Gerald Lucas

Looking For A Proven Game Changer?

Gerald Lucas' 3 Success Principles for Work & Life

1.You Don't Find Opportunities, You Must Create Opportunities From The Possibilities We All Encounter On A Regular Basis

2. A Bad Deal Is Worse Than No Deal At All: Bad Investments, Whether Personal Or Financial Rarely Improve Over Time--If You Can't Fix Them, You Have To Get Rid Of Them As Soon As Possible

3. Passion, Perseverance And Constant Learning Are The Keys To Enduring Success. Passion Gives You The Spark To Get Started. Constant Learning Gives You The Knowledge And Expertise, And Perseverance Gives You The Strength To Endure Temporary Failure And Frustration

(Quotes from Gerald Lucas)

“Life is a blank canvas and you hold the paintbrush”

Successful people just outlast everyone else---it's a lot easier to win a race when you're one of the only ones that bothers to finish.

“The truth doesn’t play favorites.”

“The universe and everything in it is in constant motion; if you’re not moving forward, you’re probably moving backward.”

“Don’t make assumptions, make observations.”

“The rewards from most things come at the end not at the beginning, which is why how you finish is more important than how you start”

"Passion gives you the spark to get started and perseverance gives you the will to endure temporary failure" Gerald Lucas

Books:
1. "Dare To Succeed" co-authored with Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series
2. "Real Estate Investing Secrets"
3. "Short Sale Specifics"

Degrees:
1. MBA (New Product & Venture Development): MIT
2. BBA (Actuarial Science): Howard University

Awards:
1. Expy Award for Outstanding Public Speaking: National Association of Experts, Writers & Speakers
2. Best Seller's Award from National Academy of Best-Selling Authors
3. Named one of "America's Top Business Leaders" in Fast Company Magazine

TV Appearances:

NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox

Passion & Perseverance

When I was four years old I noticed a price tag inside a children's book I was reading. I'm not sure how the price was explained to me but my four year old mind understood "book = money", so I got a stack of white paper, a stapler, a magic marker and a box of crayola crayons and I painstakingly copied the entire book--page by page(words and pictures) and then went door to door trying to sell "my book" to my neighbors. This was my first failed business venture—stay tuned, there are more to come. A few years later, I started a landscaping business that I ran for 7 years until I graduated from high school. I can remember coming home exhausted, dehydrated and covered in grass clippings after a long day working in the hot sun. I used to put the cash that I earned into an empty fish bowl until one of my parents could take me to the bank to deposit the money into a savings account. Over the seven years I landscaped, I was passionate about doing the best job possible and it showed—my customers tipped me on a regular basis, and they recommended me to other people they knew. Cutting lawns year after year showed me how important perseverance is to successfully completing a job as well as overcoming obstacles like angry dogs, sweltering heat, allergies, rain and mosquitoes. I've accomplished the most in life when I was able to combine passion with perseverance.

Preparation, Discipline, Patience
I've loved music for as long as I can remember. I asked to play the violin when I was a kid and the summer before high school started, I auditioned to study under a local legend violinist and conductor who went to Julliard and had been a fighter pilot in WWII. Mr. Goldblatt was a renaissance man--he didn't just teach classical violin, he knew and shared insights about the history and language behind the music we studied. Mr. Goldblatt taught me how to prepare and how to practice and he required all his students to tape record every lesson with him. He used to say, "you notice little things listening to a recording that you'll miss trying to hear while you're playing." When I struggled to play a technically difficult piece of music at full speed, Mr. Goldblatt said, "you have to slow it down before you can speed it up." I struggled, but in my last year studying with Mr. Goldblatt, I performed at Carnegie Hall and a few years later at the Kennedy Center.

An Unexpected Discovery
A few years after grad school, I began my career as a real estate investor completely by accident, with a little help from my Mom. My mother, who is an accountant, had been telling me to buy a home to take advantage of tax deductions property owners enjoy. I thought it was a good idea but kept procrastinating and putting it off. Lucky for me, Mom persisted, visited me on her week off from work and found a local real estate agent to help find property. I had no savings, but made an offer to buy a small tenant-occupied condo anyway. When my offer was accepted, I had to use a credit card cash advance to come up with the down payment and closing costs. While I waited for my tenant's lease to expire so I could move in, I noticed that similar apartments in the neighborhood were renting for significantly more money per month than my tenant had been paying. I realized that instead of moving in, if I kept the tenant and became a landlord and increased my tenant's rent, his new monthly rental payment would cover my new mortgage and condo fees, plus leave me with some extra money at the end of each month. At that moment, a light bulb went off in my head and real estate became my passion. I immediately tried to learn everything I could by reading, studying and seeking the advice of experienced real estate investors in my area. I began building a small portfolio of properties by partnering with people who had money to invest--I did all the work, used their capital and we split the profits. You don't find opportunities, you have to create them yourself from possibilities we all encounter on a regular basis.

Over $800,000 Down The Drain
I made one very expensive mistake after one of my most profitable years as a real estate investor. After my windfall year, I was brimming with overconfidence and somehow convinced myself that my past success and experience would allow me to handle a huge investment in a real estate market I wasn't familiar with hundreds of miles away. When my business partner and I purchased the property, we hired a local property management company, immediately began making surprise visits to our new apartment complex, and instituted an on-time rental-payment bonus system to encourage our tenants to pay their rent on time.
Despite all our efforts and the years of combined property management experience we both brought to the venture, the apartment complex we bought was a bad investment. Unfortunately for us, bad investments rarely improve with age. The icing on the cake was that we paid too much money for this bad investment. I've learned over the years that a bad deal is worse than no deal at all and overpaying for real estate is one of the most dangerous mistakes you can make as an investor. Two other factors that were completely out of our control made matters even worse:

1. The price of oil hit an all-time high; our buildings were heated by oil, and as landlords we were obligated by the state to provide heat to our tenants for nine months of the year.

2. A lawsuit brought against the local water company tripled the cost of our quarterly water bill. Despite trying every cost-saving strategy we could think of, we were losing well over $10,000 a month-yikes!

In order to sell the apartment complex after several failed attempts, we had to make good on a threat to our lender to stop paying our mortgage if the lender didn't allow our buyer to assume our $1 million bank loan. By the time we finally sold the complex, my business partner and I had lost over $800,000. It's easy to see how things could be better, but the truth is that they can normally be worse than they are. Two months after we sold the apartment complex, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, the world's monetary system almost collapsed, and real estate transactions ground to a virtual halt. As hard as it had been to sell the apartment complex before, it would have been almost impossible to sell in the middle of the global financial crisis--our financial losses could easily have been much bigger! What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. I've grown to welcome and appreciate all the obstacles I encounter.

Possibility Knocks Again
Around the time I released my first book, I was approached by a pension fund looking for new real estate investments for their clients. Over the years, I've noticed that successful people don't find opportunities—they create them from possibilities we all encounter on a regular basis. This pension fund had presented me with a possibility that I needed to transform into an opportunity. In less than two weeks, I developed a comprehensive strategy and written investment plan and I carefully handpicked the initial team of real estate professionals to implement it. To make this happen, I had to use all the knowledge, learning, passion, perseverance, personal relationships and skills I'd developed over the previous decade. Together we produced an investment prospectus that was based on the two-day presentation I'd initially prepared and presented. After pitching our investment plan in a matter of a few months, we'd raised over $100 million and had a thriving new real estate investment business.