A Story of Impact from KW Next Gen
Every Holy Week from the time Iñaki Guerrero was three years old until he was eighteen, his family packed up and drove to impoverished communities across Texas to volunteer. Week after week, year after year, he watched firsthand what the absence of stable housing could do to a community — to families, to children, to the people who make up a neighborhood.
He didn’t know yet what he would do with that. But it stayed with him.
By the time Iñaki was sixteen, he had found his second passion: real estate. A family friend who worked for Keller Williams had gone to UT Austin, and Iñaki interned for him the summer after his sophomore year of high school. He fell in love immediately. “I was like, this is the coolest thing ever.” He made UT Austin his dream school, got his real estate license, and used student leasing to pay for his own college tuition once he got there.
He was well into his junior year when a friend named Lorra reached out and told him he should come to this thing called QL Summit in Austin. They’d met when they were both sixteen or seventeen, volunteering at a real estate conference. They hadn’t spoken much in two years. He didn’t ask a lot of questions.
“I was on my phone at the time,” he says. “She said, you should come to this. And I was like, I’m there in thirty seconds.”
He walked in expecting a real estate conference.
He had heard of Gary Keller. He assumed it would be a room full of realtors talking about how to sell homes. What he found instead was something he hadn’t expected and wasn’t immediately sure he needed: a program focused entirely on internal growth.
“At first I was a little bit hesitant,” he says. “Like, I don’t really know if I need this.”
That hesitation didn’t last long. “After hearing Gary Keller talk for the better part of a day, I was like, wow. This was not necessarily what I expected, but I’m so glad that I was able to attend. I’m glad I went into it with an open mind.”
He came back the following year — this time as a group leader.
The tool that has stayed with him most is the GPS. He uses it for everything: career goals, semester goals, personal goals. Even training for a half Ironman.
“You have your overarching goal, and a lot of times you come up with the goal and it just feels super far away,” he says. “But if you break it down into meaningful steps, and steps within those steps, it becomes a lot more attainable.”
What he realized was that the GPS isn’t just for business. It’s for the full shape of a life. “That’s definitely something I’m going to take with me throughout the rest of my life and professional and personal career as well.”
When he sat down to write his mission statement at QL Summit, the two threads of his life finally came together.
To enact positive change in the world by creating a real estate company that invests in low-income housing and helps tenants by creating programs that help them through financial literacy training, Bible studies, networking, and other things like that.
“It combines two things that I’m really passionate about,” he says. “Real estate, both on the residential and commercial side, but also that philanthropic feeling of helping people.”
But it’s more than a goal. It’s a legacy.
“This goal is something that I don’t want it to end with me,” Iñaki says. “When I pass away, I want it to be passed on to someone else. I want that fund and that ability to help people in low-income housing to supersede me.”
That kind of thinking is rare at any age. At twenty-one, it’s remarkable.
His junior year of college was the hardest year of his life so far.
He was navigating peak recruiting season for internships, carrying a heavy course load, working two jobs, paying for school himself, and managing whatever was happening eight and a half hours away at home — all while being the first in his family to go to college. There was no one in his family who had been through it before. There was no map.
He’d been matched with his Quantum Leap coach, Debra Perlman, and their sessions became something he hadn’t expected: a place to just tell the truth about how he was doing.
“I would call her and I’d be like, hey, this is what I’m feeling. This is how I’m navigating my life. This is what I’m struggling with. And she’d be like, okay, these are little tiny, tangible things you can do to help.”
The suggestions weren’t dramatic. Set four reminders instead of two. Don’t touch your phone until you’ve made your bed. Small, doable things — but across six sessions, they added up.
More than the tactics, though, what Debra gave him was a different way of seeing.
“It wasn’t that the problems were getting smaller,” he says. “But my perspective had been reframed.”
He still uses that reframe now — with himself, and with friends going through hard things. “Hey, listen. I know you’re going through this, but let’s zoom out a little bit. You’re at your dream school. This is exactly what you were begging to do every single day for four years of high school. It’s not that bad.”
He’s also held onto something he heard somewhere during that season: It is a blessing to be tired from something of your own choosing. Whether it’s five AM swim training or a hard exam at the best business school in the state — he chose this. That matters.
Iñaki also received a Fund My Mission Scholarship through KW Next Gen — support that he says he intends to pay forward as he gets further into his career and is able to give back in the same way he’s been given to.
“I feel incredibly fortunate and blessed to have been given a lot from a lot of different people,” he says. “And I fully intend to give back in a very similar way.”
What makes KW Next Gen different from the other programs he’s tried? He’s thought about this.
“A lot of them have community. A lot of them have great leaders. A lot of them have scholarships, maybe. But I haven’t found one that really meshes all of those together,” he says. And beyond the structure, it’s the people. Everyone he’s interacted with has been not only qualified, but genuinely good — the kind of person you can be honest with.
“Even though she’s not like my therapist or anything like that,” he says of Debra, “it was really cool having someone that I could just be vulnerable with.”
Iñaki Guerrero is twenty-one years old. He is a senior at UT Austin, the first in his family born in the United States, paying for his own education, and training for an Ironman while building toward a mission that he hopes will outlive him.
He showed up to QL Summit three years ago because a friend sent him a text and he said yes before he thought about it.
He went back the following year to lead others in.
“I didn’t think that this is where it would have led me,” he says. “But I’m excited to continue to be involved. I’m excited to give back.”
Iñaki was supported through KW Next Gen’s Quantum Leap program, Quantum Leap Coaching, and a donor-funded Fund My Mission Scholarship. To read more stories of impact, visit kwnextgen.org.
