Building a Personal Brand to Attract Investors & Raise Millions | Justin Freishtat

Justin Freishtat (00:00)

I’m not a Wall Street guy. I have no degrees. I didn’t go get my MBA. Like I didn’t intern at Goldman Sachs, any of those things, right? Which was actually a huge limiting belief is I thought that I couldn’t get into this game because of those things. But by networking, spending money to get proximity to get around people that have done it, I met a billion dollar fund manager who didn’t have a degree and that’s when I was hooked. I was like, well, anybody can do this.

Dylan Silver (00:11)

Right.

Justin Freishtat (00:21)

and I had been investing heavily into building my personal brand specifically on Instagram at the food companies when we exited. I just pivoted the content, started talking about the investments I had made as a limited partner and how I was now partnered with a new fund and raising capital. So DM outreach to all the podcasts in the space, wherever people that were wealthy were listening, I wanted to be there. I didn’t care if it was infinite banking, life insurance, crypto, stock trading, real estate. Like I went on as many shows as possible and then

the people who hosted those shows, it was okay, what in-person events do you have? Can I speak? I would pay to speak on stages and then raise capital. Like that’s how I did it. I had zero experience in my first year. I raised a little over 10 million in 11 months and haven’t looked back since. It’s been the greatest thing that I ever took a leap into.

Dylan Silver (02:38)

folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based out of beautiful Las Vegas, has built and sold companies to private equity, and now runs a Tennessee-based development fund. Please welcome Justin Freishtat Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin Freishtat (02:53)

Hey, it’s great to be here. Love talking real estate, love hanging out with people that are just trying to get better.

Dylan Silver (02:58)

I like it, I like it. I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking guests how they got into the real estate space.

Justin Freishtat (03:05)

me, it started as an ancillary thing to the company we were building. We were building a direct sales business and I always knew that real estate was going to be my wealth vehicle. So I started off small, just buying a primary residence, a little condo, living it for a year, save up enough capital to buy the next property and then just move on to the next one. That’s kind how I got started with just single units and then learning more about how it all works.

going to scale, started investing in bigger multifamily projects as a limited partner, and starting to learn the game from the LP side is where I just kind of knew I eventually when we exited that business, I wanted to be on the GP side of this game.

Dylan Silver (03:44)

Talk to me about scaling businesses. mean, even the vernacular is different. I’m a wholesale guy. I’ve worked in small teams. And I’ve worked with some bigger teams. But I also know that the real estate space has some lingo that’s very unique. And then scaling businesses and then all the…

work that that entails, but then also being able to navigate through those sometimes thorny spaces and thorny deals. What was that process like for you initially when you were at the first company that you sold and exited?

Justin Freishtat (04:13)

Yeah, scaling business is pretty much the same in terms of what the model is. You’re looking at margins, you’re looking at investment and marketing and cost scaling with the ad spend, all these different things like ROAS, all the terms everybody loves. But the cost of your infrastructure is a huge thing. We had a physical business where we had big utility bills, walk-in freezers, trucks on the road. We’re doing home delivery. So we were in a business that had relatively thin margins. It was very difficult to scale.

Well, and you learn this through experience that the vehicle you’re in is the most important thing to scaling. It’s not actually your skill set, how great you are at all these different parts of business. You have to have a product and a system that can scale. Like the model has to work. That was very difficult in what we did in the direct sales game. Home improvement companies or solar companies could pay their salespeople twice what I could because we didn’t have the margins for it. So I was always at a disadvantage to scale strictly off the vehicle and the model.

Dylan Silver (04:42)

Yeah.

Justin Freishtat (05:57)

That’s what brought me into the capital raising world, is there’s just no better margins to scale a business than raising money and deploying it into deals. So I think also looking at a recurring revenue model where your income is predictable versus surviving off of have to make a new sale every day is a very different thing. So I look at all those different things now in terms of what type of vehicle do I want to be investing my time in terms of building a business.

Dylan Silver (06:04)

That’s right.

want to pivot a bit here, Justin. Walk us through that first business. I heard walk-in freezers. What was that first business?

Justin Freishtat (06:29)

Yeah, we were doing farm to table food service before anybody was doing this, right? It was before the blue aprons. It was before Instacart, any of it. And the most difficult thing about being a pioneer in a space is that nobody wakes up in the morning and Googles what you do. So you have to create the market. So that’s just one thing I learned that I never want to do again is be that first person into the business. And I learned this because

Dylan Silver (06:35)

Yeah.

