If you have ever felt like your business cannot move without you personally holding every relationship together, this conversation is for you. I sat down with private lender Alexis Morgan, who built a fund from eighteen years old with no corporate background, no playbook handed to them, and no shortage of moments where they thought certain tasks could only be done by them. What changed was not working harder. It was learning how to turn relationships, investor communication, and even the parts of the business that felt too personal to hand off into real systems their team could run. If you are scaling a real estate business and trying to figure out what to build, what to delegate, and what still needs your hand on it, this one will give you a lot to think about.
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I’m Adrienne Green and today we are here with my friend Alexis Morgan. Here on this podcast we focus on how real estate entrepreneurs break free of the grind and create the freedom they wanted at the start. Alexis is an interesting story because I don’t know that you ever really experienced the grind. What do you think?
I think entrepreneurship in the beginning is the utmost description of the grind. Not in a traditional sense, but I definitely went through a period of startup and ramping up for sure.
That’s very fair. And yet you are unique because you really started as a real estate entrepreneur before you were ever any other business person, I believe.
That’s correct. I got started in real estate at eighteen years old, and I’ve been doing real estate now almost five years. It’s been the only thing I’ve focused on, the only thing I’ve known, not coming from a traditional corporate background.
I’m curious, you were eighteen, you were in university. How did you get exposed to real estate as an option? How did it enter your world?
It started when I was sixteen. One of my friends, her father was a real estate entrepreneur working in the hotel industry, and they had massive success that you could see because of the vacations they would go on, the house that they lived in. I was always curious what this family was doing. What is behind the curtain? How are they making money? That’s where the curiosity sparked. But the actual action came from a book. I was in college and I picked up Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and that was the formula on how to execute on that dream and that vision. From that book is when I really got started. That was the exposure I needed to know what’s step one, what’s step two, and what’s step three to making this thing work.
I love that, and I love when we get a playbook and we can execute. I believe private lending was the first thing you did, hard money lending?
Before I was a lender, I got started in the buying and selling of property, wholesaling and fix and flip. That was the foundation before I went into hard money lending and private lending.
Knowing that lending is a big piece of your world and what you’ve focused on, how did you get into lending, and why did you decide this is the strategy you were going to run with?
Such a good question. There are moments in my life where mentors left a huge imprint on me. When I was wholesaling and flipping houses, I was always going to events. I always wanted to learn more and get to the next level. I’m a huge learner, hungry for growth. One of the events I went to was around syndications and funds and raising money, and there was a gentleman on stage who said, look, you all out there could be running as fast as humanly possible, spending all your energy running as fast as you can, but if I’m on a skateboard, a bike, a scooter, or a car, I’m going to go faster and further with less effort. He said, make sure you’re in the right vehicle. That’s when it really hit me: I’m working really hard, but what am I working on? What am I really working on? From that moment, I started to look at other aspects of real estate that would allow me to have more leverage, that would allow me to go faster and further with the same or less effort. I interviewed my developer friends, I interviewed other fix and flippers, I interviewed people who bought multifamily. I tried to get a real perspective on these other parts of real estate, and I also talked to lenders. The lenders always seemed to have the most leverage. Deals would come to them rather than them having to do these crazy marketing strategies. They also didn’t carry so much of a fulfillment burden. As a flipper, you have to go in there and do the floors, do the paint, list it, make sure you’re marketing it correctly. For lenders, the fulfillment was essentially due diligence up front, send the wire, and then you make money on and on. I was really attracted to the business model, and that was the click for me that made me switch from fixing, flipping, and wholesaling to being a lender and starting to get cash flow through that aspect. I even talked to people who own rentals, and from my understanding of their perspective, it wasn’t all that it was hyped up to be, as you might see online.
I can relate. I do primarily private lending myself as well, and having done the other pieces, when our borrower is really struggling because their contractor goes to them, that sucks. I have empathy for them, and I’m really glad that I’m not that flipper right now. I’m really glad that’s not my problem to solve because I’ve been there, done that, and I’m good with not solving that problem anymore.
A hundred percent.
Part of the challenge in the lending space is responsibility and reputation, for people to trust you and for credibility. You started your first investment fund at 20. How did you do that? A lot of people have expertise in another industry that they’re able to transfer as credibility here. What did you have to build in terms of systems and credibility for investors to trust you with their capital?
