It’s rare to encounter an entrepreneurial journey where the head and heart are so enmeshed that the motivation to give is just as powerful as the desire to share in the spoils of success. One such example is Leo Pareja, a real estate superstar turned tech entrepreneur and natural-born leader with a memorable journey who offered brilliant insight and pragmatic advice about leadership on my Off the Clock podcast.
He was Keller Williams’ top agent worldwide at just 28 years old during his 15-year run there, as well as №1 on the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals’ Top 250 list — an organization for which he has helped push public policy to protect underserved markets. Then he became a technologist as co-owner of Washington Capital Partners, one of the largest private lending companies in the mid-Atlantic region, and co-founder and president of Remine, which delivers big-data visualizations and predictive analytics to real estate agents exclusively through their MLS. This dude is sharp!
But the best part of Leo, who initially thought he’d be a graphic designer-software engineer, is he’s a heart-driven person. Between mentoring at-risk youth in the Big Brother program and co-founding the Pareja Family Foundation with his wife Ariana, which provides tools and opportunities for women and minorities, Leo has always given back to his community with gusto. His coding boot camp enables people from varied backgrounds who lack higher education to earn two or three times what they were making.
Leo learned over time about the importance of understanding how people are wired, knowing their career aspirations and what motivates them to succeed. Then, it became a matter of getting employees on the right track and figuring out how to train, manage and encourage them along the way because happy people lead to big profits. He says taking a genuine interest in who they are will lead them to reciprocate on that goodwill and help create value.
Noting that an entrepreneur journey isn’t for the faint of heart, his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is to find a small-business leader they admire in an industry that interests them. Their mission is to shadow that mentor nearly day and night for five or six years and be willing to do pretty much anything. This strategy will seriously compress what normally takes 10, 15 or even 20 years to accomplish. His point is that energetic young people who don’t have a spouse and kids have nothing but time on their side. “I literally worked 12 to 18 hours a day for 10 years where I didn’t leave until 10 p.m. every single day, including weekends,” he told me.
This is what will separate mice from men — and women. Leo sees entrepreneurs becoming exhausted and overwhelmed. Their natural inclination is to knock off easy stuff on the to-do list so it feels like they’ve accomplished something. But the key to entrepreneurship, he explains, is whittling down and prioritizing tasks, then a willingness to focus only on the biggest items for the longest period of time.
Click on the following link to watch the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsul6cy2TKE&t=552s
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