I Spent A Day with Miami’s Richest Real Estate Mogul (Todd Nepola)

This is Todd McCullough, the Miami real estate mogul that somehow built a $100 million empire in one of the most competitive cities in America. Well, how did he do it? Well, we are here in Miami and we are going to his office to see if he'll let us spend the day with him. Excuse me, sir. Yes. Is this your Rolls? Yes, this is. And what do you do out here in Florida to be able to afford a Rolls? We're in the commercial real estate business. We own and operate retail centers throughout the state of Florida. What would it take for me to spend a day with you? Just ask. I ask, can I? Okay. I'm Todd. Pleasure. I'm Rachel. Nice to meet you. Let's do it. Let's do it. And he said, yeah, Todd started his journey on Wall Street in his twenties, closing deals with Jordan Belfort, the real wolf of Wall Street. And now he's built Current Capital and owns over 60 commercial properties and makes millions of dollars every single year. What is the most amount of money that you've made in a single year? It's a very sexy number. Today, I want to see how he runs his company, what he looks for in a commercial property to invest in and what he would do if he lost it all and had to start over from zero. Let's do it. Excuse me, sir. Yes. Is this your Rolls? Yes, this is. And what do you do out here in Florida to be able to afford a Rolls? We're in the commercial real estate business. We own and operate retail centers throughout the state of Florida. And what is the most amount of money that you've made in a single year? You know, I'm not going to tell you that. You must be one of James's friends. I wasn't going to tell James. I'm not going to tell you either. Give me a range. Is it over 10 million? It's a really great number. It keeps me really happy. Okay. And is this your office that we're at? This is where our office is. Yeah. We're in Hollywood, Florida, and we've been here for 17 years. What would it take for me to spend a day with you? Just ask. I ask, can I? Okay. I'm Todd. Pleasure. I'm Rachel. Nice to meet you. Let's do it. Let's do it. This is a great building because this is an entrepreneurial landlord. When we moved here, I could not afford the rent 17 years ago. But when I met with the landlord, I told him my situation. I said, it's a dream building. I've always wanted to be here. And he was a true entrepreneur. He said, I'm going to make it happen. They charged me no rent for the first six months, half off for the next six months, 25% off for the next year. And he said, we'll revisit it by the time that lease is up. By the time that lease was nowhere near up, we were moving upstairs. And when you have a landlord who works with you like that, he was instrumental in helping me grow my business. I'm forever loyal to him and grateful to them because without them, I don't know how business would be as great. They truly helped us. So on a normal day in the office, walk me through, what does that normal day look like for you? Well, a normal day at Current Capital starts me walking through the doors. Come with me. Let's do it. This is our headquarters, Current Capital Real Estate Group. Come on in. Every morning, I'm greeted by Alejandra. She's always got that beautiful smile on. Come on in. I'll show you what we do. We take very good care about people. We have all sorts of snacks and coffee machines and everything for them to stay here. This is wonderful because this allows people to congregate here and it gets the leasing and the brokerage guys talking to the managers and accounting and they sit there and have a coffee or a snack. So this is a wonderful room. This is Emmy. Nice to meet you. Nice meeting you. Emmy does it all. Emmy takes care of all the insurance to make sure all the tenants have insurance. She takes care of all the violations. She helps everybody with everything. But Emmy's most important job at the office is to take care of birthday parties. Birthday parties. That's right. She threw one birthday party amazing. She got the job. Was it Todd's birthday? Yeah. So this is the area where I said we expanded. We expanded right when COVID started. When a lot of businesses were struggling, we actually started doing better and better because the government started paying people's rent, which allowed us to do even better. And by expanding our business and buying many more properties, we needed more space. So we just took this wall down and came on through. So come on through. So this is my side. This is my office over here. I kind of put myself in the middle strategically. So I'm in the middle of all the action and all the people. So that's where I'm at over here, and I'm in the middle. This side basically deals with our properties, our stuff, and buying new deals. This is Mauricio. He's one of the new guys on the team. This guy's a numbers whiz. Over here, you can see our storage room. And not accidentally, there's a picture of me from when I did the Ironman triathlon many years ago. What's your next race? I just did the half marathon in Miami. Mauricio actually did the full marathon. I like to