh, he eventually said, "Listen, you either gotta stop sending me pictures of these checks or you gotta show me how to do this business." And I said, I, you know, "I thought you’d never ask." So finally brought him in w- and since then we’ve been, um, we’ve been 50/50 partners all the way

Tim Melanson: Wow. Okay, that’s awesome. And so w- uh, if you were to do it again, like would you do it any different or did you need to get to that, to that burnout mark before you could hire?

Fernando Angelucci: No, no, I would have done it. Knowing what I know now, you know, a decade or more later, I would’ve started larger. So a lot of people think that you have to start small and then bank, you know, a l- a little bit of cash here and there to eventually get to the point where you can go to the next level, and then do the kinda the same thing.

That takes a ton of time. And when you look at, you know, our lives, people don’t realize kinda how finite it is. One of the things that I like to do is break down what your life expectancy is into weeks, [00:09:00] and then see what you’re doing on a weekly basis, and you really don’t have a lot of time. So why put the same amount of effort in going after, let’s say, a $100,000 payout when you can put the same amount of effort into going for, for a 10 million or a $20 million payout?

So what I realized in the beginning is that I should have just started adding zeros onto what my goals were and what type of deals I wanted to do, and then realized that I don’t… Again, uh, going back to the previous, the previous no- uh, point, I didn’t need to do everything, and that includes my money. I didn’t have to use only my money.

I could have s- from the beginning, started raising capital from external, you know, third parties to help build the dream, and then give them a great return along the way. And that’s how we’ve been able to scale so quickly over the last, you know, seven to eight years, is by focusing on the point that doesn’t need to be my cash equity, it doesn’t need to be my debt.

You know, someone else can, can sign on the debt for me, as long [00:10:00] as they’re properly compensated. You know, as long as I have the, the operational wherehow, the opportunities, the deal flow, um, I can put that all together much faster. So I w- I just wish f- for… You know, in the beginning, I was flipping $40,000 houses on the south side of Des Moines, Iowa, when I could have already just been building 10 million, $20 million assets from the get-go

Tim Melanson: Wow. Well, was there some people that came into your life that helped you, to help you teach this stu- or to teach you this stuff, or?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So this is one of the things that I always tell kinda new real estate investors is, you know, s- surround yourself with people that are successful in your field. Um, there’s, there’s a great saying, I forgot who said it, but you’re the average of the five people you spend the most amount of time with.

So, you know, if you’re spending time with a bunch of people that are making minimum wage, you’re probably going to be making minimum wage. But if you have the ability to surround yourself with people that [00:11:00] are, you know, at the next level or the next two or three levels of where you wanna get to, that will start rubbing off on you.

So easy ways to find this, there’s always local meetup groups, um There’s also, you know, paid membership groups. So if you wanna get really serious about your craft or your trade, you know, you gotta go to the places where, you know, most of the masses aren’t allowed to go because there’s some type of paywall.

Um, and in most cases, that paywall makes sense because then, you know, the, the guys that are doing 100 million a year, they’re not gonna go to the, you know, the community center free meetup on a Wednesday afternoon or Wednesday night, right? They’re gonna go to the 35, $50,000 a year paid, you know, once quarterly, once a, a week-long trip.

So these masterminds are super important. Um, I have always been parts of masterminds g- going through the business, uh, you know, life cycle. I, I learned this from, uh, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, where he talks [00:12:00] about masterminds and how important they are. So I’ve always had a general business mastermind.

Didn’t have to necessarily be about my, my asset class or industry. Uh, and then I would also be a part of a, a, a mastermind that was specific to what I was trying to do at that time. And, you know, you don’t have to start at the $50,000 level. What I always tell people is set aside a number of top-line revenue for educational purposes.

So, you know, start with 1% or 5%. I think 5% is pretty aggressive, but if you wanna scale faster, that’s how you do it. And then that money goes into a special education account. And in the beginning, it may only be a couple hundred bucks, but a couple hundred bucks can buy you some really awesome books, right?

Then all of a sudden you maybe get 1,000 bucks or 2,000 bucks, and that’s a great three-day weekend course that you could pay for. And then very quickly that starts growing, and then all of a sudden you have 10,000 in that account or 20,000. Now you can start paying to get into those higher level rooms, those higher level groups where you [00:13:00] really…

It’s crazy how fast you can compress learning. Something that took somebody 20, 30 years to learn how to do, just by being next to them and, and going to these, these masterminds, you can compress all of that knowledge, all the, the successes and failures that they’ve had into a period of one year for you.

