Tanh Truong - From Pills To Properties: How a Pharmacist Built Financial Freedom

Dr. Tanh, PharmD, is a pharmacist turned real estate investor, host of the Wonton Wealth Podcast, and founder of Proton Capital. After earning his Doctorate of Pharmacy from the University of Cincinnati and pursuing a career in cardiology pharmacy, Tanh discovered his true passion—investing and building long-term wealth through real estate. What started with a single duplex in 2018 quickly grew into a thriving portfolio and a deep focus on commercial real estate. As the author of Value Over Volume: The Foundation of Commercial Real Estate Investing, Tanh now empowers others to achieve financial freedom, build meaningful relationships, and reclaim their most valuable asset—time. His journey proves that with education, discipline, and purpose, anyone can create lasting wealth beyond the 9-to-5 grind.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Discover how resourcefulness can replace capital when starting your investment journey.
• Learn how disciplined saving and partnerships fuel real estate portfolio growth.
• Understand practical risk management through education and hands-on experience.
• Gain insight on selecting complementary partners and planning for partnership longevity.
• Explore commercial real estate opportunities beyond your backyard with confidence.

Key moments in this episode are:
00:00 – Becoming resourceful when capital is limited
02:18 – Tanh’s pharmacy background and investment beginnings
06:42 – Balancing risk with education and a support network
09:38 – Leveraging savings and partnerships to acquire properties
14:05 – Overcoming analysis paralysis to get started
16:27 – Finding and managing the right partners
19:01 – Focus on value-add commercial assets in Midwest markets
22:27 – Researching markets outside your local area
26:40 – Building deal flow through brokers and multiple channels

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Episode transcript here:

(0:00 - 0:08)
If you don't have the resources, you have to become resourceful. Let's say you are somebody out there who don't really have that capital. Let's say you're not a high-income earner.

(0:08 - 0:28)
You have to go out there and find the capital through relationships, through networking, through whatever means possible, through, let's say, your friends and family. Pull that money together in order to start doing that. Welcome to The Real Freedom Show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion, to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate.

(0:28 - 0:41)
I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together. Hello, everybody.

(0:41 - 0:58)
Welcome to Real Freedom, where we talk about different ways that people are building time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. If you want to get started on your investment journey, check out our website, freedomthroughrealestate.com. We've got lots of great content on there for you.

(0:59 - 1:14)
Interviews, our podcasts, blogs, really to help you guys decide where you want to pursue in real estate, what your path is going to look like, and hopefully through this podcast, you can be inspired by others. Today, super excited. We've got Tan Trong on, pharmacist turned investor.

(1:14 - 1:36)
We talk about how many people want to be in the medical field, want to be in pharmacy, that kind of stuff. Then what I find on my podcast is I have a lot of people on that get out of that and go to real estate because they like the freedom of that. Host of the Wanton Wealth podcast, founder of Proton Capital, also author of the book Value Over Volume, the Foundation of Commercial Real Estate Investing.

(1:37 - 1:41)
Excited to have you on. Mike, pleasure to be here. Super excited to talk to your audience today.

(1:42 - 1:49)
Let's just fire it off with some great value. Well, give us a little bit of the background. Why did you want to get into real estate? Kind of how did that start? And then we'll take it from there.

(1:50 - 2:02)
Yeah, Mike, like you mentioned, I actually started my career as a pharmacist, or if you like to call it a licensed drug dealer. I did that. I went to school for roughly six years.

(2:02 - 2:18)
It was a six-year program here in Cincinnati. And right after that, I started my practice after getting licensed. And throughout that little, you know, through school and as well as during practice, I was learning everything that I could about investments.

(2:18 - 2:31)
Investments being stock market, anything like trading. I didn't really do any trading. It was more so being a Buffett disciple of learning how to value invest or buying undervalued stocks.

(2:32 - 2:45)
And that naturally brought me to real estate. I went down a rabbit hole of going through podcasts, just financial freedom, things like that. And I mean, I don't think at the time, Mike, you had your podcast out.

(2:46 - 2:51)
So I had to do a lot of searching. No worries. I had to do a lot of searching.