tease him and say I finished first, but I only did half the race. But I train a lot. I run and work out at least, I would say, eight, nine times a week. How important is having focus on your health when it comes to being able to show up in business? It's an absolute must. I also find people that compete in races and events to be more aggressive and more encouraged. So I like when people do things like that. So I think it's terrific. But you got to have your health. Without your health, you got nothing. Absolutely. Health is wealth. Oh, yes. This wall over here is just a wall of spaces that became vacant. So everybody could kind of see what's going on. So we know what's available for lease. All the leasing guys come over here and check this to see what's new. Emmy takes care of this board. So this is like their cheat sheet. They also obviously have it on their computers and all. But when you have it in front of you visually and we're sitting here talking, it's just easy to digest it. So we keep this board here with all vacant properties. We don't want any vacant properties, but it's impossible to not have vacants. Now I'll take you over here. As you can see, once again, we cut this space out and we expand it. And as I said, it's very important if you want to have a good team, you take very good care of them. So we have a great water machine and coffee machine and everything from here. We just built all this out. The refrigerators came in. And on this side, we have more offices, more conference rooms. And then you come over here. This is where all the brokers are. This is where the aggressive people are that are out every day hustling and selling. This is Marcus. Marcus is a superstar. And what we do at Current Capital. May I touch the belt, sir? Of course. Marcus won the Current Capital belt. I'm not even allowed to put it on. I'm just doing it for visuals here because I didn't win it. But we have a belt here. That's how we do it. Because you know what? People don't just work for money. They work for recognition. And Marcus earned this belt. Thank you very much, sir. He has to wear it every night now when he goes home. Oh my gosh. This is a real, real heavy duty belt. I won't put it on because you earned it. But let's go. OK. Very nice. Then we have another superstar back there hiding out. He doesn't like to be on camera. He's saying he can't believe he came in casual today. He dressed like a tech billionaire. Normally he wears a suit and tie. But this is Vinny. I met Vinny when he was 17 years old. And he's been with us for a few years. He's a young man. He's killing it. Vinny's the perfect example of people who didn't go to college and are doing better than most people who went to college in every single way. I'm Vinny. Pleasure to meet you guys. Vinny, can I ask you a question? 100 percent. What is one piece of advice that Todd has given you that has changed the trajectory of your life? Consistency. The most important thing is to show up every single day, day after day. Even if it's a bad day or a hard day, you got to show up and keep coming to the office. I'm usually here Saturdays and Sundays. You just got to keep working hard and keep showing up. What is something that you look up to Todd for? How come you have to think about this one? There's so many things like his lifestyle, the way he is. I see him with his daughters. There's so many things that he has achieved in life that I want to achieve that I just look up to him like a dad and it just makes sense. Beautiful. Well, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Well, I guess I'll take you to my office and show you what my day looks like. All right. This is your office. This is a great office. And like I said, it's very central. Everything is open. My door is always open to everybody. Those are never closed. And I like that environment that everything is glass and open. So we all speak together and work together. So come on in, I guess. Have a seat. Let's talk about reading really quick. You obviously have a beautiful array of books here. Let's go through your top five and why they're in the top five. I also heard that you have written a book yourself. We won't put that in the top five, but let's show that book. Yes, I did. I wrote a book, Keeping It Real on Commercial Real Estate. This book is written to people who really don't know much about real estate, but it can tell you how to invest, whether you want to be a passive investor, aggressive investor, buy your own properties, invest in the stock market and real estate. And I wrote that book, I give all proceeds to charities so people can learn real estate from someone who's been doing it for 30 years like me. So that's why I wrote that book, but we won't count that in the top five. Now, I did get to sit in on a meeting today where you actually hired on a new intern and it sounded like she was a young woman, really ambitious. When it comes to real estate for women, how would you say it's different? And how would you mentor a woman through getting into real estate? So yes, I met a young lady today on Zoom and she's a FSU student and