Justin Freishtat (06:53)

When the Blue Aprons and the Hellofreshs and all these big venture capital backed companies came into the space, you know, I’m panicking. I’m like, they’re going to take all the market share. We’re going to go out of business. It was the exact opposite. They spent so much money on marketing for food delivery. It put everybody in the market for what we did. And that was what helped us scale and actually exit that company. So very counterintuitive thing. And that’s what I learned. I would rather, you know, sell trash bags than home food delivery service because everybody’s going to go buy trash bags.

Dylan Silver (07:21)

I wanna ask you about maybe a granular question about that home food delivery. I’ve thought ⁓ quite often about this myself. You mentioned Blue Apron, some of these things. It’s almost like you mentioned the marketing that they’ve put into this. You just fills up your feed. You’ve got so many different options. But at that point in time, there wasn’t anything in the space. So what was it like going out to people? Were they aware that this was an option to them? know, at home food delivery type of thing? Or was this totally new to a lot of people?

Justin Freishtat (07:50)

It was totally new. So we had to do creative things in marketing. And this was back in, let’s say, 2005 to the 2010 era where we really didn’t have Facebook ads or any of that digital marketing side of things. So it was all boots on the ground stuff, partnerships with dieticians, trainers, gym owners, where we could go set up a booth on a Saturday when they’re doing the Murph at CrossFit or whatever, and then hand out samples, cook for the members, and then set appointments. So it took a little bit of education. We would do

all the home shows, trade shows, and it didn’t really matter if it was an RV show or a home improvement show, everybody eats. So anywhere that we could put a booth and talk to the community is how we really got that business going. And then when Facebook ads came out in digital marketing, we crushed it from 2015 to 2018. That doubled the size of the company. And then Facebook ads got way too expensive and then it didn’t pencil for the model anymore.

Dylan Silver (08:26)

Yeah.

Yep.

Justin Freishtat (08:45)

So it’s always gonna evolve. You’re never gonna have a silver bullet that lasts forever. I think that’s what everybody should really understand about marketing is you have to be on your toes looking for the next thing because everything burns out eventually.

Dylan Silver (08:56)

I want to ask you about raising capital. I’ve had a number of different people on the show who’ve raised lots of money, but from different backgrounds. I’d say I’ve had some people who come from Wall Street, where that’s what they did and that’s how they made a name for themselves. They take that into real estate and do a similar thing, whether it’s in syndications or attracting the right partners. What’s been your process, and how did you really learn to raise capital?

Justin Freishtat (09:22)

Building a personal brand was how I did it, right?

not a Wall Street guy. I have no degrees. I didn’t go get my MBA. Like I didn’t intern at Goldman Sachs, any of those things, right? Which was actually a huge limiting belief is I thought that I couldn’t get into this game because of those things. But by networking, spending money to get proximity to get around people that have done it, I met a billion dollar fund manager who didn’t have a degree and that’s when I was hooked. I was like, well, anybody can do this.

Dylan Silver (09:36)

Right.

Justin Freishtat (10:20)

and I had been investing heavily into building my personal brand specifically on Instagram at the food companies when we exited. I just pivoted the content, started talking about the investments I had made as a limited partner and how I was now partnered with a new fund and raising capital. So DM outreach to all the podcasts in the space, wherever people that were wealthy were listening, I wanted to be there. I didn’t care if it was infinite banking, life insurance, crypto, stock trading, real estate. Like I went on as many shows as possible and then

the people who hosted those shows, it was okay, what in-person events do you have? Can I speak? I would pay to speak on stages and then raise capital. Like that’s how I did it. I had zero experience in my first year. I raised a little over 10 million in 11 months and haven’t looked back since. It’s been the greatest thing that I ever took a leap into.

Dylan Silver (11:05)

I want to get a little granular. Maybe give away some of the gold, Justin, but not all of it. When we talk about raising capital, I’ve done a little bit of it. I haven’t executed on it, but I’ve gone around to people and said, hey, would you maybe invest in this deal type of thing? I’ve actually spoken with a syndicating attorney who actually said, Dylan, you’re probably not ready for that because there’s risk that comes with syndication. He said you should probably just look for partners.

granular getting into some detail here once you have people who are interested in investing with you They’ve given you a verbal commitment that you’ve sent the text or however it is and now you’ve met them shook hands Hey, I want to invest with you. How do you make that into a deal from there?