Such a good question. A lot of people ask me how I did everything so young, and the most honest answer I can give is that I didn’t do it alone. The thing about getting started is you’re going to pay in time or money. I would much rather pay in money, whether that’s partnering with someone, a mentor, or getting a team together, than trying to figure it out for ten or fifteen years. How do I get an investor to trust me? How do I get a borrower to agree to my term sheet? The reason I was able to have success at a young age, at 20, when I launched my fund, is because the first thing I did was hire someone to teach me how to structure my fund, how to put a good deck together, and how to raise money. What I will say about raising capital is it comes down to relationships, and that’s something you can never buy. Since I was 18, I was going to networking events, I was posting on social media, I was showing people my character, that I could perform, that I do what I say I’m going to do, that I do good work, all these things that build up a positive scoreboard in the minds of people when it comes to who you are. That you can never buy, but the technical things I tried to fast track as much as possible. I had a partner early on who had done hundreds of fix and flips, and I used him as a way to show our team has experience evaluating these deals and experience looking at construction budgets. That was key to getting started and ramping up: being the connector of it all and putting together the strategy, rather than wanting to make as much money as possible and wanting it all to myself and hoping it works out. I was huge on being willing to have ten percent of a watermelon, or fifty percent of a watermelon, rather than fifty percent of a grape or ten percent of a grape, and trying to do this all myself without anybody’s help or insight.
I totally resonate with that. I know that when I was an active real estate agent and I had a real estate agent team, that was what I would work to communicate to agents to be on the team. It’s like, yes, you pay some to the team, but you’re getting a reputation. We’re bringing you leads, we’re giving you operations, so you can do more business, and you have fifty percent of a watermelon instead of a hundred percent of a grape. But the truth is a lot of people have a hard time internalizing that concept. You and I get it. How did you come to that mindset? Was there something that made you have this idea of abundance and the idea that you can net more even with other people getting some as well? Or was that how you were raised? How can I help other people have that mindset?
I think someone said to me early on, the way you get whatever you want in life is by helping other people get what they want. It’s the law of reciprocity. That was one of the core pillars that helped me develop a mindset like that: if I want to have success and I want to raise money and I want to lend, who do I know that’s doing that? What do they want? Do they need more leads? Do they need more money? How can I help them? Because in turn, I know the law of reciprocity is almost as sure as gravity, that I can start to build some success on my own. That was the first thing. But the second thing, which might be more important than the first, comes back to what I said earlier. You can make money back. If you lose money, or if you lose a t-shirt, you can go and buy another one. But you cannot get time back once it’s spent. The concept for me that I really got behind was: do I want to spend five, ten, fifteen years figuring this out and trying to do this on my own? Or am I willing to pay a mentor or split profits doing this with someone who’s been doing it for five, ten years, who can show me the ropes and speed up my learning curve? Those are the two mindsets that have been really essential for that action to take place: you can’t get back time, so try to cut down how much time it takes you. This is why I read a lot of books. Someone’s lived a whole lifetime. They’ve distilled the most important lessons of their life into 100, 150 pages, and they’re going to give it to you for 20 bucks. That’s a steal, all day. I look at mentorship that way. I look at business partnerships that way. It’s someone giving you decades of experience, decades of knowledge, and those two mindsets really helped me get over that hump of “wait, but it’s all mine.” Once you have this skill set, you like, now I run my own lending business. The first two years I had a partner and I was doing deals with other people. Now I do deals on my own, but I could never have done deals on my own this quickly if I hadn’t taken those two years splitting profits and paying people out. Those years I was gaining knowledge, thirty, forty, fifty years of lending mistakes I know about and didn’t have to make myself because of that time. The time aspect has been really powerful to me, just to put in perspective what it actually costs.
That makes sense. Now let’s move from that mindset starting piece to now you’ve raised this initial fund and now you’ve got to lend it out. You have to figure out underwriting, servicing, investor relations, compliance. Walk us through how you actually lent that first, what was it, forty million in that first raise, and how you actually lent out that 40 million to flippers and value add and everything that you did.
