Apolo Ohno’s “Patient” Real Estate Investing Approach for Financial Freedom

0:00You don't need to be the smartest person in the room to build wealth through real estate, but you do need patience, discipline, and a willingness to play the long game. Apolo Ohno understands this concept better than most, having dedicated his entire youth to becoming a short track speed skater. He reached the pinnacle of the sport, competing in three different Winter Olympics and taking home eight medals. But when his skating career ended 16 years ago, he faced a challenge he hadn't trained for. He calls it the great divorce, separating from an identity that had shaped nearly every part of his life.

0:36Thankfully, many of the skills he had spent decades honing translated to real estate investing. Now, Apollo operates at the intersection of high-performance business and wellness, helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals in a more sustainable way. And today, he's sharing the lessons that helped him weather tough times, why your investing network is your single greatest advantage and how to avoid burnout on the road to financial freedom.

1:05What's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at BiggerPockets. And today we have a very special guest, eight-time Olympic medalist, Apollo Anton Ono. Apollo has devoted a lot of his time to investing since retiring from speed skating 16 years ago. And he's going to share the key business lessons he's learned here on the show today, let's bring on Apollo Ono. Apollo Ono, thank you so much for joining the BiggerPockets podcast. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. I remember your Olympic run very well, but for people who might not know of you yet, maybe just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your backstory.

1:48My name is Apollo Anton Ono. I was a short track speed skater. I competed across three Winter Olympic Games. I had a very blessed career. I was able to walk away from the sport with eight Winter Olympic medals. I retired 16 years ago, believe it or not, over 16 years ago. It sounds crazy just to say that. There's been multiple reinventions, both inside of the sport that I was so passionate and I loved so much. And then obviously when I retired, there was the big transition or something that I call the great divorce from the previous identity into forming the new one. I spend a lot of time now focused on high performance at this kind of center of high performance business and wellness.

2:27And I'm sure we'll talk about all the investing stuff in our convo today. I'm curious about this great divorce. Tell me more about that. I imagine after dedicating your entire life to a sport, transitioning to doing something else must be really difficult. I think every Olympic athlete probably goes through some format of this, in their each own kind of way or story, or even just people who've done particularly one thing for a very long time that the world has signaled your check in the mail has signaled your fees whatever have showed that this is what you're really good at and this is what you were put on earth for and then sometimes either by force or by choice particularly in the world of sport it's usually you age out or you get injured or you decide to go on another path and it feels like that it feels like a finger snap in which everything you've done has revolved around this one particular thing and you've said no to effectively every other thing and opportunity that's not allocated towards, does it make me faster?

3:23Does it make me stronger? Does it help me recover better? If no, then it's not in the sphere of where you operate. And then seemingly overnight, after you get back from the closing ceremonies at Winter Olympic Games, and the calls start to get more quiet, perhaps the agent stops calling as much, people stop working for you as much, that you think is this kind of endless supply of deals and opportunities. but more importantly, you just don't really know what the hell you're good at. So for me, there was this great divorce from the previous identity. I had this person who I thought that I was, the world had signaled to me that this is why it thought that I was going to be on this earth.

4:00And that was gone. That version of myself had no longer, or was no longer going to serve me in the same way. Wearing spandex and going in circles is not exactly the way I want to of my business. I think there is relatability here to people who go from a W-2 job or just following one path and then figuring out, like you said, by choice or by force, time to do something different. It can be a really jarring experience. For you, Apollo, were you ready when you retired from speed skating? Was that by choice or by force? I thought that I had been prepared. You know, I had went to university. I didn't pay any attention when I was there.

4:44My mind and energy was totally spent on the world of speed skating. And so when I had really had time to come to terms with what I call the inner voice, right? The inner voice is really when no one else is around and you're not putting on the facade or the smile or playing the game of poker to show that you're fine and okay and transitioning. It's really just you and your own thoughts. So as a young man, when that voice started to get louder because the world became quieter for me, I really had to come to terms with, I don't have the skill sets yet. I need to identify what I'm going to do in my next pivot.