(2:51 - 3:05)
And learned a lot about real estate. So I started my career in real estate as soon as I was practicing as a pharmacist. So I was kind of doing a side hustle with my main career.

(3:06 - 3:20)
So bought my first duplex in 2017. The second one followed very shortly after. And then from there, I did a little bit of wholesaling, flipping, burs, some holds.

(3:20 - 3:33)
Naturally, I'm a buy and hold investor. Didn't really do much with notes and anything like that. But your traditional asset, your traditional investments within the real estate asset class.

(3:34 - 3:56)
And from there, I wanted to do, I found this thing called residential assisted living. And what that is, it's essentially a nursing home, but not so much comprehensive. So in a nursing home, you're gonna have a nurse pretty much 24-7 taking care of you for whatever ailments, disease, conditions that you have.

(3:57 - 4:13)
In assisted living, you can do a couple things on your own. However, you need some assistance with activities of daily living. So that really intrigued me because it tied the healthcare, the business aspect, and the real estate all together.

(4:13 - 4:30)
And I was like, this is the perfect piece for me. And so we were trying to develop an assisted living facility here, local to us in Cincinnati, Ohio. You know, got drawings, got architect plans, raised the money.

(4:31 - 4:37)
Well, the majority of the money, I would say. But then COVID hit. So we kind of had to stop that piece.

(4:38 - 4:55)
And from there, we were just kind of in hiatus, not knowing what to do. And at that point, my partners and I, I had two other partners who were also in pharmacy school with me at the time. We disbanded, sold all of our residential portfolios, and essentially split ways.

(4:56 - 5:17)
From there, I went to look at commercial because commercial was one of those essay classes that I knew nothing about. And I was searching online, YouTube University, again, hoarding books, resources that I could find. But the information was very limited, very rudimentary.

(5:17 - 5:33)
So I still didn't have enough information in order to do it myself. So I went out and found a mentor locally and essentially got in front of him. He taught me everything he knows.

(5:33 - 5:46)
And today, he's my business partner. So my first investment in the commercial space was 2021 until now. So I've been in for roughly four years or so.

(5:46 - 6:02)
I've taken two deals full cycle. I can't remember how many square feet that we currently have because we sold some. I'd say maybe anywhere from 300 to 500,000 square feet across a handful of roofs.

(6:03 - 6:25)
Those asset classes are retail, warehouse, office, med office, anything non-residential without a tenant living in it. Hope that covers a little bit long winded there, but hopefully it covers a little bit of the background for you. So kind of opposite me there because we're just apartments inside of the commercial space.

(6:25 - 6:42)
So we'd love to hear kind of just to backtrack a little bit talking about getting started because I know there's a lot of people that maybe haven't done a property yet looking to get started. And you rattled off, I mean, between small multifamily, wholesale, flips, burrs, that kind of stuff. You did a lot early on.

(6:42 - 6:59)
So talk about risk taking. I know a lot of people are curious to know about kind of financing and maybe you can talk about how you did that. But especially just those early days, being able to be okay with taking a risk and an educated risk because I know that's what holds a lot of people up.

(6:59 - 7:16)
So I'd love to hear just more about your feelings and your thought process going through those first couple of steps. Yeah, so I actually stepped away from my pharmacy career December 31st of 2020. So that was my last day ever working as a pharmacist.

(7:17 - 7:33)
But in Cincinnati, a pharmacist's income is pretty modest. You're making pretty good money out here and it's very sustainable. That in addition to me, so I take care of four people in my family.

(7:35 - 7:59)
But the expenses that I have are relatively low, like call it $2,000 to $3,000 per month. So at that time with that income, I could save the remainder of my income and I could either invest it in stocks or what I did was I saved it for investments in real estate. And those were small multifamilies or single family properties.

(7:59 - 8:29)
Again, when I was doing the wholesaling, the burs, flips, holds and whatnot, that was only a period of probably 16, maybe 18 months. And in that time, we did probably three, four million dollars in volume and had an acquired roughly 14 doors or so as a buy and hold. So I would say for me when I started, I was already pretty disciplined with saving my capital.

