Business Loan Broker Success Story-Sebastian’s Side Business

Oz:
Hey everyone, this is Oz here. I am doing another member interview within my Business Lending Blueprint community. I am with a very special guest here. This member in our community has been really successful. Sebastian, how are you doing here buddy?
Sebastian:
It’s great to meet everybody and see everybody.
Oz:
Absolutely man. Definitely nice to meet you as well. So let’s get started. So I want to know your background. So who are you, what you’ve been doing and what brought you here?
Sebastian:
So I’ve been in the gym industry for a long time. I’ve had a long IT background. I’ve had a long background in the financial industry as well too. I worked for a lot of firms in Chicago, was a prop trader for a long time, had my own IT business and been in the gym industry. And it got to the point where I started working so many hours, doing so many different things. Opened up a gym here in Chicago, doing very well. But it takes up a lot of your time. I kept seeing you in the studio over and over again and it’s just like I still want to do that, love to do that. But I wanted something more.
Sebastian:
I wanted to also build another business, my own business to where I have full control. Control over everything. So I worked in a lot of different fields and I want to expand that. I always want to do better. And now finding your blueprint, your group, it’s been really helping me open my own business. It’s actually my own. Something I have full control of, something where I don’t have to depend on somebody or go to someplace. And I absolutely love it.
Oz:
Got it. Yeah, that’s awesome. So like you said, you had many variable, various experiences in different industries and you said you started your own gym?
Sebastian:
Yeah. So I manage, I’m the general manager of a gym here in Chicago. Obviously it was a startup. It’s doing very well. Ideally we want to open more locations. But at the same time, you’re also overworked. You’re working 50, 60, 70 hours a week, which is fine because it’s your business. But sometimes you want to do something a little bit more hands off [crosstalk 00:02:13] time to… Something where you don’t always have to be there every single day, seven days a week, so many hours. A great opportunity, but something, hey let’s grow. Let’s do something even more. Let’s do something where you could double, triple, quadruple your income where it’s endless possibility too.
Oz:
100% man. Yeah. That’s the problem with a lot of business opportunities. Yeah. I mean, if you’re an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t have any problem working hard anyways, but like for how long, right? That’s the challenge. You can put 40, 50, 60 hours in a week, but hoping that at some point you don’t have to put in that much. But a lot of the traditional business models, they don’t have that structure. So you’re going to have to keep putting that amount of number of hours over and over again for many years until you find out one day, “Oh my God, I bought myself a job and I can’t get out because I have employees that I’m responsible towards, my customers and things like that.”
Oz:
So business ownership is great regardless of what business you own, but at the same time… So you got to be careful if you’re really running your business or you’re buying yourself a full time job, sometimes more than full time job. So I like that you have the experience to be able to compare that type of business. There’s nothing wrong with that versus a business they can highly automate. So obviously you’ve been in the market looking for a better business opportunity. What kind of peaked your interest about this one? In becoming a business loan broker?
Sebastian:
So with something like this coming from a financial background as well to being a prop trader, I know in the financial industry anything involved with money if you’re working directly with money, big businesses, there’s always a lot of money, always a lot of money being transacted. More companies are always either looking to raise, get capital, funds. And just like I saw on one of your videos and a good point that you made before is year over year, the searches for people looking for money or small businesses looking for money or people starting their own businesses is huge.
Sebastian:
There’s so many startups, small businesses looking for this, that and the other thing. And me being a startup at the gym that we’re at, it’s like you see it, it’s real. You understand what the real need is for money, why cashflow is so important. And it really sparked my interest because it was something so different. You weren’t selling a course to do Amazon this or you weren’t trying to do a drop shipping thing and dealing with all these customers. You’re dealing with business owners, you’re dealing with people that need the money, they want it. It’s high value and it’s something where you could do on your own, you could build a team. It’s something that you could even scale to. And I think it’s fantastic.
