IAM1950 – CEO Helps Investors Find the Right Property and Diversify their Investments

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

In this episode, the guest is Evie Brooks, a former advanced “Rich Dad Poor Dad” trainer, real estate educator/investor, and founder of My Panama Vacation Realty.

Key Points:

Evie's Journey: Evie started working in real estate and loved it. She became an investor, and her success led her to become a mentor for others. She now serves clients internationally.

Business Service: Evie specializes in educating and mentoring international investors to find the right real estate investments and diversify their portfolios.

Secret Sauce: Evie offers a niche market in the real estate industry, providing a program from start to finish, making it a stress-free experience for investors.

CEO Hack: Evie believes in standing on the shoulders of giants—surrounding yourself with people who are experts in their fields of expertise.

CEO Nugget: Evie advises seeking out the power team that you trust and who knows more than you on what you want to accomplish.

CEO Defined: For Evie, being a CEO means making a difference in other people's lives and helping them get on the right track to achieve their ultimate goal.

Evie Brooks Teaser 00:00

It takes money to make money. Be willing to spend the money to learn how to make the money that you ultimately want to make.

What I see so many times people going wrong, whether it's in real estate or any other business, is they'll go out and pick up a book and try to read a book about how to start a business of any type, and then 6 months, a year later, they're out of business.

Intro 00:22

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you are in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we were purposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on finishing it out, fighting the good fight and closing out the job. I think just as important as it is to start something, it's even more important in how you conclude it or finish it out. So if you think of the different things that you can finish out, it'd be everything from a project, it could be from a day, it could also be from a business in and of itself, and it can also of course be for the year. So when you think of finishing out, I want you to really think of these episodes because what we're going to really focus on is the last question that we really ask, which is defining what it means to be a CEO.

All the creative, innovative, and I think truly insightful questions that we received from this question is really what we want to highlight during the show. But of course, we want you to enjoy the entire episode and think about how you're going to finish things out and how you're going to finish things out strongly. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Evie Brooks of My Panama Vacation Realty. Evie, super excited to have you on the show.

Evie Brooks 02:22

Thank you. So glad to be here.

Gresham Harkless 02:23

Yes, I'm excited as well, too. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Evie so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Evie is a former advanced Rich Dad, Poor Dad trainer, Real Estate educator/investor, and My Panama Vacation Realty founder. Evie has guided thousands of investors for 24 plus years through the process of locating, evaluating, analyzing transactions for cashflow and ROI in 13 plus countries in 30 plus states in the United States.

Today she specializes in real estate and agriculture investments in Panama and does regular VIP tours for investors 14 maximum at a time where they visit hard to find deals and smart greenhouse farms. Evie's work has been featured on Joe Fairless: Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever. ESPN Cover Your Assets. Think Realty, The Real Estate Syndication Show, Women Investing Network, Voices America, Moving Abroad Podcast, Atlanta business Radio and many, many more real estate investing podcasts.

And as a disclaimer, Evie and her employees and her affiliates are not investment or Texas advisors in do not offer them investment advice, but they do phenomenal work. So Evie, super excited to have you on the show, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Evie Brooks 03:35

I am ready. Let's do this.

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Gresham Harkless 03:37

Let's make it happen then. So to kick everything off, I know I touched on your bio a little bit, but I wanted to hear a little bit more on what I like to call your CEO story.

We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

Evie Brooks 03:47

Mine is real simple. I was supposed to go into law school right out of college and I ended up getting pregnant with my first child and was extremely sick. I had a friend that came to my rescue and said, I've got a great job for you and it'd give you insurance benefits. That was in the real estate industry. So, I was in corporate America for 4 years. I never looked back. I never thought about leaving real estate. I got into it. I loved it. I was in the commercial division and after about three years, I realized I was sitting on the wrong side of the desk.

I needed to be on the other side. So I went out on my own as an investor and I've been doing that ever since. Shortly after I started investing, a lot of people started saying, will you teach me how to do what you're doing? I became a mentor by default, not knowing that I was a mentor and then I started professionally mentoring. And then I started teaching with the Rich Dad Organization in 2003.

In a nutshell, the summary of how that all came about.

Gresham Harkless 04:42

Nice. I appreciate you sharing that story. I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about your business. Could you take us through exactly how it works? How you serve and work with the clients that you serve?