(8:30 - 8:54)
So it was easier for me to purchase an investment property being a modest income earner and being able to save so much capital aside. Now, what I will also say is that I've also had a partner. So now you have two people who are modest or higher income earners with the ability to save, to put down that capital liquid in order to get started.

(8:55 - 9:17)
And when you get started from there, it kind of snowballs. So the income that you can get from your first rental, that in addition to what you're saving can start to accumulate and the snowball starts to grow. That leads you to the next property and everything thereafter.

(9:18 - 9:38)
So to answer your question about risk, well, your first question was how did I get started? And it pretty much came from savings and partnerships. However, there are other ways to do that. If you don't have the capital yourself, again, well, my saying here is that if you don't have the resources, you have to become resourceful.

(9:38 - 9:52)
Let's say you are somebody out there who don't really have that capital. Let's say you're not a high income earner. You have to go out there and find the capital through relationships, through networking, through whatever means possible, through let's say your friends and family.

(9:53 - 10:06)
Pull that money together in order to start doing that. Now, the second question, Mike, was the risk piece. How do I manage the risk? Well, at that time, again, I was a hoarder of knowledge.

(10:06 - 10:17)
So I knew I read every single book that I could get my hands on. And let's say only 60% of it or 70% of it was actually absorbed. That made me pretty dangerous.

(10:17 - 10:41)
So I knew 70% of the material, right? And the caveat here is that I will say that any book that you read out there is not going to teach you everything you're going to know. You're going to have to put in some hands-on experience in order to learn everything more because I thought I knew a lot. But the first year as a self-manager in my own rental portfolio was very eye-opening.

(10:41 - 11:00)
It taught me a lot that year or even first couple of months. But again, I managed the risk by educating myself, knowing as much as I could, utilizing the network that I had around me for answers. You know, I had friends that were in the contracting business.

(11:01 - 11:16)
I had friends in HVAC. So I could call on those people to help me through whatever issues that I was going through. So risk comes from inexperience and it comes from not having enough knowledge.

(11:16 - 11:29)
So if you can fill those two gaps, you should be okay. You should be in a really good position to be, again, dangerous. The other piece I would say is that I was still working as a W-2 pharmacist.

(11:29 - 11:36)
So I still had an income. If shit went south, I would still stay afloat. Some people don't have that.

(11:36 - 11:47)
Some people will put their back against the wall and jump forward. So you have to, again, alleviate what you don't know. And that's what I did in the commercial side.

(11:47 - 11:53)
I put my back against the wall. And so that was a little bit more risky for me. Hopefully that answers your question, Mike.

(11:53 - 12:05)
No, absolutely. Because one of the things that I highlight with people is just the importance of getting started in trying to manufacture a win or manufacture your first deal. You've got to find a way to get in.

(12:05 - 12:11)
I think that's where people get stuck. It's like, well, I don't know how I'm going to get the money. I don't know what asset class I'm going to choose.

(12:11 - 12:24)
And it's like, you just got to get in and learn. Because once you get in, then you realize either I like that asset class, I don't like that asset class. But to your point, you said you learned more in the first year of actually doing it than all the time listening to the podcasts and all that.

(12:24 - 12:43)
And so my advice for people is always find a way to get in and get started. And then once you get in there, then you can adjust. You also want to figure out what method or vehicle fits you the best, right? So there's a million ways out there to make a million dollars.

(12:43 - 13:01)
So you just have to figure out what actually fits your mold. Could it be stocks? Could it be trading? Could it be arbitrage? Could it be short-term rentals? Or just single families, multifamily, or commercial? All of them are real estate, yes. But they each have a different caveat to them.

(13:01 - 13:10)
So you have to figure out what fits you the most. And then you take that vehicle and run with it. I had a client that bought a small multifamily property.

(13:10 - 13:22)
And after having it for a while, they just were totally stressing themselves out. Because they're thinking about their property and the tenants. And what are the tenants doing? And are they ruining it? And that sort of thing.

(13:23 - 13:33)
And they just couldn't deal with the uncertainty of that. Of feeling like it's a little out of your control. And then they just decided they were going to sell and go back to stock market.

(13:33 - 13:42)
Because it's different, right? And so I think, yeah, to your point, some people diversify. Some people have risk tolerance. And some people want to be hands-off.