Oz:
Yeah, I think it’s a very simple, you’re kind of satisfying a very simple, basic need, right? So there’s no intermediary products or there’s no shadows. It’s just someone needs fricking money, right? So they need it for employees, for your company for startup growth purposes, for marketing, for buying a new fridge, new truck, or hiring somebody for growth. Once you become a business owner you understand what that really means, right? So you understand how important it is to have cash in your bank account because without that it’s really debilitating.
Oz:
You can’t really do much and millions of businesses, they go through that thought process every single day and they lose sleep over that and they need money only to find out that, Oh, the banking system is not really designed to support them and it’s designed to give money to the bigger guys, especially after 2008 and that’s a big problem. We can’t just ignore that. And now here we are in a position to help these guys and put money in their bank account as fast as possible. I think there’s something to say about that. Is a huge help. And for someone like yourself who is ethical and want to do the right thing, you can just help so many people without hiding behind, like you said, a physical product or anything like that. It’s just you providing money and they can do whatever they want with that.
Sebastian:
And it’s great because what’s nice too is these people come back to you. You build a book of business and just like you talked about before, that you build these relationships. People are always going to come back to you because you’re going to be their confidant. You’re more than just their broker. You’re going to be the expert as far as helping fund their business, what they need. And a lot of business owners, a lot of people that start businesses have no idea about the financial industry. People don’t even understand what their credit score is. They don’t even understand how it works. So if you could help navigate that to a lot of people and build value, they’re going to keep coming back to you over and over again, whether it was just to you or you have a team of 40, 50 people. You’re going to be their go to person.
Oz:
Yeah, 100%. It’s great point. And another thing that’s been shifting in this industry over the past, I mentioned this on one of our weekly Q&A calls in the community, is that now if you build that portfolio very strongly, there’s a possibility that you can exit out without selling your company, right? So this only used to happen in one other industry, which is credit card processing. Right now all the big guys are understanding the value of the brokers. So it’s so relationship based. Of course they want money at the end of the day. But like you said, there is so much consulted approach going into it. Like they don’t know how they’re going to get this, right? They know that they understand the level awareness is at the problem stage? Well I have a problem, I need money.
Oz:
Well what’s the solution? I have no idea. They need someone to explain that. Not someone who’s going to pitch them, not someone who’s going to badger them with phone calls and text messages and emails and things. A consultant who’s going to answer their questions, help them understand their options. And when you have a portfolio of these people that have become so valuable, not only to you, but also to the big guys who want to buy that from you. So even if someone wanted to build a portfolio for a couple of years and exit out, now it is possible more than ever. So that’s the beauty of this. Because in this day and age, people are bombarded with so much misinformation. When they find someone who’s good and who can give them reliable information, they want to cling to that person. That’s why the renewable rates are really high.
Oz:
People aren’t [crosstalk 00:08:30] for those of you guys watching, you might not know what our new rule is. So if Sebastian provides funding to somebody and they need more funding three months from now, they come back and they get funding from him. That’s free money. Already he’s done the work the first time. The second time he’s just, it’s literally a phone call to get more funding. That’s called renewal. So that could happen anywhere from twice to five, six times through the life of that relationship. And so when you have 50 of those clients… Like you might be down to shore and you working off of your laptop and you might just get a phone call from one of your ex clients who can provide more income for your family because you’re helping them get the money they need, right?
Oz:
So from that perspective, it has a lot of benefits that the traditional businesses do not have. First of all, you’re not stuck in a specific geography, right? A lot of the small businesses, no matter how good of a marketing you do, you can only bring customers from a certain mile radius. No one from California is going to usually fly to New Jersey to come to your location because they can’t find a business local near them. So we don’t have that locality problem. But I want to bring it specifically back to your experience, Sebastian. So after so many various experiences on different industries, different businesses and different jobs and things like that, you chose this and you became a part of our community. In relatively short amount of time, you had success. So let’s talk about your success and what’s been happening recently.