Yes. It’s a lot. Our average loan even still today is like two hundred thousand, two hundred and ten thousand. It’s a lot of volume. You need a team for that to go right. We had to start to create systems and processes. You can no longer do this off the top of your head. In order for other people to come in and keep up with that volume, keep up with demand, make sure servicing is correct, we had to create SOPs. Now in my company there’s this whole back end folder, a data room essentially, on how we do business. How do we talk to investors? We have reports which are like back looking statements, but we also track KPIs which project what we can expect to happen over the next couple weeks, what we can expect over the course of this month, and what we can expect over the course of the year, putting projections out there, not just as goals, but actual actions towards those goals. When it comes to the underwriting, the servicing, the processing of the loans, after the first dozen, when I realized I was sending the same email every time, I said, okay, this has got to go into a template, and I’m going to bring in an assistant. It wasn’t easy. I’ve been through maybe three or four assistants. People come and go for various reasons, they work out, they don’t work out. But it does make it easier when you can onboard someone with solid systems and a book to review, rather than having to start from scratch in live verbal communication all over again.
Exactly. I am very hardcore with everything, that when somebody onboards, we really want to minimize the live verbal communication, the live face to face meetings, for the repetitive stuff, because that’s not scalable. It needs to be a procedure, a recorded video, something that can be repeated again and again, so that if you do have turnover, you have other people coming on and you’re not starting over.
Let’s dive into how you grew a little bit. You’ve got these systems now, you’ve got this data bank, the SOPs, the KPIs. Let’s talk about how you got from the initial raise to where you are now. What was maybe the first role that you hired for that you initially thought only you could do? You were like, I can’t hand this off, I can’t hand this off. Then eventually you did hand it off. Is there something that comes to mind?
Yes, a hundred percent. Handing off the processing was relatively easy because it’s very simple, you have a checklist almost. The systems are the same more or less for the deals. We do the same type of loans, we’re not doing crazy creative loans. But the one thing that I thought only I could do was investor relations. That is not simple. It’s a relationship, you need a lot of emotional awareness and intelligence, and also a bit of sales, and you have to understand the industry because you get these difficult questions. I was convinced, and I still do investor relations, that’s business development, it’s not like I don’t do any investor relations, but the first year it was exclusively me doing investor relations. The second year that I was lending, around January 2025, I brought in an investor relations team, two people who came onto my team, and I had to distill: how can I make this a process? How do I talk to investors? How do I take someone from not knowing me at all to sending a wire to our team? Slowly but surely we created it. I would have them hop on calls with me, then they’d share their takeaways, and we’d take my takeaways and their takeaways and distill them onto a piece of paper. Slowly but surely we created this system. How do these calls work? What are the typical questions that we get? A frequently asked question sheet we created, a flow of how we are supposed to talk to investors. For example, one of the things I tell my team, I meet a lot of people who are ready to invest today because of a referral, because maybe they saw me on stage. There’s a lot of people who are ready, and it’s their first or second time meeting, and they’re ready to invest today. I used to just say, okay, great, let’s do it. But now we actually slow them down. Because we understand the investor psychology from reps, we slow them down and say, look, we want to get to know you first, make sure this is a good fit. That avoids any cold feet, any wishy-washiness. We know all the boxes now that should be checked before someone actually sends that wire. Those processes became very clear, and it was really interesting for me to change investor relations, this whole thing that I thought was magical, into a real system for closing capital, down to the copywriting we send on the first message, to the first call, to the second call, to the follow-up email. All of it now has become a little bit more mathematical, whereas in the beginning I thought no one could do this, this is very hard, this is very advanced, I didn’t think anyone could.
That’s a great example. I love to contrast it with what you said, that the processing was easy to hand off. There are times when something is a relatively set process and we can bring someone into our team, and we can have the SOP ready to go, and they can plug and play. Then as we advance as leaders, as our business advances, we run into these other situations where someone else can step in and help, but we don’t have that system yet. I think of what we have on some of our SOPs, it’s not just a linear checklist, it’s a flow chart, where there can be multiple choices, it can go back and repeat, and everything. I love how it’s a collaborative process, having that new hire who’s observing, seeing things from an outside perspective, and you and them working together to develop that system.