she's going to be a junior. And the truth is there's not enough women in commercial real estate. I have two daughters and I'm very passionate about getting more women involved in commercial real estate because I think the automatic response of a lot of women is once they become licensed, they go sell houses. They don't consider commercial real estate as a path, yet I have friends in commercial real estate. I have a woman, a friend of mine, Beth Azar, and she's fantastic and she's killing it. She's worth a fortune and she's out there hustling and she leads a big team. There's a crew network that does a lot of stuff to get women to commercial real estate, but I don't think there's enough women in real estate. So I'm really excited to bring on board a few more women. So we have a big intern class and women are very important to have them here. Beautiful. Okay, let's do those top five. Now, I tell everybody every single book you can learn something from. The book that you read should be what's important to you now. You should not read the same thing over and over. So even if you love sales, like let's get a young black guy like Vinny. He really wants to get into sales. Every book can't be sales or you'll burn out. You won't want to read. So you got to change it up. I don't like to read anything fiction. So everything I read has to be biography, self-help, history, things like that. To me, the greatest book ever written, the one that got me started reading was Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant with him. So that's an older book. I think he probably wrote it in the late 80s, but it's a great book because it holds you accountable for what you got to do in life. The next most important book I'd have to go would be How to Win Friends and Influence People. Then I'd probably go same type of book, Think and Grow Rich. You know, there's so many great books. It's so hard to answer what five would be, but I would tell people I really enjoy, I think it's a fantastic book that covers all corners. It's like David Goggins' books. You know, he talks about like what he overcame and that's what life is. Everybody wants to overcome something and especially the young generation. I see that a lot of them get stuck and they're like, it's hard. It's supposed to be hard. It's not supposed to be easy, but it's really hard when you're young because you don't have the success. So when I hit some walls at 53 years old, I've been through this. I know the outcome, but I would go back any day of the week to change it for that excitement of the sleepless night. These are true stories and these people are no different than anybody else. So action is everything. So I'll give David Goggins, I'll put him up there. Who else can I go to? Let me see if I can cheat and come around here and find another book that's number five. Oh, I'm going to give you a number five. One of my favorite authors, I won't pick one of his book, is Robert Kiyosaki. I think his series on Rich Dad Poor Dad, he's got a whole bunch of books and that's some on real estate, some basic. I think they're fantastic books for every generation, certainly the young. So there's my five. Okay, I want to go back for a second. We were talking about David Goggins. We're talking about, you know, being able to push through those moments. What was a moment when you were young, when you were getting started on your journey, that felt absolutely hard in that moment? It felt like you couldn't push through and you used that inner fuel to be able to get to where you are today. The first real crisis that I went through was in 2008-2009. It was scary. We didn't have as much social media and as much influence, so CNBC was on TV 24 hours a day. That's how serious it was. I won't say that I was afraid I was going to lose everything, but it was the uncertainty of how it's going to play out. And then I started reading books by like Warren Buffett and people like that and they said good times and bad times, they both pass. You just have to hang on. And if you hang on long enough, you'll get to another wave. But after going through it, that setback became a great thing for us. The worst for many people, but great for us. So the long answer to that is basically you go through these tough times, but you just got to keep chugging ahead. Just keep taking a step forward and don't quit. And if you do, you'll win. You'll get through. Let's talk a little bit about team culture. What are some of those values that you install in your team? So a team is like here a dysfunctional family. We all love each other, but we're all very different. So some people want to go out at night. Some people are married and kids. Some people are older. We have all different things here, but when we come together, it's very important to work together as a team that everybody gets along. Have you found that you need to respond to those personalities differently to give them what they need in those moments and answer those questions that they have for you? Absolutely. Everybody has a different way, which is why I recommended earlier how to win friends and influence