Vanessa Alfaro

“I was born and raised in a small city in Venezuela. I moved to Panama City when I was 28, and then I moved to the U.S. in 2011. The biggest barrier for me when I started in real estate investing was the language, because English is not my first language.”

Interviewed by Jonathan Rozek for Ten Paths. David Lindahl was not involved in editing these interviews.

Vanessa: I was born and raised in a small city in Venezuela. I moved to Panama City when I was 28, and then I moved to the U.S. in 2011. The biggest barrier for me when I started in real estate investing was the language, because English is not my first language.

Even though I've been speaking English for the last 20 years, I’ve always been a little bit insecure about talking to people in a language that I haven’t completely mastered. That’s true especially in business, because the language is specialized. There were so many words that I didn't know. I found myself all the time Googling, or asking everyone: “What does this mean?”

One of the things that I believe has contributed to my success in real estate is my lack of fear about new challenges. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. When I was 15, I took a job in a company similar to McDonald’s. I really liked it and had a lot of fun there, but after a while I realized that I didn’t want to work for someone else for the rest of my life. I found myself thinking: How would it feel to be the owner of this restaurant?

When I was 16, I decided to go to college, and then I would try to become a businesswoman and an entrepreneur. After college, I went to business school. In the meantime, I had to make money, so I took a job that gave me flexibility of my time while I was studying. I began fashion modeling. I was a runway model, did TV commercials, and I was also in some beauty contests. I did that for several years and made good money, but I knew that it was not my destiny.

I got married at 20 and I had my daughter when I was 21. At 22, I started my own business. With my work experience as a model and new knowledge from school, I started to think about what business I could create. I called one of my best friends and said, “Let's start a marketing and promotion company.” We discussed it, she liked the idea, and we created a boutique marketing company with just $100 and a computer.

We started with one small client, doing all the marketing for their events. To tell a very long story short, we grew really quickly. In the space of five years, we went from the two of us and $100, to 2,500 employees in 17 offices across Venezuela with $5 million in annual income.

Jon: Wow!

Vanessa: Our clients were famous liquor brands like the champagne Moet & Chandon, and they referred us to other brands of that same caliber. We got to the point where we were doing as many as 200 events in a single day.

I remember I was working one Christmas Eve with my daughter on my lap, because we had so many things going on between Christmas and New Year's. It was really fun, and it was wild. I was very young—only about 26 at that point—and I had to talk to a lot of guys in their 40s or older, who looked at me and thought—or said: “Who is this girl doing all of this?”

But we were doing it right, and they became impressed. We were also doing business differently from other marketing companies. That’s a lesson I learned and it's something that I use to this day in my real estate business: always try to think outside of the box. We have to think about how we can do things differently. Back then, though, it was for survival because I was 26 and my competitors were twice my age, and they had been in the business for decades.

Things were great for several years. But when I was 28, the government adopted different policies and everything crashed. Our biggest client, a wine and distillery organization, had problems bringing liquor inside Venezuela because of the currency situation. We were at the top of our game, and three months after the government policies changed, we lost everything in Venezuela. Everything. We tried to keep it going for six months, but eventually had to admit that it would not work. All our competitors went out of business, too.

Fortunately, about a year before that happened, I had decided to expand the company to Panama City in Central America. It was because we already had an issue with crazy inflation in Venezuela. We would make a million dollars and a month later, it was worth $500,000. We wanted to set up a similar business in another country with a similar culture. After exploring a few different countries, we chose Panama.

The original plan was to have my vice president move to Panama, and I’d stay in Venezuela. However, on my business trips to Panama, I fell in love with the country. It was beautiful and I felt safe. Venezuela was very unsafe, even back then. I had a security detail protecting me and my daughter, it was so dangerous. My ex-husband was kidnapped a few weeks after my trip to Panama and my daughter was in danger of being kidnapped. The day he was released, I took Andrea straight to Panama and we started a new life there.

So I bought a house in Panama. I had been working from there on both companies—the original Venezuelan one and the new Panamanian one—for about six months when the Venezuelan economy crashed. My thinking outside the box saved me once again.

As we saw the influence of social media grow, we began to do more of that. The company evolved and grew from boutique marketing to BTL marketing1, production, public relations, and digital media. (Note: BTL stands for Below The Line, and it’s targeted marketing using trade shows, samples, direct mail, and other methods.) I could go on and on about these years, but to summarize, we did well in Panama. I actually created a second company focused on trade shows, event exhibits and retail store fixtures. I told you that being an entrepreneur is in my blood.

Jon: You just can’t help yourself, can you?

Vanessa: For some people, you have to push them into business. In my case, I sometimes had to be pulled back. I just couldn’t stop, OK?

After some time, I married my second husband, who was Panamanian, but who lived in Los Angeles. I sold my two companies in Panama and the two of us started yet another company, a production company, and I moved to the U.S.

Jon: Someone reading this interview may think: It’s obviously easy for Vanessa to start and grow businesses—she’s SuperWoman. It’s in her blood. She can’t help but be successful, but I could never do that.

Vanessa: Oh no, not everything I’ve done has worked out, by any means. Let’s take my early investments in real estate, for example. When I first lived in Panama, both my businesses were doing well, so I had money to invest. I decided to invest in apartments, because that’s what everyone who had money did there. I was very young and knew my own business, but I did not know the real estate business. The four or five properties I bought all turned out very badly. I put aside the idea of real estate investing.

Jon: Where are you located right now?

Vanessa: Los Angeles. I have lived here since I married my amazing husband. The production company that my husband and I created dealt with publishing and production of content around very high-end cars, like McLarens, Lamborghinis, and so on. My husband has been in the car industry for many years, and I’ve been in the marketing world for many years, so we could see the opportunity.

This worked well for us, but once again I want to compress a long story. This was another high-pressure, high-speed type of business and to be honest, I’d done enough of that sort of thing by then. I still wanted to be in business, but I wanted to learn something different at this point of my life.

Jon: Did you explore other types of income opportunities at this point?

Vanessa: Yes, I thought about all kinds of different businesses, and got some offers, but nothing really resonated with me as something I wanted to do long-term

While I was thinking about these opportunities, it never crossed my mind to look into real estate investing again, until one day, my best friend Maria invited me to attend a free two-hour event about real estate. She was a successful real estate broker, and she got an invitation in the mail. It was about investing in apartments. It was Dave Lindahl’s event.

I thought that it might be interesting to attend, and maybe I’d find out what I had done wrong when I invested in apartments in Panama. Even so, I felt insecure about going and I had to overcome all the excuses in my head about why I shouldn’t bother going. It seemed to me that buying apartments in the U.S. was for extremely rich people, and I was not in that category.

Jon: You had already done apartments by then, so how could you have felt insecure?

Vanessa: Oh, I was very insecure because the first time I tried, I hadn’t educated myself about the business and it turned out badly. Second, up to this point when I was in the U.S., I had been in the background in the company we started. I was doing marketing behind the scenes, and I didn't have to talk to anyone, other than to my husband and our team.

I continued to feel very unconfident about my English. Sure I could communicate, but I don’t do things half-way. If I’m going to speak with someone, I want to be great at that conversation, and I simply was not there yet in English.

At that point, I had two kids: my daughter was 17, and my son was already five. We wanted to have more kids but unfortunately, that didn't happen. Our family was not growing as we expected, so I stopped looking forward to a larger family and again began to think about other business opportunities. It was all I could do to go to the apartment-investing event, because I knew that if I pursued real estate, it would mean that I’d be doing a whole lot of talking in English.

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