A lot of people ask me why I chose the company name “7 Seeds Properties” and if it has a special meaning. It does. 7 Seeds Properties is the real estate division of my company, Conscious Enterprise, Inc. The meaning, message and mission behind the name is about planting the seeds of prosperity for your family’s future—7 generations into the future to be exact. Our focus is on helping families do that through property ownership and real estate investing. Why is that our focus? Because there is a huge wealth gap in America that, for a lot of families, grows larger with every generation; real estate is one of the best and quickest ways to close that gap.
Before getting into real estate, I had been doing exceptionally well investing in mutual funds for several years, seeing a 30 to 40% return. Once I realized that I could make the same money and more, at least five times faster with real estate, and with less volatility than the stock market, I changed my investing focus. My personal goal at the time was to build up my retirement fund. The rule of thumb is that you need a minimum of $1M to retire comfortably. Even with the great head start my mutual funds gave me, I saw I would be far away from that number by the time I reached retirement age if I didn’t take action and more control over my future fortune immediately. But what elevated this from a personal goal to more of a mission of economic improvement and financial wellbeing for families came from doing a homework assignment while training to become a psychotherapist.
The assignment was to assess three critical issues in society and develop a program to address one of them. Two of the issues I chose dealt with economic justice—(1) the retirement/poverty crisis among seniors and (2) the economic decline of the American middle class, both of which hit urban families and people of color particularly hard. I researched the factors that put families at risk as well as those that protect families from these outcomes. Investing and property ownership are only two of more than 21 factors that can help a family secure and maintain economic growth and wealth across generations, but they are among the most powerful.
So many people are faced with losing whatever nest egg or property they’ve acquired if they hit a rough patch for just a few months or acquired it unexpectedly and are unable to manage it. So part of what we do is about helping people, especially property owners, to hold on to what they have, protect the value of their investments, or stay in their homes…because you can’t pass it on and you can’t reap the economic benefits of it if you can’t keep it, right? The 7 Seeds Properties mission is to help families plant 7 generations of lasting prosperity, but the loss of prosperity can have just as far reaching an effect. So we want to help prevent and pull people out of downward economic spirals and get them back on track.
More than just building wealth, my passion behind 7 Seeds Properties is about intergenerational upward mobility, which means ensuring that each generation can build on and do better than the last. It’s a different mindset than, say, just buying a home or investing in some mutual funds, because it requires long-range intention. No matter what your financial strategy is for securing your family’s future, think about how you might evolve that strategy today to ensure it could sustain and uplift both you and your family seven generations into the future. That’s what we help people to do.