So now you’ve– you’re getting to catapult and almost, you know, skip over all of that pain and heartache and discovery that someone else had to go through. So I always tell people, you know, you can learn from other people’s successes, but you can also learn from other people’s failures. But to learn from people’s failures, you have to be in a room where people are willing to be vulnerable and share those true failures.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Well, I mean, and then that’s the next question. Like, h- uh, what do you think is in it for them to be vulnerable and share those failures and, and, and help you?

Fernando Angelucci: You know, they’re in the room for the same reason. They’re trying to grow and, and level up. Um, there’s that old adage that, you know, two heads are better than one. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh [00:14:00] perspective for somebody to see something that you have been stuck on for one, two, three years, and sometimes it comes from somebody in a different industry than yours.

Because in their industry, they do things a little bit differently. They look at problems differently the, than the way that you look at problems in your industry. That’s why I always say it’s important to not only be in a mastermind that is industry specific, but one that’s just general business, ’cause then you can learn how other industries are tackling problems.

So they’re there to, to learn as well. It’s not like these are people that aren’t getting anything out of the groups. The people that go to these groups, typically the structure is you go… It’s multiple days. They’re broken into rooms, and then each person has to present anywhere between 30 to, you know, 50-minute presentation on a give that they’re giving to the group, something that they learned, something that they think is valuable to the group.

And then at the end of that presentation, they have maybe 10 minutes for an ask. Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what I’ve been struggling on. You know, q- Q&A. Let’s, let’s figure it out together in this room. So it’s kinda like a sounding board, [00:15:00] almost like a, a board of directors that you don’t have to pay for their insurance and healthcare, et cetera.

So it, it’s, it’s super awesome structure

Tim Melanson: Yeah, and sometimes you can learn from somebody who is even at the beginning of their journey because, uh, maybe you might have gotten away from some of the fundamentals, right? And you’re like, "Oh, geez, I used to do that, and I got success, and now I’m stuck," and maybe that might be the kind of the aha that you get from someone who’s just getting started, right?

Fernando Angelucci: 100%. 100%.

Tim Melanson: So now you do a lot of traveling. H- how do you, how do you set up your, your, your jam space, your, your home office if you keep on moving?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So the, the key is to have a, an office that is easy to set up and take down on, on a moment’s notice, but then also to have kind of processes and procedures in place to make sure that you’re always in a reliable space or reliable mindset. So for example, anywhere I’m traveling, I do a lot of podcasts.

I always find podcast studios to rent. So this is not in my office. This isn’t a virtual [00:16:00] screen. This is a real podcast studio that I rent on a, you know, on an hourly basis. Uh, the other thing is to kinda… For me, because I try to travel as light as possible, I travel around with just one backpack. It’s a travel backpack.

I think it’s 45 liters. Um, so my workspace has to be super refined. So laptop, phone, um, a Wi-Fi- uh, satellite Wi-Fi, uh, just in case I, I’m in an area where there isn’t reliable internet. Or like we were talking before we started recording, you know, there was a period of time where I worked from a Airbnb that I rented in the middle of the, of the, the tropical rainforest, so there was no internet connection there at all.

Um, and then, you know, making sure that you have a proper work hygiene. So just because you’re working from home, I mean, and this is just my opinion, so I’m sure there’s a lot of people that would disagree with this, but just ’cause you’re working from home doesn’t mean that you should be working in your pajamas, you know, rolling out of bed.

Treat it like I at least like to treat it [00:17:00] like I’m going to work. I get up, I take a shower, I brush my teeth, I eat breakfast, I put on work clothes, and then I go into my work space, wherever I set up that space to be. Typically, it’s not in the space that I’m relaxing in because that mental separation is not only good for when you’re trying to get things done on the work side, but then also when you’re on the, you know, the, the balance side, the work-life balance side.

You know, when you’re done working, when are you actually done working? F- and for me, it’s I put away all my stuff, I take off my work clothes, I put on my chill clothes, and I’m done for the day. Um, because, like I said, you want– Uh, for people that have been business owners for long enough, burnout is a real problem, and if you lose your passion for what you’re doing, all of a sudden you’re in a nightmare of your own making.

So you gotta make sure to set boundaries, just like you would set with someone else paying you. You know, you’re not gonna answer phone calls and emails on the weekend when you’re with your family. Why would you do it in your own business, [00:18:00] right? So just making sure that you have that, that proper hygiene is super important.