Justin Freishtat (11:45)

So it’s really just a sales process like anything else. It’s all right, here’s the fun documents. Step one is complete your PPM. How much do you wanna start with, Being very assumptive, but not putting pressure on people, right? Cause you’ve gotta move them down the chain. And I think when someone’s handing you their money as a limited partner, they are in a mindset of like, it’s stressful. Like that’s why they’re not the GP. So you need to make it very seamless for them.

and take them step by step and then you get the PPM done. It’s like, okay, now it’s time to do your KYC verification. I need your driver’s license and a utility bill that matches the same address, right? You just take them one thing at a time and then it’s, hey, you’re approved for funding. We verified your accreditation letter. That would be step three in the process. And then it’s, here’s the wire instructions. I’ve texted them to you and I’ve emailed them to you and then you can call me to get a three way verification to make sure that we absolutely have it right. So it’s like everything in sales,

is just making somebody so comfortable throughout the process. So I’m getting ahead of any anxiety, any insecurity they could have in the process. And on the front end of all of that, before they even say, want to invest with you, I’m trying to educate them with all the mistakes that I’ve made losing millions of dollars on the way to being on the GP side so they don’t have to go through that. That’s my favorite way of connecting, being vulnerable, and ⁓ telling people like, hey, this private placement space is a dog-eat-dog world.

and you’re gonna get hurt. Like accept that or don’t come in here. But you also won’t get those outsized returns. You won’t have the opportunity to make a whole lot more than the diluted returns you’ll get if you just dollar cost average into Wall Street.

Dylan Silver (13:10)

Yeah.

So many different ⁓ thoughts that I had while you were mentioning the steps and the process there. That was definitely some free gold that you gave our audience there. I think it’s definitely not straightforward. think so many people who are in the real estate, even in the real estate space, let alone other spaces, but the real estate space may have that kind of a limiting belief, well, hey, I don’t have this background or I didn’t do this and I don’t know exactly how this process works. Right now is probably the best time ever in history to be able to figure some

of this out and hearing it from yourself who came from a background that wasn’t like cut from the cloth of capital raising and then doing it really I think gives a lot of people that perspective. I wanna pivot a bit here and talk about the ⁓ fund that you’re a part of now, Tennessee Based Development Fund. I think Tennessee’s a really hot area for real estate development. I personally am a little bit ignorant but I also love Nashville. I’ve been to Nashville, I wanna go back, it’s a great place and that’s really what color

is my perspective of Tennessee as a whole. But what about Tennessee made you decide, hey, this is where we’re gonna really have the fun based out of?

Justin Freishtat (14:25)

Yeah, so that was a decision for our founder, Scott Boroff, him and coach Michael Burt, who’s the other partner in the fund. They’re the two founders and they’re both out of Nashville and Knoxville, right? So they brought me in. It was kind of a marriage of two different companies. Scott’s also the founder and CEO of Safe Space Global, the stock tickers SSGC. He’s taken several companies public. He’s taken a company to a $900 million market cap on Wall Street. So I was looking to

you know, partner with some big dogs, right? And I got real lucky in terms of they were recruiting me through a relationship. And again, back to the social media, the brand, like, you know, there’s a lot of power there. And they brought me in to be the capital advisory chair for Safe Space Global because we needed to do a $10 million raise to prepare to up list on the New York Stock Exchange. So they brought me in for that. They said, hey, we’re starting this new private equity real estate fund. We want you to be the fund manager there and the capital advisory chair at Safe Space. So.

You know, we work together closely on a daily basis in both of these companies and we’re raising capital and building a public company or raising capital and building, you private funds as well. So it’s great to be partnered with those two guys. I mean, Scott, Scott did a billion on Wall Street as an investment banker before going private and he’s got a track record of 22 exits and taking companies public. mean, so in terms of, you know, leverage, it’s like you can try to do things yourself in this world. What I’ve understood is

I need to bring my skill set in at the highest level to somebody who’s 10 miles ahead of me. We go a lot further, a lot farther, faster. This recent deal we did, the bend in Chattanooga, 120 acres of waterfront development, over 4 billion in economic development. That is not a deal that I would ever get access to. But because my partner can, I get to go out in the marketplace now and raise capital for one of the most competitive, best real estate deals you’ll probably see in a decade when you look at underwriting deals.

