From Pizza Dough to Real Estate Empire: Gino Barbaro on Loss, Legacy and Building a Business That Outlives You

In Episode 166 of The Proven Entrepreneur, host Don Williams sits down with Gino Barbaro, co-founder of Jake and Gino and founder of Barbaro360, for a candid conversation that goes beyond deal-making to explore grief, identity, and the living legacy an entrepreneur can create.

Barbaro traces his entrepreneurial roots to age eight, when his father handed him a knife in the family restaurant kitchen. After his father's death in 2007, he began questioning whether he was living his own dream or his father's. That moment of reckoning led him to pivot from restaurants to multifamily real estate, eventually co-founding Jake and Gino, a multifamily education company.

Williams and Barbaro discuss why most real estate investors fail—by treating properties as assets rather than businesses with a framework. Barbaro shares how the 18-month hunt for his first multifamily deal in 2013 shaped the Jake and Gino methodology. He also opens up about his current fear: not a bad deal, but the risk of building Barbaro360 poorly and leaving his children with the impression that business just sucks.

Barbaro redefines entrepreneurship by highlighting his stay-at-home wife and his 26-year-old missionary daughter, who sells handmade jewelry and holds a massage license, as diverse examples. He credits T. Harv Eker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind with reframing his mindset. "Legacy is not something that you leave behind. Legacy is something that you activate today," he says.

Williams, author of Romancing Your Customer and Build Your Big Legacy, connects the thread to seeing offers from the customer's point of view and keeping faith, family, self, and business in that order.

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