people because you have to offer people the treatment that they want. There's a big misunderstanding when people say, treat people how you want to be treated. That's not true because how you want may not be what they want. So you have to look at them and that's a little bit of psychology, but understand what their wants are. Let's take a look at your calendar. What you got going for the rest of the day? In the afternoon, we're going to have a meeting with the city about a program doing a grant program. Are you familiar with grants? I'm not. Educate me. Let me show you something here. So one of the things we specialize in current capitals, we buy shopping centers and we repurpose them, but we like larger centers. In December of 2023, we bought this center and this center, the sister properties. And this is the city of Lauderdale Lakes. We went to the city and we said, we want to completely remodel these properties, which they've been remodeled since then. These are the pitches when we purchased them, but we went to the city and we requested money from the federal government for grants. These grants, I'm happy to share them with you. These are the grant checks. This one here, 321,000. This one, 132,000. And how about this one? $1,122,000. This is money that the government gave us to remodel these properties. Now we had to put money in as well, but this is checks that were provided to us for doing the work to make these properties beautiful. We beautify the buildings, it enhances the area, brings the property values in the area. But we work with the cities and the federal government to get these grants, but that's a million and a half dollars that they gave us to fix their own property. So grants is something that the young generation has to look into. And they're not just for properties. You want to start a business, you want to start a home office. There's so many grants available. Check your local city. What makes you choose commercial properties over buying a home? Is buying a home a good idea? No. Buying a home is never a good idea. Buying a home is a luxury item. And I know you're all about to put some sort of comments and feedback that I don't want to pay rent, but I wish we could change the narrative to everybody should own a home by 30 to everybody should own an investment property by 30. A home is a money pit. And I know people are going to say, oh, my mom and dad bought a home for 200,000. It's worth 2 million. I know that's called luck. Anytime your investment, so to speak, the only way it's going to improve is by market conditions. That's a problem. You can't really do much to increase the value of a home. And then people don't think about the variables of a home, like got to replace the roof. Pool had a leak. The AC went bad. I can go on and on. Nobody ever factors that into the price. There's nothing wrong with owning a home before anyone gets upset. I own a home. I'm buying a second home. I like home. I rent a few homes. I think it's great. But if you really ever sat down before you question it and did the math, what would it cost to rent this home and what would it cost to buy this home? And you did the math, you'd realize renting is usually the better way to go. If you were to do it all over again, is there anything that you would do differently? I would love to say I'd be more aggressive. In hindsight, I should have bought every single property I ever saw because they've all gone up in price. And pretty much that's across the board. That's not realistic. I think anybody would do that. But if I could change something, I would have been more aggressive and bought more properties. I had properties available to me. I could have bought more, but I was conservative because you got to be conservative when you're getting started. So the only thing I would change is, yeah, I wish I was more aggressive and bought more. I want to switch gears. We were talking earlier and you told me that you have two young daughters as well. If you were to die tomorrow, what would be that one thing that you would want them to remember you by? That I love them more than anything on earth. And I would do anything for both of them to be successful. And I'd give everything up if they could have a great life. And you talked about how they are going to college for real estate, but you don't necessarily need them to get into that industry. You want them to do what it is that they want to do. What are those values or education systems that you do want to install in no matter what line of work they get into? Well, I want them to come from the belief that hard work counts and that's the way to do anything. They see me go to work. I haven't had to go to work in many, many years, but I still wake up and come here every day. Not Saturday or Sunday, but I come here every day for work and I love it. I love what I do. So it's a lot of fun. It doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean it's always enjoyable. It doesn't mean you don't get a lot of stress, but I love it for them. And I think one thing a lot of parents do is they try and guide their kids into what