(13:42 - 13:46)
Some people want to be hands-on. It's a mix. But you learn by doing.

(13:46 - 14:05)
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(14:05 - 14:17)
We have the knowledge and experience to handpick the best deals that most investors can't find. We've got large off-market deals all the time. Where you can hopefully find returns and economies of scale that you just can't find on your own.

(14:17 - 14:35)
The best thing is, it's 100% passive to you for less capital than you put down trying to acquire a property on your own. Don't let this year go by where you don't make the leap, add to your portfolio, or you just sit in analysis by paralysis. To find out more, visit freedomthroughrealestate.com and click on invest.

(14:35 - 14:48)
You can book a call and learn more there. So get to scaling your portfolio now with us by your side. Yeah, so talk a little bit about, because you mentioned about, having some partners early on, selling it, and then now having a new partner.

(14:48 - 15:03)
We'd love to hear just your thoughts on finding partners, balancing workloads, or kind of figuring out who does what. And then just tips or advice on that piece. Yeah, so partner, this is a difficult one for a lot of people.

(15:03 - 15:26)
So I am a firm believer that I cannot do everything myself. So I have to delegate some things, right? Whether it be through employees or somebody on the team, right? Partners will help you, partners should help you exponentially grow. And the biggest piece here is that it's a marriage.

(15:26 - 15:37)
You have to look at it as a marriage. Even, I've had millions, 20, 30 million dollars in handshakes before. Those are the people that I can trust, right? I don't need anything on paper.

(15:37 - 15:48)
I don't advise that. Even though nothing's gone wrong, I would have everything on paper. Because circumstances change.

(15:49 - 15:58)
Who they are now, what they're going through now is going to be different. Or the same thing with you. What you're going through now, in your circumstance now, it's going to change a year from now, five years from now.

(15:59 - 16:15)
So you have to always plan for the worst. And or you have to plan for an exit in some way, shape, or form with your partners. Now, how to find your partners? I would say partners might not be for everybody.

(16:15 - 16:27)
Some people are controlling. Some people want to do things their own selves. So you kind of have to look in the mirror, do a self-assessment to see if having a partner is something that would truly benefit you.

(16:27 - 16:49)
Again, from my position, I think partners help you get to where you want to go and your goals a lot quicker if you choose the right one. Now, who's the right one? I think the perfect partner is someone who can complement what you lack. So if you're a visionary, you're going to need an integrator.

(16:49 - 16:56)
Or if you're an integrator, you need a visionary. Let's say you're super organized. You're an operations type person.

(16:56 - 17:18)
You'll need somebody who's more like a visionary, who thinks a little bit bigger, who focuses on growing. Whereas you are somebody who's inundated with kind of the day-to-day stuff. I shouldn't say inundated, but you love doing the day-to-day stuff and you love seeing progress within every week or the goals that you're setting for your team, things like that.

(17:19 - 17:47)
Or just from a personality perspective, if let's say I'm really good at networking and my partner is more so better on the operations side, that would work pretty well, right? So again, you want to find a partner who is complementary to the skills that you lack. And again, you want to plan for an exit. You want to plan with the end in mind, whether it be a short-term partnership or a long-term partnership.

(17:49 - 18:04)
Again, my first set of partners, we didn't really see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. And that's why we disbanded. Now, I found a partner in the commercial realm who's been my mentor for the past five, six years.

(18:05 - 18:17)
Same partner that I've had handshakes on for multi-million dollar deals. And we vibe very well. And I don't see it as a short-term partnership.

(18:17 - 18:33)
I see that as a more of a long-term partnership. So again, it kind of depends on what your character is and what you are looking for when it comes to a partnership. So talking about your sweet spot, your bread and butter right now.

(18:33 - 18:49)
So you linked up with a new partner, decided to get into more of retail, warehouse, office. Is that all in the Cincinnati area? And then talk about your criteria of what you're looking for for opportunities. So they're not all in the Cincinnati area.

(18:49 - 19:00)
They would be considered probably around the Midwest and the Southeast. I typically avoid the coastal states, West Coast, East Coast. They tend to be a little bit more expensive.