Sebastian:
Okay. So the first month I got the course. It was great slowly going through the videos and I was like, “You know what, if I’m going to do this, I got to do this.” And before I even finished anything, you got to set everything up. I’m one of those people where I have to dive in, I have to learn it, I have to do everything on my own. I want to understand how the whole process works. So as I’m watching your videos, I’m sending out my LLC. As I’m watching another course, I’m setting up the Facebook stuff. If I’m watching something else, I have to do it, I had to just dive in. It’s a very short timeframe. Things start to happen. The biggest thing that I could tell people is, be consistent.
Sebastian:
Okay. And this is with anything. I’m building this as a real business, not a fly by night type of company or I’m just doing this for the short time. I want to do this for the longterm and the growth is there. You just have to want to do it. And just like in the blueprint, you lay it all down. You tell everybody, “Hey, X, Y and Z. This is what you have to do. These are the steps you have to go through.” Everybody just has to do it. Now it’s like I wake up, I have 10, 15 missed text messages from clients. Fifteen, twenty emails that I got to respond to. I got lenders, I got to submit documents too. People have questions. I have three, four calls a day, easily scheduled. Three months ago I’d be lucky if I had one or two a week. Now my calendar, full.
Oz:
And that’s because you kind of paid your dues and stayed consistent, right? It’s no magic. It’s not a surprise to me why he has that many appointments, it’s just building that massive mountain high pipeline. Now I was just reaping the benefits and consistently still plugging yourself in. I mean you kind of nailed it man. Just like in any program, we have different personality types. Some people kind of jumped through the course, right?
Oz:
They do module one, lesson one. They jumped into module six and come back and some get their funding within a week. Some take a couple of months. It just, you’ve got to know your personality. Now you knew yourself from the beginning. I got to set up everything, the foundation. I got to understand mentally it needs to sink in for me to do anything. You let that happen, you stay consistent. You knew that it’s a process like you’re learning your brand new business. If you think about it. You didn’t know nothing, almost nothing. Maybe you knew something, but almost nothing about this when you first started out. Now you’re in a position to be an expert in a relatively short amount of time to help people with their financial decisions. I think that’s pretty amazing to be able to get to that level that fast.
Sebastian:
And 100% as a business owner, you have to have understanding of every single part of your business, whether you like it or not, because you’re going to have to explain it to somebody else. You’re going to be that leader. If you’re going to build a team, you have to be able to explain it and teach it to somebody else. So it’s like you have to be an authority figure. Anything that you do, you have to be confident in, and that’s talking to anybody doing anything. You want to lead by example and you want to do it well, you don’t want to half-ass everything. You want to be able to put your best foot forward in every situation.
Oz:
Yeah, because you’re representing yourself. You’re the company, right? So when you become a business loan broker, it’s not this brand or logo that you’re hiding behind. You’re not a big corporation. You are the dude or the lady helping these businesses and that’s why they’re coming to you because they want to work with you. The more likable you are, the more consultative you are, they’re going to keep coming back. And that’s what you’ve been experiencing especially recently. So, talk about some numbers. So how many deals have you been funding and what’s the income so far?
Sebastian:
So I started off, I mean with this, I still have my full time job, which I do and this is nice side income so far. From what I’m doing, I’m making about four to five thousand a month just doing this. And this is after two months of solo funding deals and that’s my average so far. And the rate that I’m going at, it’s going to start growing. And everything just adds up to whether they’re purchasing a smaller product, the line of credit, whether they’re doing on an SBA. Maybe I’m not getting that big deal yet for a $500,000 loan or anything like that. But it’s in the works, it’s in the process, and it’s just more of meeting people. Now it’s like, okay, hey you still have your full time job. Awesome. Now you’re making an extra four, five thousand a month doing this from the house?
Sebastian:
It’s ridiculous. You know what I mean? You can be working in your underwear all day if you really want it to. And it’s just nice. Sure, you’re not making $100,000 yet, but it’s a scalable business. You have to start somewhere and you have to set realistic expectations. At least for me, I was thinking, “Oh man, what if I get my first deal in the first week and I’m making $10,000 a month in the first month.” Okay, that’d be great. But it’s probably not going to happen to me. First two months, like I said, didn’t make anything. Second month you’re making $1,000, $2,000 then you’re three, four, five, six. It just starts to grow. And then the more time you put into it, the more you could scale it, the more you’re going to grow as well too. The more applications that you’re going to do, the more people you talk to.
