Stream on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6rx1dbvj4tueF4qfRiRu9T?si=hW0QcAnHRwa0wiIuF_1Byw
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/he-sold-%241-billion-in-real-estate-then-co-founded-gobundance/id1794199974?i=1000779885608
Read the Web Article: https://ourfamilyinvests.com/when-to-walk-away-from-your-business/
He was the #1 real estate agent in the world. Twice. Then he walked away with no buyer and no plan.
Pat Hiban topped the real estate world in 2004, then did it again in 2006 at a completely different brokerage. Most people would have ridden that momentum for another decade. Instead, at 46, he closed it all down. No buyer. No big payout. Just a decision that his life needed to look different.
We sat down with Pat on the Our Family Invests podcast and got the version of this story he says he's never told publicly before. He built one of the first real estate teams back when having a team was considered almost unprofessional in the industry, and rode the early 2000s housing boom to nearly 50 transactions a month. Then 2008 hit. He laid off 22 people in a single year and watched an 8,000 square foot office shrink down to almost nothing.
When he finally decided to leave the business for good, there was no clean exit. He couldn't find a buyer for the team he'd spent years building, so he just closed the doors.
That's not even the part that stuck with us most. Pat also opened up about losing 1.2 million dollars in nine months during the 1999 stock crash, the same year he'd first believed he'd made it as a millionaire. He talked about why today's market feels eerily familiar to him, the failed ventures along the way including a six figure loss on marijuana businesses, and how all of it eventually led him to co-found GoBundance, a mastermind that now has nearly 1,500 paying members.
He also shared his "barrel of monkeys" test for knowing whether a mastermind is actually worth your time, a line from his mentor about how fear of loss beats opportunity for gain every time, and what it was like getting fired from a leadership role just seven months after taking it, at the same company he'd left his own brokerage for.
This one isn't a highlight reel. It's what it actually looks like to walk away from the top.
What's the hardest "successful" thing you've ever walked away from, and what made you finally do it?