(19:01 - 19:13)
And I don't have a competitive edge out there. The numbers just don't make sense to me to find opportunities. For me, I guess anything with outside of the coastal states is where I look.

(19:13 - 19:26)
But I focus primarily on the Midwest. And I love retail, love industrial. And office space right now holds a big opportunity coming off of the COVID season.

(19:27 - 19:43)
So I think my favorite asset class would probably be either flex space and strip malls. Those are my bread and butter, I'd say. But since office is presenting an opportunity, my focus is transitioned over to office.

(19:44 - 20:07)
So what I look for, I am a value add investor. I don't buy your credit tenant properties that are generating 4%, 5%, 6%. I look for deals that have a lot of potential to add some type of value so that you can exploit the cap rate and pretty much benefit from the backside.

(20:08 - 20:21)
So it's pretty representative of flipping in the residential side. So when you're flipping on the residential side, you're buying a house that's dilapidated, whatever. You're fixing it up.

(20:21 - 20:34)
You either rent it out after that. But ultimately, you are selling that asset after your improvements. So let's say you bought a house for 50 grand, put in 30 grand into it, it's worth 150 grand.

(20:35 - 20:45)
So you make the net difference. We're not gonna talk about the fees and all that, but you're gonna make some profit at the end. So it's essentially the same thing for me in the commercial realm.

(20:45 - 20:53)
However, there's a lot more nuances involved. It's not just fixing up the property itself. Sometimes it comes from the operations of the property.

(20:54 - 21:09)
Sometimes it comes from re-engineering the leases, lease ups, changing the type of leases. You can create outlots to sell and that adds value to the property. And essentially, I'll hold the property for three to five years.

(21:10 - 21:22)
The last one I took, full cycle, it was a $5 million purchase. We created an outlot, optimized some of the operations. Increased rents for some tenants.

(21:22 - 21:35)
Found better tenants in some of the places. And once it was fully occupied, sold it for just south of $8 million over three and a half years. So value add once again.

(21:35 - 21:58)
And I think the other criteria for me is that the property has to cash flow from day one with current debt terms. Which means I typically look for something that's around maybe 10% to 15% cash on cash on day one. And if it's not there, it has to have a bigger valuation on the back end.

(21:59 - 22:08)
So 10% to 15% day one with the value add. Hopefully it gets to your mid 20s. And if it goes over 30, fantastic.

(22:09 - 22:27)
But then I know that the value of the property is going to be considerably more once all that stabilization and value add has been completed. Talk a little bit about working in markets, you know, outside of Cincinnati and different states, different cultures, different climates. Trying to learn about those opportunities.

(22:27 - 22:54)
You know, trying to recognize that it's different when it's, hey, I've been driving by this strip mall down the street and I see there's a ton of value here. It's different when it's a different state, an area you're not familiar with. So how do you feel comfortable or kind of eliminate those, I guess, kind of that second guessing or educating yourself to feel comfortable about a market that you're going to take down a property in? Yeah, so it's very similar to your own backyard, right? The only difference is that you're familiar with your backyard.

(22:54 - 23:07)
So you don't have to do any more research on your backyard. You've been there for a while, you know it, etc. So any market that we look at, any property that's outside of Cincinnati, we'll look at the demographics.

(23:08 - 23:44)
You know, what does the population look like? What's their income? What's the combined household income? What's the median house value? What's driving that particular market? Who are the employers, right? Where does the property sit? Can it draw tenants? So each asset class is going to have its different nuances. So retail, office and industrial, all different nuances there, right? So when you're looking at a property just based on, again, within the real estate side, the one thing you can't change is location. So you really have to know that location and that comes from research.

(23:45 - 24:16)
And, you know, a lot of it comes from intuition, right? The data is going to give you some intuition. Now, so if the household income, let's say, is 40 grand, I know it's not an affluent area, right? If it's 140 grand, now I know they have some expendable income and retail should probably survive, right? And let's say there's a lot of demand for industrial spaces in the area. Then I know an industrial property would probably survive.

(24:17 - 24:32)
So supply and demand metrics as well. And, you know, outside of intuition, you kind of have to utilize the people that are around you. Use, try to find as much data as you can, right? Call some brokers up that are in the area.

