Show Transcript

Today's guest has a story that I believe many of us can relate to.

It's a story of life's highs and lows, the good times and the bad.

In one moment, Sean Donovan was a carefree college student living the good life he was in his junior year.

Sights were set on what was going to happen after college.

And yet then, in the next moment, he's dropped out of college.

He's opened up his own garage, working on cars, all because, well, he got the news that he's about to have a child.

Fast forward a while.

And Sean Donovan, he's back on top.

He's thriving as a successful real estate investor again.

He is living on top of the world.

And yet, then it's the 2008 recession.

The floor drops out from under him.

Hes lying on the floor of the gym bathroom.

Hes broken in every form of the word.

Financially, physically, emotionally.

Hes done.

And yet, from these devastating lows, Sean Donovans story takes an inspiring turn.

A turn that makes this a comeback story that you, my friend, cannot afford to miss.

I've given you the highlights.

You, though, are about to discover the details, the full story told by Sean Donovan himself.

So, my friend, I'm excited to welcome you to what is episode 330.

Yo, are you ready to flip the script on life?

Cause those bad days, they're just doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at grit, grace, and inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, he's been flipping the script on his own life, turning over 20 years of being completely blind into straight up inspiration, motivation, and encouragement just for you.

So kick back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin Lowe.

What's up?

And welcome back to another awesome interview here on great grace of inspiration.

Today.

I am blessed to be in the studio with a guy I have been so excited to get to talk to.

And that is none other than Mister Sean Donovan.

Sean, welcome to the podcast.

And Kevin, thank you so much for having me here today.

I'm really looking forward to this, and you're such an inspiration to so many.

And I'm just blessed to be a part of this process and this podcast with you.

Oh, man.

Well, thank you.

And Sean, I'm excited to unpack this story that you've been on.

And I figure the best place to start is when you kind of look back at this journey you've been on.

What do you feel like?

Was that, that moment, that experience, that really kind of shifted everything that's ended up leading to where you are today?

Two things come to mind Kevin, without a doubt, the birth of my daughter, which was very unexpected and unplanned and it happened at an early age.

I was a 21 year old father and my daughter coming into this world changed the trajectory of my life.

I went from this fun loving, partying, lifeguarding, bartending kind of guy to all of a sudden, whoops, I've got another human being that is counting on me and looking up to me for inspiration and guidance and financial support and all of those things.

So that probably more than anything changed the trajectory of my life.

And although it was unplanned, I called my daughter.

Sometimes jokingly, I follow my greatest mistake.

But the most positive things have come out of that, including an eight year old granddaughter that I have now.

So my daughter is 28 and my granddaughter is eight and what a beautiful family we have.

And it all evolved out of an oaksy.

So sometimes those things happen.

Yeah.

I would say the second thing, the most probably pivotal moment of my life was 2008 and real estate bubble bursting.

And the financial situation that ensued from that really put me at a low .2 thousand.

Eight was the worst year of my life.

Lost two businesses that I had poured a lot of blood, sweat equity and hard work and tears into over a ten year period of time and I lost both businesses and found myself just struggling to figure out what was next and in the moment how it was going survive.

But it really caused me to take a hard look at my life, what I was doing, how I was spending my time, and it caused me to make some drastic changes, including moving to Florida.

Yes.

So a lot of positives came out of the toughest year of my life.

It was tough to make it through at that point, but the end result was a much happier, more fulfilled life.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely understandable.

Well, talking to the first point about finding out that you were having a child, where were you kind of at in life?

I mean, were you in, I think you were maybe in college at that point?

I was, yeah, I was a junior in college at Old Dominion University up in Norfolk, Virginia.

I was lifeguarding on the beach there at Virginia beach during the summertime and you know, working security and bartending and waiting tables and all those other odd jobs in between to help pay my way through school.

And you know, I was just having a really good time.

I was in, I guess you could call full on Playboy mode.

At that point in my life I was just, you know, it was all about having fun and, you know, wasn't, wasn't thinking a whole lot about the future.

It was.

I was just enjoying life to its fullest at the time.

I'm glad I had those experiences.

I got a lot of that out of my system at the time, but I was absolutely, positively not in the mood to have a child.

I aspired to have a child one day.

That was a dream of mine, but I just.

I didn't think it was going to happen that way, and certainly not under the circumstances I was in financially, and maybe with a different person as well would have been nice also.

But it is what it is, and we made the best out of the situation.

I love my daughter to death, but she did change my life more than anything at that point.

Yeah.

What I can't help but think of is that quote that people say is that life is what happens when we're busy making other plans.

And I listen to you with that, and I think that definitely rings true now, career wise.

You talked about being in real estate coming up in 2008.

What led to that?

I mean, you said you were a junior in college.

What happened from there?

Well, I had to drop out of college when I found out I was having a daughter.

That was the first thing that had to happen, and it was unfortunate.

I really didn't have my heart and soul in college at the time.

Anyway, I thought I knew what I wanted to do when I went to college.

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

I quickly learned that math was not my forte, and I had to change my major over to environmental sciences, which I enjoyed learning about.