5:16Were you after something financial? Did you want to build something for the sake of building it? Or what was driving your next steps? Were you able to use a goal to sort of narrow down what you did next? It was financial in the beginning, But I think that pure drive of financial also was a big part of why I made mistakes, because I was more willing to say yes to certain types of risks that perhaps didn't resonate with me as an individual. And everyone has their own story, right? So this is not in any way, shape or form advice to anyone. But for me, what I've noticed is that when I chase something purely on a capital basis versus trying to have synergy between does this make sense financially and does this fit with the synergy of the attributes that I bring to the table?

6:04Does it fit within the sphere of the thing that I think that I could do even for a couple of years or three, four, 10, whatever it might be? If those are totally mismatched, almost always it has resulted in a complete failure. And forget about misallocation of capital. That tuition that I have paid was very expensive, more expensive than all the universities probably that you could add up many times over because of either rushing, wrong business partners, wrong timing. And something that I had to learn that many folks would probably resonate with, you know, coming from the world of sport, one of the key skills that you develop is never giving up, having this insanity of work ethic, drive and grit to create resilience over long durations of time and never stopping.

6:48And eventually you will compound that into having an amazing result at the Olympic Games, which is a four-year cycle, sometimes an eight-year cycle to getting there. In business, you need to learn how to spot when to pivot very quickly, cut your losses, and then begin again. I was not accustomed to that, nor was I accustomed to asking for help. And that's another part. That's my second part, Dave, where looking back, if I could speak to a younger Apollo, it would be like, dude, you don't have to do all of it alone. There is so many resources out there and mentorship. I mean, I'm such a big believer in mentorship and guidance and community because that's how you learn.

7:28People are there and they want to help. They want to teach. They want to guide to help you sidestep those landmines. And for me, I was like almost playing whack-a-mole. Like, let me step on every single landmine known to man. Let me figure this out. All right. So we got to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more from Apollo Anton Ono right after this. You know what changed the way I invest? realizing that scaling rentals shouldn't mean creating more work for yourself. If you're trying to build that kind of system, Baseline is giving away$10 ,000 to help investors build rentals that run themselves.

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11:38Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Let's get back to my conversation with Olympian Apollo Ono. You talk about this divorce and making a lot of mistakes. How did you go from trying out different things and experimenting a little bit into finding your calling and what you feel you're good at in business and as an investor? It took me a long time because even though I cognitively understood the concept, behaviorally, I still found myself to be making the same types of mistakes. So for example, blind trust, right? My father had told me at a very early age, he's like, trust, but verify. I heard the words.

12:17I didn't feel the impact of what that meaning could really be. In real estate, I think it's pretty, almost pretty cut and dry. You can get every piece of information you need to get before you go to any type of a closing. You can really dig deep. And I was not sure what that was like because I was not willing to do those things. So just to give you backstory and context, I started investing in real estate back in 2006, 7, and 08. 2006, 2007, and 2008. Right before this devastating. Yeah. So I was buying real estate through a fund. I was writing promissory notes. I was writing loans. and unbeknownst to me, because of my blind faith in this particular group, they had been doctoring and changing.

12:58They were doing all of the mortgage do not dues. Like full on fraud. Full on fraud. And they kind of survived. Coming out of the crisis, they had survived. They kind of changed the names and done their thing. And they had gone through bankruptcy. And I only found out about this because someone that I knew in the state of Utah had called me and said, hey, hey, do you know those guys that you're investing with? They actually both filed for personal bankruptcy and you're not listed as a creditor. And I was like, oh, I was such in denial. I was like, oh, I don't, how can that be true, right? Because I had consoled some of these people on their marriages and it was a gnarly time.

13:36And so I got completely eviscerated and blown out while I was still training and competing. I was much more of a passive investor, but I didn't understand the concept of understanding how to bring in the right type of legal teams to monitor, to adhere to the right type of principles that are required when you do these types of deals. So I learned the really, really hard way. And it was painful, man. It was really painful. And so the moment that I went from pointing the finger to then saying, well, this was your decision. This was your making. And yes, like, did I get taken advantage of? Sure. All those things.

14:09But at the end of the day, I had to radically own that mistake. And only upon then could I really say now I'm willing to move forward? And do I want to allocate my time towards something that's going to be potentially really negative on a mental perspective that I have no control over? Or I'm going to use that mental space to progress in a way where what is the hard life lesson here? How do I move forward in the right way? And how do I make moves so that I can compound my next generational move in the same way? And so I look at that as we all love to hear about these overnight successes, right?

