One thing I'm struggling to grasp is scaling.

I agree that this would be making a struggle for creating profit with something like this.

Don't let anyone convince you otherwise -- the struggle is real! 

Time will tell how many a "significant portion" is exactly, as they seeks to turn around the struggling business.

What I'm struggling with is the fear that the economy could take a turn for the worse and get upside down on the project, which I understand is always on the table but wanted to see what everyone's thoughts were as far as waiting or if it's better to just start as soon as possible?

I struggled with this in the beginning a lot because I don't self-manage any of our properties so a lot of things that these other softwares provide were overkill and provided way more than I needed.

Those types of syndications (such as Cardone) are typically very aggressively underwritten (meaning higher execution risk), have sponsors who don't have full real estate cycle experience (meaning higher sponsor risk), have higher leverage ( meaning higher risk of default or suspended distributions), use floating rate loans ( meaning higher interest rate risk), have short-term debt ( meaning higher refinance risk), use financial engineering (meaning higher risk of missing the pro forma), lack signficant (or any) skin in the game (meaning higher risk of lack of alignment with conservative investors ). etc.And it's 100% true that most of these are struggling now.

Newer investor here, I'm struggling on what to do with my property and figured I'd turn to BP for some opinions.  

For my sub 1k per month properties (all of them), income less than 3x rent is THE MOST IMPORTANT indicator that a tenant will struggle to pay rent.

I struggled early on, and was afraid to take risk.