Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to The Voice of Hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the change makers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Hello. Today's guest on The Voice of Hope is Vladlin Xavier Stark, CPA, CA, I C D D, and the CFO of Remuda Building, and the founder and CEO of Luxara, a luxury real estate co-ownership platform. With more than 15 years of experience in finance, governance, and entrepreneurship, Vlad has scaled real estate portfolios-led AI transformation initiatives and is passionate about helping others build lasting wealth and meaningful impact. Vlad, welcome. Thanks so much, Ken. Great to be here. Yeah, I'm always interested to hear the path. What brought you to this stage of your career? Why are you doing what you're doing?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 0:58

The big why. I'll start with a quote that means quite a bit to me. And it's I don't actually know where it originated, but it goes something like before you win, everybody asks you why you're working so hard. And after you win, everybody reminds you how lucky you got. And I think my story is very much the story of, you know, a lot of hard work along the way, and maybe not so much luck along the way. And I think the most formative experiences and behind my why really could be summarized probably by two things. One is the athletics that was a big part of my life for a long period of time, and then also my immigrant journey, immigrating now several times between tempering countries over my personal and professional life. And if I think of the athletics component of it, I grew up playing competitive tennis. And even though in the context of leadership and in business, perhaps it doesn't necessarily translate. But what it taught me ultimately was the absolute individual accountability. And I think accountability is something so central to business and to leadership in particular that it's one of the most valuable things that I learned. On the immigrant journey side, we immigrated to Canada in early 2000s, and then I immigrated again to New Zealand in 2016, and then I came back to Canada, and now I'm potentially immigrating somewhere in Central America, but that's a story for another time. So throughout all of that, there was a ton of different experiences, a ton of different learning and growth. And that really changed my worldview in a very profound way, just seeing different perspectives all over the world, seeing different businesses and being part of different cultures. And to form my why, it really goes back to the legacy that my grandparents and my parents have built over their time. And that's something that I continue trying to build. And that legacy really is all about elevating those people that are around me and just improving everybody's well-being.

Ken Huey 3:07

If I dug just a little deeper on the immigration story, do you feel like those that do not have that experience are lacking something or what that can be pejorative, and I don't mean it to be, but what extra does it give you that somebody that's not been through that doesn't have?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 3:26

Well, I don't think it's necessarily immigration per se. I mean, it's certainly a trial by fire. I recommend it carefully to people, but you could equate that to going away to college or to moving to a different town or an opportunity to work. And really, I think it's just this idea that you put yourself in a totally different context and you have to adapt and you have to figure things out for yourself very often without the support networks. And you build a lot of resilience along the way, and you build a lot of life skills along the way that I think are paying dividends for me 25 years after I immigrated here. It's just that a lot of the values were instilled in me because of the circumstances I was in as immigrant. And yeah, you could, like I said, potentially mimic that experience with some of these other moves.

Ken Huey 4:19

You've built quite a career across finance, governance, entrepreneurship. As you look back, what experiences out of that have shaped the leader that you are today?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 4:31

Yeah, I think looking back, I think the the most important thing for me was getting the breadth of experience. So not necessarily some very specific experience, but just getting the real breadth of it. And that to me came through my career started in public accounting. I was with PwC, and I got exposure to all kinds of different companies all over the world. And then I moved with a firm to New Zealand, got even more exposure there to all kinds of people and businesses. And throughout all of that, you pick up just so many interesting things and so many lived experiences from not just the companies that you're working with, but also from these various different teammates that I had. And being part of the large company like BWC at the time, it really is a global firm. So you're working with people from all over the world. So you become this melting pot of awesomeness. And you get to lean on one another, you get to learn from one another. And for those of you who don't know about public accounting or consulting world, it's it is tough. It's a lot of hours, it's a lot of you know in the trenches type work, long days, long weeks, and travel. And you forge a lot of these really strong relationships and really strong bonds in the process. And you really, I mean, I don't want to compare it to military, but it's this similar type bond that you build when you're in this trial by combat, if you will. And some of those bonds are lifelong friendships for me, even throughout I haven't been out of public accounting for over a decade, but a lot of those friendships and a lot of those experiences still live off.

