Charles Gaudet

Everything was documented that my attorney was managing the case because my dad just didn't want to lose a relationship with his son over a business deal.

So I found myself in over a million dollars worth of debt, working every waking hour of every day.

And you're 24 at the time, right?

24 at the time, ended up in the emergency room for a stress-related condition that the doctors told me was actually starting to kill me.

So, you know, it was a stressful situation, but then we made a few different strategic moves, managed to pay off that debt within a year's time, create my first multi-million dollar business.

Well, come on.

Well, we did a few different things.

Number one, I realized if I couldn't work harder, I had to work smarter.

So we ended up, my girlfriend or fiance at the time, we had her quit her job and she managed the division of just selling the properties so that we could get rid of the real estate agent and she would sell the properties.

Okay, 5% there.

So we saved 5% there.

The other thing that we did is we looked at, well, how can we make it a little bit easier for people to get involved in buying these properties?

So we said, look, here's the deal.

You can go through conventional financing, and you can do it that way.

Or if you'll do a construction loan, we'll give you a $10,000 upgrade credit if you'd be willing to do that.

For one reason or another, everybody loved the idea of the $10,000 upgrade credit.

It kind of put us as a unique advantage over many of our competitors.

No, when you're in real estate development, you're actually competing against every other property that's for sale, both new construction and existing construction.

Okay.

So we did that.