I had dreams of maybe traveling, studying rainforest and coral reefs and all these cool things and adventures in life, and then all of a sudden, ooh, now I got a daughter, and I probably shouldn't be going all around the world.

So this major that I had switched into my sophomore year now became sort of irrelevant to me.

Again, I didn't have aspirations to.

To become a doctor or anything like that.

I always have more of an entrepreneurial mindset.

So I made the tough decision, considering how much time, effort, energy, and money I already put into college, to withdraw from college and start a business.

And I had really been into cars since I was a kid.

I tinkered with cars with my grandfather, and he was always taking apart a lawnmower or working on something mechanical.

So I thought, well, let me do something I love and, you know, figure it out.

So I had a 66 mustang that I was halfway into restoring, and I, my first car with triumph Spitfire necessitated me becoming a good mechanic just to keep that thing on the road.

So I got quite good at it.

So I said, let me try my hand at business.

I hadn't taken any business classes in college, unfortunately.

And so I made every mistake in the book, starting what I called on site auto service in Virginia beach back in the mid nineties.

So made every mistake, hired family members, hired friends to work for me.

And in spite of all of my mistakes, at the end of the day, I was financially successful with that business.

But I got burned out after a couple of years.

I was doing literally everything.

I had developed some trust issues because of experiences I had had with the wrong people I had hired.

So I was the guy that was crawling underneath the car in a parking lot, changing the oil.

I was the guy doing the accounting and invoicing.

I was the guy doing the sales.

So I was wearing a lot of hats.

And this working on cars thing that I had really loved started to become feeling a lot like a job and a chore.

So I made the decision to close that business down.

It was tough.

My last month in business, keep in mind, I'm in my mid twenties.

I think I made about $7,000 that last month.

And I just didn't have the foresight or the business acumen to think, well, why don't I sell this book of business that I built up to a competitor?

Nope.

I just closed the doors one day and decided, I don't want to do this anymore.

And then I went into a brief stint in corporate America and quickly realized I didn't want to do that either.

So I thought, okay, if I can restore a car, maybe I could renovate a house.

So with some of the money that I had made from the auto repair and auto restoration business, I bought my first condo.

I did some restoration and improvement to it and sold it a couple years later and made a pretty decent chunk of change for myself at that point in time.

It was certainly the largest chunk of money that I had made in my life up until that point.

And I thought, you know what?

This is kind of nice.

So I went and got my real estate license, and I started practicing real estate in 1998, and I had a ten year plan that was supposed to culminate in 2008, 2009.

Worked my butt off, Kevin, 16 hours a day.

Three or four years into real estate, I built up a little portfolio of investment properties.

I'd scrimped and saved and moved into a place and renovated while I was living there.

So I lived 90 days without a kitchen.

One time I ate out a whole lot.

I lived in a house for 30 days with no bathroom.

And luckily I had a gym membership to a gym that was just a couple blocks away.

So I shower there and, you know, do all my bathroom kind of business at the gym in the interim while I was working on the house.

And then I'd flip the house and move out into another one, or I'd rent the house, etcetera.

So that's how I got into real estate and contracting, and it was a learning curve for that as well.

I made a bunch of mistakes early on, cost myself a bunch of time and money, and I finally got everything on the right track.

The machine was running smoothly, so to speak.

I was hitting on all eight cylinders.

I was making money, I was living a good life, and I was very busy, but at the same time, it was very rewarding financially.

And then out of the blue comes 2008.

Bam.

Rug yanked right up from underneath me.

That was a very tough thing to face.

And it happened at a very inopportune time for me as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, when 2008 happened, as far as, I mean, you weren't only just a typical realtor, but you had all these investment properties.

How did it end up happening for you as far as, did you have to sell those?

Did everything basically get taken?

I mean, what, what exactly went down for you at that point?

I was so ingrained in what I was doing.

I was renovating an old victorian home that a partner and I had purchased.

I had a couple of renovation projects going on for clients at the same time, I was overseeing the management of 1200 residential units in Richmond, Virginia.

Our rent roll range from 250 a month up to $3,500 a month.

So we were dealing with just a whole spectrum of renters and all different financial situations in different walks of life.

I didn't see it coming.

For some reason, I should have.

I didn't see the bubble busting.

All the junk loans, the arm loans the banks were making and stuff were just.

It was not on my radar.

I was doing my thing, working with a lot of first time home buyers and investors as well.

So I was working with people who were getting FHA loans and I was working with investors that were paying cash and everybody in between.

And I had my own thing going, but I was in the middle of this victorian renovation.

I had put a lot of my own cash into it, and I had a lunch meeting with my banker.

We were getting close to the point where we're going to refinance the property, pull some of our own money out, get ready to list it for sale and move on.

My banker comes to the lunch meeting, and he looks rough.

And this was a guy who was usually well put together, so he looked like he hadn't slept in days, and he just didn't look like himself.

I thought he was sick, or maybe he was going through some personal stuff at home.

And before we had even ordered lunch, he proceeds to tell me that you can't do the refinance.