Ken Huey 6:10

So Luxara is rethinking luxury real estate. What was the problem that you saw that needed to be solved that led you to build Luxara?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 6:20

Yeah, so just maybe to give your listeners a little bit of a context for what it even is and what the model is and what it's trying to solve. So Luxara is two things. One, it's a hospitality brand where we aim to provide exceptional experiences to our guests. But the other side of it is this sort of private equity investment side where we take these trophy properties, these luxury hospitality assets, and we structure them in such a way that everyday person could invest into it. And ultimately, that provides that access that was previously restricted just to the ultra-wealthy, where you had to have very substantial sums of money to be part of private equity groups or just buying personally some of these assets. And where it all started actually was in 2021, I was in Costa Rica with my wife and then almost one-year-old son, and we found this beautiful villa on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, and it was just stunning. But we couldn't afford it on our own. We didn't have seven figures in cash burning a hole in our pocket. So I came back to Canada that Christmas, and I had this one big dream of finding a way to own this property. And cutting a very long story short, spent about four months trying to raise capital, trying to find investors, and then eventually in May of 2022, we bought what is now Luxara Villa Vista Bahia in Costa Rica. And I remember when we went down there for the first time after we bought it, and we went up to the pool house that sits above the main structure overlooking the ocean, and it's a whole bunch of these kind of windy steps up the hill, and it was scorchingly hot. And you could hear the animals and the birds and everything around us, and we get to the top, and we turn around, and there's this majestic view of the bay, of the boats on the water, of the lush green hills, and there's this tree that was there with these yellow flowers, and we notice this tiny little hummingbird just sort of flickering between the flowers trying to drink the nectar. And in that moment, I'm thinking to myself, I had this huge dream, and it became reality through eons of hard work, but it became reality, and that feeling is really something that I set out to share with other people. That idea that you could dream dig, and with the help of a structure like ours, we can actually help you to share that feeling that I had on that day.

Ken Huey 9:06

Yeah. So a lot of times when you're getting private equity to come and invest, and they're dropping two-thirds of the cost, or let's say half the money, and they're borrowing the other half, they get a certain ownership and a certain return. If you aggregate a whole bunch of smaller owners, are they getting the same rate of return or is there a lot more administrative cost that dilutes that?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 9:29

So we very intentionally set it up in such a way that we don't have a lot of administrative overhead because every one of our investments sits in a separate limited partnership that has very low administrative overhead. But you're absolutely right. But some of these bigger pooled funds, the administrative burden is huge, the peril costs and administrative costs are huge. So we were very intentional about that. And down the line, potentially, if we were to roll up into a master fund, then that fund would have a higher kind of expense ratio than what we're doing at the base level. But yeah, we very intentionally wanted to limit the expense for our investors and also to have the same return across the board, no matter what your investment level is. The only difference we do have it has to do with the use of the property that varies depending on the amount that you invest, of course, but the base financial return is the same for everyone.

Ken Huey 10:23

That's fantastic. I was in Costa Rica earlier this week in the Osa province. Where is your where was that first property located? Just out of curiosity.

Vladlen Xavier Stark 10:31

It's in a place called Playas del Coco in Guanacaste. Oh, fantastic. It's on the west coast.

Ken Huey 10:37

Yeah, yeah. That's where I was just spending my time. My daughter-in-law made quite a nice little mistake and thought she'd put flowers in everybody's drink and turned a whole lot of the vacation into running to the bathroom for uh about four hours. Didn't realize like oh boy. Wow. Okay. Noted. Oh boy. It still turned out really fantastic. And I got it in other ways, but we were in the middle of the interior. This is a different discussion. But anyway, we are it had to take a boat an hour into the middle of nowhere to be in this little ranch. And it was really a very different experience than I've normally had when I've been out there. All right. So let's think a little bit about AI, if I could. You've spoken pretty openly about using AI as a partner while building Luxara. What do you mean by that?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 11:23

Well, I when I initially set out, I actually wanted to have an actual team of AI agents and even introduced them by name to our investors and to our people using our platforms. And I think we're still a little bit ways away from that level of autonomy for me to just unleash these agents out there. So if we scale it back a little bit, AI has really enabled the very existence of Luxara. Um and I say that because Luxara was really built between the hours of 7:30 p.m. when my kids go to bed and the time that I pass out on the keyboard. Okay, because during the day I have a job as a CFO of a large manufacturing and building company. And then Luxara comes at nighttime. And for me to cram in that much productivity into an evening is really impossible to do without the help of a tool like AI or having a large team. So really it just became this enabler and accelerant of research, of writing, of creative that enabled every one of the milestones for Lizzara to actually happen because I had access to so much more productivity right at my fingertips.