Sebastian:
If I did this a full 50 hours a week, 40-50 hours a week, you grow 10 times as much. There’s only so many hours in a week you could do this if you have a full time job. But this is what you want to grow into another actual career or something that actually you could do on your own, you could get away from that grind, get away from that office at work. You’d be your own boss and start a team of people if you wanted to. You could go anywhere with this type of business. And this type of business is not going away. More companies, the more money, more people don’t want to work for big corporations. They want to work for themselves and that’s where you come in and you could help all these companies as much as you can with any type of funding.
Oz:
Yeah, I mean, I think the feeling against the big corporations are record high right now, right? People are kind of running away from these customer service lines and a customer service being transferred to India and other countries and things like that. They’re looking for somebody that they can work with who can answer the phone and they can text them. Maybe they can talk to them. Like you said, you’re building as… I know you’re not building it as a side gig, but as of now, you’re building a side business that makes a full time income that some people make by putting in 40, 50, 60 hours a week, right? So it’s not easy.
Sebastian:
If they’re lucky.
Oz:
If they’re lucky, if they have a good job, good boss and good products they’re putting in that much. So some people spend a lifetime to get promotions, to make five grand a month. Now in a couple of months you’re building your side business while you keep your full time business.
Oz:
Because why would you not until you get to a comfortable spot and you can just put that and put your full time into this and make ya up to quarter million, 300,000 and you know members are doing that. That’s an amazing story. Thanks for being super transparent with your experience and how things are going. So obviously on our YouTube channel and throughout advertising, hundreds of thousands of people watch us every single month. What would you recommend someone who might be in a similar position to you where a couple of months ago they are looking for the right business to start. I just don’t know what to look for and things like that. What would you recommend to kind of maybe someone like yourself five, six months ago.
Sebastian:
I tell people this all the time and this goes back to the gym industry. This goes back to everything. Stop thinking. Just do it. Just sign up. Go for it. You’re never going to find out until you actually do it. This is a great opportunity that’s in front of you. You just have to put your best foot forward and just do it. If you’re going to keep thinking about it, you’ve got to think about this six months later or a year from now, two years from now, stop wasting time. The best time to do anything is right now. If you don’t do it right now, you’re never going to do it. You have to do it now. Get started with it, get through everything, get everything going. That’s my biggest recommendation. Be consistent and just start now.
Oz:
Awesome man. That’s such a great, powerful advice from someone who does it every single day. So if someone doesn’t really know about us and the blueprint, what’s one thing that you would say about us that they should know. Whether they join or not that’s a different story. But about the training, the community and things like that.
Sebastian:
The training is fantastic. It’s very easy to understand. You put it together very well. Everybody is super nice, super polite. Any questions that you have, they make it very easy to understand and they’ll take the time with you to explain anything and there’s a lot of people in the group. They’ll give you as much information as you need. They’ll help you. If you feel uncomfortable doing some things on your own, people will gladly jump in and help you. And it makes it very easy. The community is one of the best communities I’ve ever been in. The courses are great, very easy to explain. They walk you through everything, whether you’re tech savvy or not. They make this a very easy process for you, no matter how young or old that you are. And there are people in the community that will make this work for you. You just have to want to do it.
Oz:
Yeah. It comes down to personal accountability, right? Your commitment to yourself, not to me, not to anybody else, but to yourself. You put it very nicely, my friend. I know you’re a busy guy. You have a lot going on, so I don’t want to keep you any longer. Anything else I can do for you?
Sebastian:
You’ve been a fantastic help. I always enjoy speaking with you.
Oz:
Awesome, man. Great to know. Looking forward to your success. Take care now.
Sebastian:
Thank you. Take care.
Oz:
Thank you. Bye bye.