(24:32 - 25:00)
If you have friends that are in the area, boots on the ground, call them, get their intake. And that's how you get to know the feel of the area. If a broker is going to tell you, you know, I have space, I have retail space in this area that's been sitting for 12 months, 14 months, I can't get a leased out, that tells you there's a problem, right? So we generally manage all of our property ourselves with a caveat.

(25:00 - 25:31)
So it depends on what stage of life the property is in. Is it really dilapidated? Does it need a lot more hands-on? Or is it one of those that's plug and play, where you can just lease up to a couple tenants and just kind of ride the wave, manage it remotely, call contractors, et cetera. But in order to be comfortable investing outside of state or outside of your backyard, you have to know all the data about that particular location.

(25:31 - 25:54)
If there's, again, market drivers, supply and demand, get all the info that you can. And then on top of that, you also have to put a team in place if you want to invest out of state. Now, with commercial, it's a little bit easier if you have properties that are a little bit more, let's say it has a little bit less value add to where you can just lease it up and kind of plug and play with it.

(25:54 - 26:13)
You know, you have your contractors in place where you can manage everything remotely. That is on the easier side. Now, if a property has a lot of issues with it, you know, tenant turnovers, late payments, things like that, and it needs a lot of work in and of itself, you might want to hire a property manager for something like that.

(26:13 - 26:40)
That's where your team comes into place. Again, you become a lot more confident in something once you have all the knowledge base and the team around you in order to do something about it. Talk a little bit quick here before you wrap up about building deal flow because you're working in other states, you're working in other communities, building relationships with brokers or whatever it might be, would love to hear kind of how you're building up that network so that you have consistent deal flow to try to find those right properties to weed through.

(26:40 - 27:17)
Yeah, so just like in residential, you have off-market and on-market properties, right? Off-market's a little bit more challenging to find because the data within the commercial realm is a little bit more challenging to dissect. And that sometimes comes from the data provider, but ultimately it comes from the county websites, right? So the data's not very clean compared to residential. So that's one way to find deals through data whether you're cold calling, doing direct mail, et cetera.

(27:17 - 27:36)
So you can do it that way, but again, the data's a little tricky. On-market deals, you can find those pretty much on Crexie, LoopNet. They're there for you to see, right? So the problem with that is that there's a lot of eyes on it already.

(27:36 - 27:49)
So it depends on if you're pretty religious on looking at Crexie and LoopNet all day every day, you might be able to find a deal. There are deals out there on Crexie and LoopNet. You just kind of have to craft it a little bit.

(27:50 - 28:11)
Now, sometimes residential brokers come into finding some commercial deals. So that comes from networking through local meetups or meetups that are, let's say, out of state, what have you, or just communicating online, right? Outside of that, you can look on Facebook Marketplace. You can look on Craigslist.

(28:12 - 28:29)
I think Craigslist is still a thing and I'm sure you can find something there. So those are all ways that we have found deals or are looking for deals. In order to find additional deals, you can look for broker websites that are poorly marketed.

(28:29 - 28:56)
And a lot of times, so one of our first deals that we found, a broker only had it listed on their website versus Crexie and LoopNet. So you would have to do some digging in order to actually find that deal because it wasn't mass marketed. To answer your question, Mike, how do we build that lead flow? So it comes down to utilizing a lot of these different methods in order to build that pipeline.

(28:57 - 29:10)
So we have people that cold calls for us. We're doing a little bit of direct mail. We are looking religiously on Crexie, LoopNet, Facebook Marketplace, sometimes within our area.

(29:10 - 29:28)
And that builds up a little bit of a lead flow in and of itself. Now, broker relationships is a really big one because they have probably the most data and they're doing all of this outreach already. So we keep a database of the brokers that we talk to.

(29:28 - 29:47)
We curate that list and we try to continuously reach out to them whenever we can. And outside of that, you also have to build up a brand for yourself or a reputation for yourself within the space. I say that because you don't wanna be a tire kicker.

(29:48 - 29:54)
You don't wanna be somebody who's out there like, hey man, just send me all your deals. I don't care what it is. As long as it's value-add, send me your deals.