Ken Huey 12:43

Uh Vlad, you've got a podcast, The Immigrant Hustle. What inspired you to share your journey so publicly, including wins and struggles?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 12:52

Yeah, I think you know, looking at social media over the past couple of years, I think it's getting a bit better. But it was always this flashy private yachts and planes and vacations. And it's always the final destination. It's never the journey. And even though most of it is actually fake, at least that's my personal opinion. But the ones that are truly successful, they very infrequently share what it actually takes to get there. And what I wanted to do by sharing my experience, well, a couple of things. One, I wanted to really showcase what it takes to be an entrepreneur, to take some of these risks, the challenges that it comes with. But on the inverse of that, I also wanted to make sure that people feel that there is somebody out there who's going through the same thing as they are, that the problems that they're facing aren't really that different from somebody else. And maybe within that, they actually find a way for them to learn from my experience or even to reach out for help or to ask somebody for help. Because at the end of every episode of my podcast, I say, hey, we're trying to build a community here where we encourage you to lend somebody a helping hand to always pay it forward. And that's really the entire thought behind it, the entire mentality that I have is that we don't have to struggle alone. And there's a lot of people there with incredible ideas that are just afraid to take that next step. And then if they saw somebody else doing that, then maybe they get inspired and maybe they can actually do something meaningful with their idea and really profoundly change their entire outlook.

Ken Huey 14:32

Vlad, I get the impression that ostentatious displays are not necessarily your style. Is that fair?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 14:38

No, that's fair.

Ken Huey 14:40

So how do you define a successful life today?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 14:45

To me, I think I measure my success professionally and personally by how much I've improved the lives of people around me. And I say that now with even more conviction than earlier on, largely because of the value framework that my grandparents instilled in me, and now that both of them are gone, the carrying the torch or continuing under a legacy of that same mindset, of the helping hand that they lent to countless peoples in their lives, I think that to me is one of the central values of me as a person. And I think in a context of business, if you set out to build a business with something other than a zero-sum game with a net positive as an outcome, if you set it out to get better the lives of your customers, of your team, of your vendors, the money comes as a result. I found that time and time again. If you chase the money, you'll never get any anything great and that you'll never get the legacy that you're striving for. But if you build it from the right foundations, I think the money always comes.

Ken Huey 15:55

So the idea that it's not just a zero-sum game seems to be baked into who you are. Do you have a guiding principle, a personal mission statement, something like this, that really is your North Star?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 16:06

When I was branding Luxara, you know, the one quote that I shared was we strive to put unparalleled experiences in the world's most desirable places within the reach of those who dream big. And if I strip away the first part of it, I think that within the reach of those who dream big, I think that is really the central core philosophy that I have is really the empowerment of dreamers, the taking of the chances, and landing a helping hand in that big pursuit of bad dream. Yeah.

Ken Huey 16:41

Somebody's listening today, I think this happens pretty frequently, and they feel stuck. They don't know what the next step is toward their dream. What message of hope would you want to leave with them?

Vladlen Xavier Stark 16:51

Yeah, I've said this a bunch of different times. You know, business and life is a journey of a thousand steps. It's never linear, it's never easy. And, you know, being an entrepreneur, being in big corporations, day one is hard, day two is hard, day one thousand is hard. But what you learn on day one thousand is that it's a little bit easier than 999 before it. So it's really just taking that first step, taking that leap of faith, and really taking a bet on yourself. And one important thing that also comes with that is if you're not in a position where you are a believer in yourself, I think it's really important for you to find that one person or a few people who do believe in you, whether it's a mentor or a spouse or a parent or whoever who could be that wind in your sails. And if they believe in you long enough, then I think you'll start believing in yourself as well. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in my experience. So I think it's really take that first step, find your right support network, and just left, right, left, right until you get there.

Ken Huey 17:57

Yeah. Vlad, it's inspiring to speak with you. I mean that sincerely. There's a lot of times without naming names, you've got these folks that'll go put a mic in somebody's face and how'd you become a millionaire? And what it's just sort of personality ethic, as Stephen Covey would say. And it's there's a challenges to it frequently. But this kind of mission driven venture is inspiring. And I just want to say thank you for spending some time with us.

Vladlen Xavier Stark 18:20

Thank you for having me.

Ken Huey 18:21

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.