Tim Melanson: Wow, that’s, that’s really good. I remember actually when I was first starting to do, uh, cold calls, I, I actually did put on a suit and tie to make phone calls, and it, it actually did help. I, I was, I was more confident on the phone. It, it just was, it is what it is, right?

Fernando Angelucci: Look good, feel good. You know what I’m saying?

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Now, uh, I, I imagine that, uh, it might be a little bit weird for the people around you.

Like, what are you doing sitting in your office with your, with your suit on? But I mean, hey, if it works, it works, right?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, exactly. There’s a ton of books on, on, uh, the psychology of this exact aspect of working from home and how do you separate work-life balance that I’ve read, and it’s– I think it’s super important. It may seem weird, it may seem cheesy, but it really does have awesome results, uh, both from stress levels and from, you know, being laser-focused when you are in work mode, and then being super relaxed when you [00:19:00] go out of work mode into, you know, chill mode or, you know, I’m at home.

You know, ’cause y-you’re in the same space usually. You’re in your home, you just move from, I don’t know, your kitchen or your office to your, to your living room, or in some cases, like when I first started, I was in a st- a studio apartment. So there was no different zones, if you will. You ha- I had to, like, make my own zone.

So that’s why I forced myself to, you know, put away all my things, put them out of sight, ’cause just even seeing my laptop would, would start making me think about th- work again when it was 9:00, 10:00 PM. It just started disrupting my sleep. That’s not healthy. So making sure that you have proper work hygiene, I think, is one of the most important things, um, for your kinda jam space if, you know

Tim Melanson: Now I don’t, uh, I don’t remember, um, I, I don’t know what’s going on in, in, uh, school systems today, but I know when I was going to school, I don’t remember a real big, um, curriculum on cash flow and, and that kind of stuff. And I, I’m wondering, like, uh, is, you know, how do you learn [00:20:00] that? How do you keep that going?

H- how do you make sure that you’re making more than you’re putting out? Like, do you keep an eye on those numbers every day? Do you have somebody

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So, you know, there’s obviously levels to this. So at the beginning it was, it was just me. Now I have a full, you know, bookkeeping team and an accountant to handle that stuff for me. But in from the beginning, you know, for your listeners that are thinking about taking the plunge, you always gotta focus on your profit first.

I know this sounds kinda backwards. Most people think, "Hey, here’s the revenue, pay all your expenses, and then whatever’s left over is what I’m gonna take home." But what you end up realizing is expenses start growing as the business start growing. So if you don’t take profit off the table, you have problems.

So there’s a really good book, I’m, I’m s- blanking on the author, but the name of the book is called Profit First. I really recommend people take a look. I not only use that system in that book for the business and the, the multiple businesses that we have, but then also for my personal life. I created a profit first flow that makes sure that I’m taking [00:21:00] chips off the table all the time because I…

You know, in these masterminds, I’ve met guys that, you know, that they had successful businesses for a decade, two decades, and all of a sudden they f- they file for bankruptcy. How can that be? Right? How can you be successful for multiple decades and then have nothing to show for it at the end? And it’s usually ’cause they were never taking chips off the table.

They just kept reinvesting into the business and then all of a sudden, once the business was no longer viable because either the economy changed or we had a p- global pandemic or whatever happened, they had nothing to show for 20 years of work. So I think that’s a huge mistake that a lot of people make right off the bat.

So definitely read Profit First. I think it’s Mike Michalowicz, I think is the name of the author. Super cool guy. I saw him speak in person, really animated dude. Um, so go out and ch- and check out that book. And then the second thing that I’d, I’d tell people to focus on is when you’re… You know, you gotta have clear goals.

So when you go into business [00:22:00] being extremely vague, um, you don’t really go anywhere. It’s like getting into a car without a GPS or a map, and then just driving hoping that you’re gonna get to your destination. That doesn’t work. So the other book that I tell people to read is, uh, Traction by Gino Wickman, Gino Wickman.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman, and it basically shows you how to set up a operating system for your business with very clear and concise goals on a 10-year, three, five or three-year, one-year, 90-day, one-week, and daily level. So you know exactly where you are and ha- you have a scorecard that you can easily look at to see, am I on track or am, am I not on track, and why?

So those are two books I really recommend for as far as cash flow management goes.