14:44These people that like, oh my God, like I want to do what they did, but we forget to peel back the layer of that onion to see like, it was really hard and really difficult for long duration of time, but they didn't do anything. They stayed with it. And I think that was, to me, has always stood as the test of truth, especially for folks that decide to go into real estate is it will not fail you if you stay with it long enough. It's a really powerful asset class. It's a beautiful story too. You're a steward of capital that provides immense value to this country. Yeah, it really does. And you're totally right.

15:16Real estate people see it as risky and it is capital intensive. So it's totally understandable when people say putting in my only$50 ,000 or$20 ,000, that is scary. But it is a much more forgiving business over the long run than I think people give it credit for. You can make mistakes in this industry. And if you stick with it, I mean, I can tell you I've made plenty of mistakes as well. Apollo's talking about mistakes he's made. If you stick with it, it is pretty forgiving over a long period of time. But Apollo, you must have liked something about real estate, right? Even during that negative experience, was there some kernel of it that got you excited and helped you endure through that difficult time and get back on your feet and say, I'm going to try this again?

16:02Yeah. I mean, I would say the following. I mean, First and foremost, real estate is not what I do on a day-to-day basis, but it's something that I believe in. I would say 80 % of the Olympic athletes that I know from my cohort that have since retired, the ones that have gone on to be successful are in real estate today. They're either in development, they're commercial real estate brokerage down in Southern California. My really good friend, he works for Cushman Wakefield. His name's Rusty Smith. He does amazing work down there in the Long Beach area. Chad Hedrick does, he's a residential real estate agent in Houston and the surrounding areas.

16:37Ryan Bedford owns his own real estate development company. I mean, all of these great people that I train alongside with, what they did really exceptionally well was they applied the same rigor of hard work, discipline, consistency, and they just went like this and took those attributes and just said, I'm going to do real estate. This is where I'm going to go. So for me, I have so many different interests. I mean, my real passion is, like I said, living at this intersection of high performance business and wellness and trying to communicate and get not only the current American business community to understand their own reservoir potential that has not yet been tapped into, but also the next generation, the kids that are in youth sports, the kids that are in K through 12, to realize and recognize entrepreneurship, critical thinking, learning how to get stronger, better, faster, more resilient, not even through sport, but through their own decision making process.

17:26and data. That's what I get excited about. And I take those monies that I earn from those companies that I work with, and then I reinvest them back into really two categories. One, which is health and wellness technology companies. And the second would be companies and or funds with people who I have built long-term relationships with, like my friend's company that focuses mainly on industrial real estate. They call it, it's almost like the bond portfolio of real estate. Like it's consistent. If you believe in the American economy and that people are still going to do specific types of things and behaviors, which I would agree that we will for a long period of time, it's an amazing asset class.

18:05I have learned tremendously a lot about what's happening here. But what I love more importantly, Dave, is the interaction. Because I've been to some of their off-site meetings and some of their meetings when they bring their AGM, all their general partners and all their investors and LPs, and I get to meet them. And I hear about the story. It's this doctor from Northern California. It's this optometrist. It's this person who's also in real estate. It's this person who runs a family office. It's this person who just started, they just left the W-2. They're trying to get into real estate. They're learning their ropes.

18:33They're doing it this specific way. And it's fascinating, right? Like that spirit of entrepreneurial activity in the United States is still very vibrant and strong. It is capital intensive. It's not easy. Rates don't help, but there are deals I think to be had and opportunities will always present themselves. So that's where I try to keep my eyes peeled as much as possible for those opportunities. Couldn't say it better myself. There are always deals to be had. You know, the cycles change, residential, commercial, industrial, all these different things. They cycle in and out. There are different opportunities.

19:10And the whole goal is to spot what the market's giving you. Like at certain points, it's giving you cheap deals. At certain points, it's giving you negotiating leverage. at other times, it's giving you runaway appreciation that's going to make everyone look like a genius. There's just different things, and that's why you need to stay informed and understand what's going on in these individual markets. But Apollo, I'm curious. I think, obviously, not everyone in our audience is an Olympic athlete, but I do really see a lot of corollaries between your story and people in our audience who are trying to shift.

19:45Even if they don't want to quit their W-2. They want to build something on the side. They want control over their financial future, and they're turning to real estate to do that. You've obviously invested in real estate. There are some lessons you can help teach us, both as an investor and as an Olympic athlete, maybe just personality traits or skills or habits that our audience could learn from you that you think will help them in their business. There's something that we call the gas principle in athletic performance. So it's general adaptation syndrome. So it's alarm, then resistance, then exhaustion.