And at the time, I had a 800 plus credit score, and I've done multiple loans with this bank and him.

And I said, well, why not?

What's wrong?

What did I do?

So it's not you.

The bank has just made a decision that we're not going to do any of these investment refis anymore.

And I said, well, that's your bread and butter.

And he said, and that, my friend, is why I haven't slept in the last week.

So that was my first indication that something major was going on about to happen.

And it happened quickly.

And the transition for me was extremely tough.

I had been living a pretty good life up until that point.

I've been working very, very hard, but I've been enjoying the spoils of my labor.

And it stopped very, very abruptly.

I went from making a whole bunch of money to making no money in a very short period of time.

And to compound things, a lot of my renters, some of which who had been with me for years, and personal investment properties that I own, they found themselves in a position where they couldn't pay rent.

My employees who were working for me in the contracting company, I was still paying them, but their wives or their spouses had gotten laid off, and now they were in a different financial position, looking at me for overtime and things that I just wasn't able to give them at the time.

So it was a very rapid onset of change, and it was extremely painful.

I think back, and I reflect back now, a lot of the tenants that rented from me and a lot of the investors, they either worked at or owned a lot of the restaurants in Richmond, Virginia.

I used to always get an invite to go to openings of these restaurants, and I was on a guest list sometimes for special events at the museum, which I was a member of, and different things.

And all of a sudden, all of that went away.

And I went from not looking at prices on things in the grocery store to shopping so frugally.

At one point, things got so bad, I was living off of an avocado and a mango and water every day.

Man, what an adjustment that was.

Kevin.

Yeah, I know some people are thinking, oh, poor Sean, blah, blah, blah, but it's easy to say until it happens to you.

And it happened to me, and I was cautious.

I had savings, I had contingency plans in place, and it was amazing how fast all of it came unraveled.

I had $120,000 sitting in a reserve fund for maintenance issues on properties, and I watched it evaporate in one year.

It was unbelievable.

What that taught me was that even sometimes when you think you're prepared, you can never underestimate what can be dealt your way in a very short period of time.

So that taught me to have contingency plans for my contingency plans to have not just a plan a and a b, but plans a through z.

Wow, how rough.

Now, out of my own curiosity, kind of, what was that kind of ground zero moment during this time?

Like the lowest of the lows that maybe sometimes it seems like we have to hit rock bottom and then maybe even find a floor below it before things can kind of start to change for us.

Well, it's funny that you said rock bottom and a floor below it, because that.

That definitely brings up a story, and I think this was rock bottom for me.

I had been dealing with a lot of the stress from the financial burden that was put on me in 2008 by going to the gym and working out.

I was working twelve to 16 hours a day, six days a week and a half a day on Sunday.

And, you know, it was finding time somehow, even if it was 910, 11:00 at night, to squeeze in some gym time.

And I was doing that six days a week as well, just to blow off the steam.

And one night I was in the gym doing my normal workout, and I wasn't feeling that great, but I pushed through.

I had a good workout anyway.

I got into the sauna, which I always ended all my workout sessions with the sauna.

I'd go in, do a little bit of meditation, yoga, stretching, etcetera, get some of that detox going.

And in the sauna, I started feeling really dizzy.

I got tunnel vision, my ears started ringing.

I was the only one in the locker room.

It was late at night, the gym was about to close.

I had the wherewithal and luckily, the ability to get out of the 140 degree sauna.

And I literally remember crawling across the tile floor of the gym, over to the shower, and in the floor of the shower, which I always wore flip flops in the shower, just because you know a little OCD about germs and the gym floor, but here I am sitting on the floor.

I got the cold the shower on the coldest water I could possibly get, just running over me to cool me down.

And I thought I was having a little bit of heat exhaustion.

So I remember that very, very well.

It was a vivid memory for me.

I remember getting up out of the shower after I cooled down.

I remember the gym worker vacuuming the locker room, kind of waiting for me to leave.

I remember walking out of the gym to my truck.

What I don't remember is driving home.

My house is about 3 miles away from the gym.

So the next thing I remember was waking up in the floor, a hardwood floor of my house, in a very uncomfortable position.

The dogs were in the next room whining and pawing at the door to get to me.

And I woke up and I could hear my heartbeat beating in my eardrums.

I just felt terrible.

I felt like I had the worst hangover of my life.

Hadn't drank anything in days.

I mean, I didn't have money for alcohol at that time, so there was nothing like that going on.

And I thought, oh, my God, first of all, how did I get him?

Secondly, did I have a heart attack, a stroke?

What is wrong with me?

So I managed to get up out of the floor, and I look out the back of my house, and the garage door is wide open.

And I lived in an area in Richmond.

It's a nice area.

I was living in my home office at the time.

I was fastidious about closing the garage door even for a minute.

I had a bike stolen, had some tools stolen out of the garage in broad daylight.

It's downtown in the middle of the city, and here I am, middle of the night, the garage doors wide open.

Somehow I got my truck in the garage perfectly straight without hitting anything.

And I know that I, under normal circumstances, would have not left that door open for a minute, but it was probably open for about 4 hours or so.