Evie Brooks 04:52

That's a great word is serve. My calling, I think, in this life was to be an educator to help other people do what I've already done and have been blessed to do and I love it. I am so passionate about it, but we work with international investors that are looking to do one of several different things. Many of them. The reason I started in this industry internationally was when I was teaching with rich dad, I started teaching in the Costa Rica market for those that wanted to become expats. So that initially the driving force or the niche market if you will, was people that just wanted to become expats.

But as time has gone along, it's become a lot more than that. People are looking to diversify their investment to get them out of their home country. They're looking to have a plan B to have a place to go in the event that they need to leave their home country. Of course, you've got people that are looking for second homes, vacation homes and retirement homes. So, you've got a lot of different things, but realistically, since code has hit our market has been those that's looking for plan B, diversify their investments or move their hard earned revenues or dollars that they have an account offshore into hard assets so that they can protect them better.

Gresham Harkless 06:03

Yeah, that makes so much sense. Probably the next step is figuring out who to actually ask, who to lean on, who has that expertise to actually make that vision become a reality.

Evie Brooks 06:12

Many people think it's a lot more complicated than it is. And in some countries it is very complicated, but in Panama, it's easier than purchasing in your own backyard. So yeah, it really is. That's what makes it people that cannot build a portfolio here for whatever reason, they don't have the debt to income ratios.

Their FICO scores are not where they need to be. They don't have enough cash to be able to build a large portfolio. They don't understand how to leverage all those types of things that we teach people, but none of that is going to stop you from being able to purchase property in Panama, Central America.

Gresham Harkless 06:43

Nice. No, I appreciate you so much for breaking that down. And so, for people that want to learn more, it's just reaching out to you, going through some of the programs that you have, or just having a conversation and it just leads from there?

Evie Brooks 06:54

We start with a conversation and you can go to one of our websites and fill out an option page or just call me directly. My contact information's right there and I'll start with a 30-minute conversation to see where you are, what you want to accomplish, what your goals are. We start with basically a 5-year plan of action and then back into where you are today and how to accomplish that 5-year goal.

It's all about the education. It really is about understanding leverage and opium and other people's money and how to utilize your money that you have to work with in the most efficient manner. When people understand that, they can accomplish way more than they can by just going out and buying a property. People just think that they can go buy a property and hold it for 10 or 20 years and it's going to double in value.

There is such a more efficient way to be able to utilize those funds than doing that. And so that's kind of part of the whole training process that I do that. I work with each of my clients to accomplish that.

Gresham Harkless 07:47

Nice. I love it. Again, knowledge, the same knowledge is power so I love that you're able to provide that information and knowledge from that standpoint. So would you consider this to be what I like to call your secret sauce? I know you said it's fairly simple, but it sounds like you had a fair amount of expertise and knowledge and information.

Do you think your secret sauce is potentially your ability to be able to take that knowledge and information, maybe simplify it so that people can potentially execute on it?

Evie Brooks 08:12

There is no question about it because people get so consumed and they get so bogged down. They analyze to the paralyzed and you don't need to do that. It's not difficult. It's not hard If you have someone to work with you. I would say that my niche market is my secret sauce because there's nobody in Panama Central America that does what I do. I know the market like the back of my hand. I work with the developers to bring special deals to our investors exclusively.

They're not going to be able to go online or go directly to the developers office and say, I want this situation, this deal or whatnot, because that's exclusively for our investors. I've already done the legwork. I've done all of the due diligence, the reconnaissance, everything that's necessary. So, people aren't having to wonder, are they getting taken advantage of? Are they paying too much? Are they using the wrong professionals? Is this developer going to be in business? I've done all the research. I work with developers.

It's been around for 34 years. They've never gone down on any project, much less as a company as whole. They're financially secure. So, I've done all the legwork. What I do is just create a program that makes it simple A to Z from start to finish everything from the furnishings to the property management to the maintenance services to relocating your dog. Whatever it is that you need, we do everything all things Panama. And so we make it so that it takes it all the stress out of it and makes it a stress-free situation or opportunity for all of our investors.

Gresham Harkless 09:40

Nice. I love that. And what was coming to mind is Albert Einstein has this quote where he says you can see so much farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Evie Brooks 09:48

That is definitely the key. I know one of the questions that you'd like to refer back to is, what is one of your favorite business hacks? And you just said it sitting on the shoulders of giants. I have surrounded myself with people in my industry for as long as I can remember that know more about my industry and my business even than I do. I think that would be the key component right there is just understanding that you can't do it alone. You don't know everything.

I don't even begin to want to know the financial side of it, the CPA side of it, then, running the numbers part of it. I know how to run numbers, but I don't want to do the accounting, and I don't want to do the legal and I don't want to do the architectural design. I want to surround myself with the people that can do that. What I can do is find the deals and make money and that's what I want to teach other people how to do.