20:19Growth happens when you recover a little bit before the complete exhaustion. So we don't train as athletes 100 % every single day. Okay. We, we, we basically use periodization, large blocks of volume of training followed by large blocks of real recovery. Um, many entrepreneurs, and I have been guilty of this too, retiring, we run never-ending block cycles until we start to see the quality of our decisions begin to fall apart. And we don't actually notice it because we're so used to grinding. Real estate people typically are grinders. Like they are up early, they go long hours. I know the type, I'm around them.

21:03And I love that aspect of it. But something that I've learned from sport is that you with a refreshed mind, it's almost like if you've been writing something for a long period of time, you get eye fatigue when you see the same thing over and over again. If you're looking at like homes to purchase for yourself as a single family, right? After like five or six homes, they all start to look the same. That's just eye fatigue. You need to refresh that system in the same way. So that's something that I've learned as you transition or as you go into this next phase, know that your ability to persevere, to go do long periods of work need to be followed because you're a human being, you're not a robot, right?

21:38So you need to follow with some formats of recovery. Also, performance is cyclical, just like in stocks, just like in any other market in the world. It's not linear. Sports was identical to that. What do you mean by it's cyclical and how do you sort of counteract that? Or how do you mentally prepare yourself for that kind of up and down life of an entrepreneur? You zoom out, right? It's the number one reason why I think we see folks either overtrade if they're in the markets, right? They overtrade themselves. They exit positions they shouldn't have. It's actually like this, right? Where like you have an uphill swing, you fail, you revert back, you learn, you begin again.

22:20Right. It's not like hills. It's like circular. It's like small little circles, right? Where you feel like you're going backwards. You take a couple of steps forward, maybe two or three steps backward, but you're getting momentum again and you're going up in the same cycle. Because that performance is cyclical, we have to, I think we have to realize when you press and when you start to, I think, either coast or have the ability to be, I think, not resistant, but be patient. Patience is a key attribute towards a sport like short track speed skating and the same thing in real estate. And then the last part I would say, Dave, is like for all the people that are making a big transition, I believe deeply in the physiological change.

22:58So if you want to have a big change in your life, The fastest way to do that is you change the body's feeling first, then your behavior will follow. So sleep, fueling, training, breath, all those things you can control. All the other stuff that's happening either in the government, in the market, you cannot control those things. You are always going to be defensive and moving and dynamic based on that information that comes towards you. So the things that you can are when you're optimally performing. Like when I was an Olympic athlete, my mental acuity and processing was so high. Man, I was like reading information so quickly.

23:33I felt like I was Neo from the Matrix, right? Everything was slowing down. I was in flow state. It was amazing. And that was because we had a combination that I was living a life that was really attuned to being at my physiological best. And so my brain was also had the ability to make really, really good decisions in the same way. And so I'm no longer competing as an athlete. I'm 16 years retired and I still take it really seriously because I want to perform my absolute best. And I know that my behavior can be predicated upon the way that I make those moves and that energy forward. So for those folks that have not yet made that change, you know, do so.

24:10And no one's trying to be an Olympic athlete. I get it. Like just being consistent with your movement, your food, your sleep and the like. A hundred percent. I think it just gives you a lot of self-confidence too. Like I, in college gained a lot of weight that was not in a place I wanted to be. And then just dedicated myself to going to the gym every single day. I've lost 60 pounds. I've been doing the same thing every single day since then. And I, you know, I don't really care about the weight anymore. It's just the self-confidence. Like I can do something that takes a lot of discipline over a long period of time, which is exactly what entrepreneurship is, right?

24:44Like it's just, you got to grind it out. Some days it's going to suck. Some days you're going to feel on top of the world. You get a great workout in, you do a good deal. You're going to feel great, but it does give you that sort of ability to balance your emotions over long periods of time. And I think for me, it's just been like the absolute confidence boost that I needed to succeed in my career. I understand not everyone's doing that right now, but I'm with you personally. For me, it's been probably the biggest difference maker in my life over the last 15, 20 years. Yeah, same. I would say in the same realm, my consistency of trying to take care of my mind and my body have resulted always in me feeling better.