Tim Melanson: I love that. What other tools do you use? I mean, you’re, y- I mean, you probably have a pretty good tech stack, right? Be- being, with doing all your traveling. What, what, what do you use?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, now it’s been getting a lot easier, but when we first started this business over a [00:23:00] decade ago, um, the– we– you had to be very, um, nimble, and you had to be able to kind of MacGyver things together. Uh, now there’s a lot of full tech stacks that are kind of all, all-encompassing. But then what I found out is, you know, that the KISS method, keep, keep it simple, stupid, is still a really great adage to keep in mind because you can get, you know, over your skis and all of a sudden decide that this, you know, this Salesforce massive package that costs $10,000 a month that’s gonna solve all your problems will solve all your problems, and then it doesn’t.

So what I found is that, you know, e- I l- I live on Excel. I love Excel. No, no reason to migrate from that. Email, email client is great. Um, I do have a, a CRM that I use. It’s kind of… It’s called Asana, but there’s many similar to like ClickUp and Monday, and there’s a ton of them. Just kinda helps keep projects-oriented tasks, and the great [00:24:00] part about it is those tasks also have deadlines that they start pinging you via email or even text message if you allow it to, um, so you can kinda stay on track.

So, you know, as far as total tech stack goes, we have, um, Asana is where we live kinda most of the time ’cause that’s what keeps the rest of the team and the rest of the company oriented towards their specific goals for their specific departments, et cetera. But then also it flows up to the company-wide goals and what we as the owners are setting for everybody.

Um, and then, like I said, just kind of super basic stuff, keeping it simple. Excel, uh, G- we use Gmail. We use the, the corporate version of Gmail, but it’s still a Gmail account. Um, pretty, pretty basic. And then, you know, with, uh, with all the AI stuff that’s coming out nowadays, um, we, we do dabble a little bit into, you know, some of these LLMs that help reduce the amount of time it takes to produce certain deliverables like presentations [00:25:00] and, and summaries of financial data, things like that.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Um, and, and that’s the thing. I mean, sometimes these all-encompassing sort of tech stacks might be kind of mediocre at everything rather than picking something that’s, like, really good at what it does type thing, right?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, and then not only that, but then it’s also a single point of failure. So we saw recently when there was like a massive outage, I think it was the Cloudflare, C- Cloudfla-flare, something like that outage, took down something insane like 23% of the internet. So if you had everything in your business housed on one of these CRMs that was a do everything for you CRM, and now you have no access to that CI- CRM for gosh knows how long, that could be a huge problem in your business, especially if it, your business deals in kind of very tight deadlines and large money transactions, things like that

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah, and you see a lot of businesses running their, you know, their whole marketing on Facebook or whatever happens to be their social media platform too, which is super [00:26:00] dangerous, right? I mean, something could happen. You could lose your profile, right?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. Sing-single point of failure. You always want at least two to three vendors for every, every thing that you need, every vendor that, that, that you’re looking at to use, so

Tim Melanson: Yeah, I love that. Let’s get into your guest solo. So tell me what’s exciting in your business right now

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. So, uh, up until recently, how we’ve raised money for every one our deals were what are called single asset syndications, which means that when I need money for a deal, I go out and tell people, "I need money for this one deal." And the hard part about that is before I can raise the money, I have to get everything else lined up, the financing, the deal, everything.

Which mean- meant that I usually only had couple weeks, three to, three to eight weeks to raise all the money I needed for some of these projects that were pretty large, you know, $15, $16 million build that I had to raise $3 to $5 million on. The cool thing that I’m super excited about now is we have launched our [00:27:00] first fund, and it’s actually a general partner fund which offers kinda higher returns than what a limited partner fund would offer.

So now we have kinda like this, this, you know, this track record from the single asset syndications. All these investors are coming into the GP fund, which now means that we have cash to play with before we actually need the cash, which allows us to do some very creative things. So for example, when we’re negotiating, um, a purchase on a property, we can say, "Hey, here’s the regular price.

Here’s a severely discounted price, but we’ll pay you in 10 days. We’ll give you your entire purchase price," and it could be a couple million dollars, right, in 10 days. And usually there are some people that are willing to accept that because time is money to a lot of people. So super excited about the GP fund.

It is our first fund. It’s a $25 million fund, um, and it invests alongside me and Steven as the owner on a lot of these single asset syndications that we do. So, um, super excited about that. I know it may sound a little bit like gobbledygook to some of the [00:28:00] people that are out there, but in the syndication space it’s a, it’s a huge milestone.