A hundred percent. I think as an entrepreneur who’s trying to scale and formalize, I had a mentor who told me, look, you don’t need to pretend that you have it all figured out. Ask your team what stood out to them. You don’t need to hand them something on a silver platter. I used to have my team review my calls and take notes on things they didn’t know, so I could craft exactly what a new person coming in wouldn’t know. I had imposter syndrome on my first hires, that I had to be perfect for my team. A lot of times now I ask my team, what do you think? What did you think about that? Send me a report on what you took away or what you found most interesting. We’re going into commercial space, so I’m sending them a lot of commercial resources and material, and I say I want you to tell me all the things you didn’t know that you learned, and all the things that stood out to you, so that now I can craft my SOP and my book of material around what a new mind coming into this looks like, rather than what I think they should know about it. That’s been huge, and a big weight off my shoulders, but it also made me lose a little bit of ego. I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t need to pretend that I have it all figured out. These people are trusting me to figure it out, and it’s okay. It’s actually better to ask for their feedback and their opinion a lot of the time. It empowers them too, to feel like they are making decisions and are part of the decision making process.
And the other thing that resonates there is that employees, I think all human beings, one of our top fears is fear of failing. It can be so helpful when you set that expectation, that I’m going to make mistakes, you’re going to make mistakes, we’re all human beings, that’s normal, we’re not going to know the answers every time. It really can make for a much healthier workplace environment.
Yes, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Now we’ve talked, you have great wisdom here about growing a team. I’d love to talk about onboarding. When you’re bringing on new team members for whatever role, what is your process for onboarding, so you can get people operating at a high level quickly?
Yeah, this is so good. I’ve hired people in person and virtually, and what I’ve found is that whether you’re in person or virtual, the first two weeks to a month, I try to just spend as much time with the person. I don’t want to be spending time on things that are repetitive, like teaching them something that is a system, but I do think the culture, being engulfed in the culture of who our company is, is so important. Now my team more or less runs, and we have our meetings every week. But in the very beginning, I actually did something called a virtual office, where we would have a Zoom open during business hours, and our team would just come in and hang out, because I wanted new people to get that sense of community, to laugh and tell jokes and say, hey, what’s going on with this, what’s going on with that. I found that was when we were operating at our best. Honestly, talking about it now, we should bring that back. It was such effective communication, almost like having a real office. That was huge, that was really valuable for me, when someone’s coming in, to spend at least two weeks, but I spent sometimes a month, just having an open forum rather than having them shoot me an email or having calls scheduled on the calendar to check in. I would just have office hours, where our team would jump on a Zoom, and everyone’s working. We’re not all talking, but we’re available to each other, we know we’re available to each other. That really helped, as people had random questions that would come up throughout the day. I felt it helped our culture, and helped them feel comfortable casually approaching the team with questions they had.
I love that idea. It’s something I don’t do right now. I have found that when I’ve been in groups that do coworking calls, and in a mastermind or something, they have an hour a week where everybody can hop on, set their goal, and leave their cameras on, and you have that accountability of being there while you work. It’s a little different, but there’s some kind of community that comes from just being present, while you’re doing your individual work, having your cameras on, being on the same Zoom call. It does help create communities. I love that application of it. That’s a new one for me. I like that, Alexis.
That was huge for me as well.
Love it. Now the next question, Alexis, you may not have anything that comes to mind, it’s okay to skip that. I’m curious if there’s a task or decision in your business today that you’d like to hand off. Maybe it’s something that brings your energy down, or it’s tedious, but you haven’t delegated it yet. Is there something that comes to mind?
Yeah, absolutely. That question is easy for me, and it’s the servicing. I still service all of my loans in house, mostly because I want a pulse on what’s going on. Servicing has provided me the opportunity to check in with my borrowers, to check in with my investors. It’s this natural touch point that happens. But I know deep down, if I want to grow this company, I cannot be collecting and sending payments every month. It’s not feasible. I’ll either need to hire a third party or bring in an internal controller. That is the honest answer to that question. It’s a hard one for me. I still have a tug of war in my head. You can probably see it on my face. That one is hard for me.