they're going to do. I don't want them to do real estate because I do real estate. I want them to do whatever they want to do. Because if a young person, and listen carefully, takes a job that they don't want to do at 25 because they get paid a nice paycheck, you're going to be really miserable at 40. And then it's hard to pivot because you may have a family, you may have big responsibilities, or even still, you don't want to go back to where you were at 25 and start competing at that. So it's very important when you start out, you start out in something you like. That doesn't mean it won't change. Change is great. I think everyone's going to have multiple careers, but you got to start out doing the things you like and the things you love or it's not worth it. Money alone will never be worth it. In your 20s, what instilled discipline in you? You know, I was very lucky. You might've heard of a gentleman who became very famous because of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street. I worked at one of his firms down here in South Florida as a stock broker. And while there's a lot of bad things that were done behind the scenes that we as agents didn't know about, and obviously he did some time for it. We all know that. We watched the movie and it's great. But what people don't realize is I was 21, 22, 23, 24. Forget about the amount of money you made. Every day you went to work in a suit and tie. There was no ands, ifs, or buts. You would never dare even think about not wearing a tie. That just was in the way. So you had to be at work at 8 a.m. If you weren't there at 8 a.m., you were not getting in. You were going to get a fine the first time and the second time you couldn't come to work. And the third time you're probably going to get fired. We never dreamed about going home when I first got started, ever before 7, 8 o'clock at night. So you learn these values and principles and they stick with you for many, many years. And here it is 30 years later, I don't have to wear a suit and tie. And in South Florida, a lot of people think, why do you wear a suit and tie? Because it's what was instilled in us many, many years ago and that work ethic stayed with me. And I know a lot of guys that used to work for Jordan's company and even though they're maybe not proud of what they did back in the day, they still work hard. They're still grinders. So you have to understand that what you do on day one, you're going to do on day 2000 and one, two. It's never going to change. Now, I heard from a little bird that you have some stuff back from when you actually worked closely with him. Can we see it? Yes, I'm happy to share it with you. I don't know if Jordan will be happy I share it. But back in the day, this is how we did it. We would have these books like this. And we were trained. And I guess this is one of the things that got these guys in trouble was that these books would tell us how to qualify calls, how to get connects. And we will go through this stuff right here. This is the Stratton Oakmont. If somebody said I have to ask my wife, if somebody said I have to think about it, this gave you a cheat sheet saying you had to make 500 to 800 cold calls a day in order to get 10 pitches off. If you got off 10 pitches, and you had 10 people listen to you, nine of them are going to hang up, one may open an account. So if I said, Hey, I need to talk to my husband about this, what would you say? We always have funny ones. I can't when someone would say something like that, say, well, let me ask you a question, George, if you're driving down the street in your car, and you get a flat tire, are you gonna ask your wife for help with changing a flat tire? I don't think so, George, the time is now. So we had like lines like that, that would just went over and over. And they're funny now. But they still work now. Do you still use them in meetings? I do. For fun. I think a lot of the stuff I learned 30 years ago is still great today. It'll always be great. It's a lot of fun. But it's really great that the young generation see stuff like times back then, there's good times now, and there'll be good times in the future. So long as you wake up every day and go to work, and the sooner you start, the better. There it is. Hard Knocks family, that might have been my favorite day in the life so far. We just spent the day with Todd Napola. He is a real estate mogul out here in Florida. And we talked about everything from where he started on Wall Street working for Jordan Belford in his 20s to now where he's at in this beautiful office owning over 60 commercial properties, mentoring hundreds of real estate investors. He has an incredible team here. And we got to see the real behind the scenes, what his meetings look like, how he talks with his team, how he leads people on his team and his interns. And not just that, we talked a lot about his family, about his two daughters, and how he shows up not just in business, but also in life. It was an incredible experience. Make sure that you like, make sure that you subscribe and follow along for more day in the life just like this.