Tim Melanson: Hmm. Cool. Now, what is the type of person that would benefit from that?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, so we help, um, you know, a lot of high income, um, business owners and W2 investors. So a lot of what we do is focus around tax advantageous structuring of deals. So for example, we closed on a deal in Rochester, New York, uh, at, uh, on New- uh, literally on New Year’s Eve. Um, and every investor that invested into that project, for every dollar they invested in, they got to write off 90 cents on their, uh, tax returns, uh, for any passive investments on their K1.

So that was huge, and it helped a lot of our investors out that were trying to, you know, plan taxes. They, maybe they didn’t, uh, hold tax money in a reserve account as they were working throughout the year, which I know has happened to a lot of new business owners. [00:29:00] It happened to me when I was a new business owner.

You know, because now no longer it’s being taken out of your paycheck ahead of time, you’re just getting all that money and then you forget to set things aside. So then they come scrambling to me and say, "Hey, Fernando, I have a $300,000 tax bill. I have $50,000 to pay this. What am I gonna do? Can you help me out?"

I said, "Actually, I can. I have these deals that you can invest in that will lower your tax burden." So, um, y- you know, typically high, high income W2 earners, uh, business owners, especially if you’re a business owner that you have passive gains that you need to offset, we’re very good at offsetting those

Tim Melanson: Hey, interesting. All right. And, uh, I mean, that leads to something that we could have talked about earlier, which is the tax issue, right, in, in your business and making sure that you save enough money for the taxes, right? Wow. So now how would someone f- what’s the process of someone finding out more information about this?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, so there’s, there’s– I always tell people there’s kind of two ways to reach me. So if you’re more of a active outreach guy, you’re a cold [00:30:00] caller, you’re a sales guy, you’re, you’re listening to this right now and you’re just like, "Fernandez, just give me your number. I wanna call you right now," here is my cellphone.

My, my real cellphone number is 630-408-8090. So for all my extroverts out there, 630-408-8090. If you’re somebody that’s more of an introvert, let’s say, or a little bit slower to, uh, reach out when you have questions or, or interests, you know, I always tell those, those folks to go to our website. It’s www.ssse.com, and there you can find out all about us, what we do, uh, the 100-plus podcasts I’ve been on, um, a f- a FAQ page with video responses to every question.

I think we got like hundreds of questions on there. Uh, and then if you want to schedule a call on your own time and terms, there is a link that you can go right to my calendar, and you can schedule a time that works for you

Tim Melanson: Okay, awesome. All right, so before [00:31:00] we go, let’s talk a little bit about music. Who’s your favorite rock star?

Fernando Angelucci: It’s a tough,

Tim Melanson: Yeah

Fernando Angelucci: a tough question. Um I mean, I know we were talking about this before. I don’t know if I can pick one of the guys in the band, but my favorite band of all time is Umphrey’s McGee. It’s a jam band. They are pretty rock heavy for a jam band. So I’d say if, if you’re allow, allowing me to answer with a whole

Tim Melanson: fine. Yep.

Fernando Angelucci: Okay. Umphrey’s McGee

Tim Melanson: Awesome. Right on. And so y- you like, w- what do you, have you seen them in concert? Or like, how, how, do you follow them?

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve probably seen them more than 40 times live. I go to the, you know, I go to the music festivals that they headline. I, I camp out in a, in a tent. Nowadays I’m getting a little bit older, so it’s more of a, I rent an RV and then rent an RV space to g- camp out instead of just being on the ground like I used to.

But yeah, I, I follow them around all the time. I love the, I love the music [00:32:00] festival culture and the food and, uh, exploring new music that you hear just from walking from one stage to another stage. So really love that

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever played an instrument?

Fernando Angelucci: I have. So, uh, piano, guitar, I sing. Um, nowadays it’s more of a hobby than, than something I spend a lot of time on. But, you know, high school, college days, I, I was playing guitar a couple hours every day. Piano when I was at home. My parents have a piano in their house. And now, uh, like we were talking before we started recording, uh, because I travel a lot, I go to countries sometimes where I don’t speak the native language.

I found that one of the easiest ways to connect to people that don’t speak your language is to go up onto the stage and sing some karaoke, and you end up making a lot of friends for life real fast.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. That is an awesome, awesome tip for sure. Rayon, well so, thank you so much for rocking out with me today, Fernando. This has been a lot of fun

Fernando Angelucci: Yeah. It has been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on, Tim

Tim Melanson: No [00:33:00] problem. And to the listeners, make sure you go to workathomerockstar.com for more information. We’ll see you next time on the Work at Home Rockstar podcast