Dylan Silver (16:31)

Yeah.

I want to ask you about the brand. Something that really stuck out to me was you mentioned they saw you from the brand and that it was your brand that might have had a big influence as far as how you got involved. What would your advice be your feedback to be for folks who may be building a brand?

Justin Freishtat (17:10)

Yeah, so it’s the most competitive thing to do right now. So social media is the most competitive professional sport there is. The highest paid creators are making more than professional athletes now. So you have to understand what you’re up against, right? So when you start creating content, you just start throwing it out into the ether, like nothing’s gonna happen unless you’re one of these unicorn creators, right? So what I did is I said, all right, I know that the odds are stacked against me to build a big brand, so I’m gonna hire a company, right? I hired a social media marketing company.

that I thought was the best to help me build my brand and they did. And ironically enough, I’m also a partner in that business now and we’re helping other people build their brands and duplicate the results that I’ve had. what’s great about doing this in the beginning is don’t worry about how your content performs. Don’t worry about any of this stuff. What you’re doing is you’re getting great at the craft by doing it. So if you’re sitting around doing media all day, whether you’re going on podcasts or you’re just talking in the camera and having it edited and thrown onto social media, you’re developing a very valuable skill.

So when your brand does get to the point where you can get onto some stages, you’re prepared to go crush it. And then when people meet you in a frame of authority, like someone who listens to this podcast versus meets me at the airport bar is going to have a different level of respect for me on the way in. Same thing. If I speak on a stage and you’re in the audience, you’re going to see me differently than if I just met you in public, right? Or if I’m attending that conference. So I think a lot of building brand is so that you can get in a position to leverage your brand.

Dylan Silver (18:28)

Yep.

Justin Freishtat (18:33)

to then be in a position of authority to speak on your top.

Dylan Silver (18:36)

another golden framing your authority. You know, I think one of the interesting things about how I encourage as many people to have podcasts as possible. I don’t know how long this will be a strategy for, but I can say in my my own experience, it’s been tremendous just the the connections that I’ve made. I actually had my my sponsor in exp who I met through this podcast was a top performing realtor in Texas. And just like you said, all the ways that you can kind of lend credence to your

own name. You hired out, but you can also do this on your own through getting in the reps. I couldn’t agree anymore.

Justin Freishtat (19:12)

Yep, that’s the game. mean, it’s, and it’s, this is just a fact of business and life. Love it or hate it. Like one of, think my biggest competitive advantages is that I just have no ego about my name on the door. Like I’ve never had my name on the door of anything that I’ve done, but I’m really close to the top and leveraging somebody who’s better. Right. And then, you know, I got in the marketplace, I’m building my own name brand. Like you are your own brand. It doesn’t matter if you work for another company. Like that’s not an excuse to not build your personal brand because it is the

Dylan Silver (19:28)

Yeah.

Justin Freishtat (19:40)

the greatest equity you’re ever going to have. No matter what I do now that I’ve built a big brand, like if everything goes to zero, I can launch anything overnight because I have a big following that can be re-monetized.

Dylan Silver (19:51)

That is such a good point. mean, if there’s three takeaways from this podcast, it’s how you can start raising capital, what the steps are involved in that, building a brand, and then also, you know, leveraging the people who may be at a whole other stratosphere than where you’re at and not necessarily trying to replace them, but partner with them.

Justin Freishtat (20:08)

Yeah, I mean, you got to be able to bring value though, right? And that’s the number one thing that I look at is who needs me and how can I show up at the highest level that it gets leveraged for both parties, right? It’s like Scott’s got access to the best deals. He doesn’t have time to go do all these meetings and raise all the capital. Now he brings in capital, don’t get me wrong, but he needs me as well to manage the fund and take care of all those mundane processes we talked about, PPMs, KYCs.

wires, like all that stuff is something that I can handle and that relieves pressure for him to go do the highest value work that makes us all win together.

Dylan Silver (20:45)

Justin, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if maybe they’re interested in investing in the fund or if they’re in the greater Las Vegas area and would like to reach out to you?

Justin Freishtat (20:57)

So our website is pitchequityfund.com and you can find me on all the social medias. Instagram, you’ll get me the fastest and there’s only one of me in the world with a last name like freishtat it’s @ Justin F-R-E-I-S-H-T-A-T.

Dylan Silver (21:12)

Justin, thank you for coming on the show here today.

Justin Freishtat (21:15)

My pleasure.