That’s the reality of business growth and development. There are times when you can see the pros of making a change, outsourcing or something like that, and yet you can also see the con of it too, and we as the business owner have to measure those and figure out the best way forward. That’s tough. There’s a lot of responsibility. It’s not the same as being a W2 employee where you just show up and punch a time card.
Exactly. I think that’s the real thing that happens with entrepreneurship. The level of decision making gets harder. You have to be more and more courageous, more and more strategic. I think those are the character traits and the skills an entrepreneur has to continue to sharpen, because you learn how to lend money, you can lend money forever, you learn how to process a loan, you can process a loan forever, you learn how to do a flip, you can flip forever. But courage and strategy, you never fully master. It’s always a new level of, I need to be more strategic, I need to be more courageous, I need to make decisions better and faster. I do love that part, because I feel like I’m always growing there.
I think that’s where certain people do so well in entrepreneurship. I love how you’re always learning things, and I can relate to that. If you’re not in a situation where you always have the opportunity to learn and grow, you’re probably going to get bored.
Yep, a hundred percent.
So we have to stay challenged to stay engaged. We’ve got a few more questions. I love everything you’ve done with teams and bringing people on so you can grow the business and help more people. What separates a team member who just executes tasks, maybe a B team player, they’re okay, they can check off the box, from one who actually drives results for your fund, those A players? What have you seen as the difference between the B player and the A player?
This is so good. I have a two part answer. The first is, I think you can tell right away, there is some aspect of hiring an A player or a B player that you can tell from their work ethic, from the way they do their work. Is it to the best that they could do it? There’s such a thing as capacity, someone could have the will but not have the skill, so that’s another thing to evaluate. But you can see from the beginning someone’s ability to perform. The second thing that came to mind is I do think there’s an aspect of this that is due to company culture. If you’re not enforcing that proactivity is a core value of your business, how can you expect anyone to be proactive? Everyone’s going to be reactive. One of the core values of my company, we have three core values: integrity, perseverance, and mastery. When I think about mastery, that’s the core value that most likely plays into this question. Mastery means we are always going to try to be the best. That’s a core value I bring people on with, and I say, look, this is how we operate. The question is, we’re pretty good today, but how can we be better tomorrow? We think we’re great, but how can we be greater? Having that be the foundation of a company, it bleeds into everything we do. The people on my team are constantly thinking about what else could be done. It’s a two part answer: you can usually see right away whether this is an A player, a B player, or a C player, and how they operate. But if you place an A player into a culture where they’re punished for forward thinking, where their ideas are not received, where their feedback falls on deaf ears, you can easily turn an A player into a B or C with a bad culture. And maybe you can do the opposite too, you can turn a C player into someone who has initiative, who is proactive, who wants to think ahead and strategize, with a positive culture that encourages that mindset.
I love that, I think that’s a really good point. Which feeds into our last question before we wrap up, Alexis. You mentioned a lot about that culture and how important it is. How do you communicate culture, your expectations, your standards to your team?
We talk about it every week, so we do beat a dead horse, it’s not something that we treat lightly.
It’s a part of every team meeting, like at the beginning?
Usually over the course of the week, at the end of the week we have a review of that week, and we identify what each person did that week to exemplify these characteristics. For example, I had an investor relations team member who did additional research to answer an investor question, and that’s mastery and perseverance. I also had one time, someone sent me an incorrect wire amount, and we sent back what they oversent. That’s integrity, rather than just accepting it and changing the contracts to reflect what they sent. It’s, hey, this is wrong, and we want to make sure we have the correct amounts reflected on our documents. That’s integrity. We talk about the actions of those core values on a regular basis, and I think that helps the team really identify with and get behind how those shape our business.
That’s a really good point, and it has to be explicit like that to really help. Great point, I love it. Now, Alexis, as we wrap up, if people would like to connect and learn more, or have a follow up question, what is the best way for them to reach out to you?
Any platform that’s out there, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all of them, I am at Alexis Morgan Invest. My email is Alexis at peachstatecapital.com. If anyone wants to reach out and has questions, I’m more than happy to help.
Perfect. And if you are listening as you drive, of course all of that is in the show notes, so you can grab it there. Thank you so much, Alexis. There’s a ton of wisdom shared today. I really appreciate you coming and opening up like that. And for our listeners, thank you for listening, and join me again next week.