And so, when I surround myself as a whole in a business with other people that have all those levels of expertise that I don't have, the asset management team, we have the best asset management team, it's just makes the whole thing more productive and in the long run, much more successful.

Gresham Harkless 10:58

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So, I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Evie Brooks 11:11

That goes back to what we were just talking about. Seek out someone or your tribe if you will, a power team that has your best interest at heart that you trust and that knows way more than you do about what you're wanting to accomplish that can help you achieve those goals.

That is absolutely unequivocally going to be that hack that I would recommend.

Gresham Harkless 11:33

Nice. I love that. And do you feel like that was something that you picked on or you picked up I should say from early on that you were able to execute on or was it something that you progressed into?

Evie Brooks 11:43

You know, I have always been a numbers person from the perspective of how to take a little bit of money and make a whole lot of money out of it. And so that whole leverage thing that I learned about utilizing other people's money, and people just don't understand the power behind that. If you have 300, 000 dollars to invest, why put 300, 000 dollars into one 300,000-dollar property when you can put it in 3 or 4 or 5, which doubles, triples, quadruples, whatever the value of your portfolio, your rental income, your appreciation.

Every component of that plus, you've got multiple exit strategies with each of those instead of just one property that you've got, maybe one potential exit strategy. So, what you've done is you've not put all your eggs into one basket. That for me has been the key component of success in this business. If I had not learned that early on, I would not have the portfolio of real estate investments that I have today. No way.

Gresham Harkless 12:41

Yeah, absolutely. And going back to your nugget in your hat, do you feel like a lot of people are able to quote and quote, I don't know if that's the right phrase, but diversify a lot more largely because you don't try to lean and do everything.

If you understand your lane, to me it allows you to do that and lean into that where you could do that in multiple places rather than trying to do everything for that $300, 000 property or whatever property you might be. You get to stay in the lane on each of the different ones.

Evie Brooks 13:06

Yeah, people have got to stop stumbling over dollars to get the pennies. That's the mentality. And when people are like, oh, I'm not going to pay 14% for property management, I'll just do it myself, you don't know how to do it. Let somebody else that's an expert know how to do it and have you an 80% occupancy rate versus you doing it yourself and having a 45% occupancy rate. That's what I call stumbling over dollars to get to pennies.

When people understand that, and they can implement that, it takes money to make money, be willing to spend the money to learn how to make the money that you ultimately want to make. What I see so many times people going wrong, whether it's in real estate or any other business is they'll go out and pick up a book and try to read a book about how to start a business of any type, and then 6 months, a year later, they're out of business. Because they're not willing to spend the money or the time to make the sacrifices required to get the support and the mentorship that I refer to many, many times to have that success I promise you it pays off in the long term.

That's the way that you want to make sure that you have successes, to surround yourself with other people that know more about you and your industry than you do.

Gresham Harkless 14:16

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show.

So Evie, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Evie Brooks 14:26

Being a CEO to me means being able to make a difference in other people's life, helping other people to get on the right track, whatever that track is for them to accomplish their ultimate goal.

Gresham Harkless 14:36

Nice. I love that. And I love how you said on the right track, as I often say, if you run your own race, you can't lose. I love how that aligns exactly with that because I think so many times we can get on certain tracks and it doesn't lead us where we want to be.

But to be a true leader is really helping people to align with those goals and aspiration and get in that spot where they can actually progress towards that.

Evie Brooks 15:02

I agree with you 100%.

Gresham Harkless 15:04

Awesome. Evie truly appreciate that definition, and of course I appreciate your time even more. What I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a hold of you, your team and find about all awesome things that you're working on.

Evie Brooks 15:20

Great. Thank you so much for having me.

Gresham Harkless 15:22

Awesome. For people that want to get ahold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Evie Brooks 15:25

You can go to my website, mypanamavacationrealty.com. And then also eviebrookspanama.com

Gresham Harkless 15:39

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. To make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. But truly appreciate I appreciate you Evie for taking some time out. I definitely appreciate you for changing I think the perspective of the knowledge and information of people because a lot of times our reality is based off of how we think and what we're seeing outside.

When you're able to reframe that and change that, then really phenomenal things could happen. So thank you so much for reminding us of that, of course doing that for so many clients and people you work with as well, too, and of course I appreciate you.

I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:10

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, It's a community. Get your driven CEO gear at ceogear.co.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr.

Thank you for for listening.

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