Seeing Greene: How to Build a Business That Sets You Free

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show 792.

Gary:
I always tell people FOCUS is an acronym, Follow One Course Until Successful. Stay focused. Follow one course until successful. That’s what I want. I want us focus in one year or less to get our goals and then we take those goals and we drive it down in the next 90 days. How do we measure that? We take that key purpose indicator and then we drive to keep profit indicators. The profit indicators are our annual, are our 90-day numbers. How much profits do we need to make to get to our purpose?

David:
What’s going on, everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, here today with a Seeing Greene episode. Don’t be fooled by the blue light. It is a Seeing Greene, however, it’s not just me. Today I’m joined by Rob Abasolo and Gary Harper, a very, very talented business coach and successful business investor and owner who’s here to help me tackle questions from you, our listener base, reaching out for some real estate wisdom. Rob?

Rob:
Very I’m just like, “Okay. Let’s throw out the business and start it over.” Yeah, no, this is always good. It’s always good. I heard Gary speak at a conference and I was like, “Man, we got to have this guy on the show,” and really did not disappoint because I think, really, I think a lot of us tend to think of real estate, a real estate business as different from just running a business, and it really is just a business. It just happens to be real estate. He helped clear, I don’t know, some of the ways to think about running that business, who to hire, when to take yourself out of the business, how to feel fulfilled when running the business, how to delegate roles, how to automate roles, how to delete the things that aren’t working for you.

Rob:
So he really takes us through the entire gambit, but really, it was really fun because the way that we structured the episode is we brought in listener questions and he had these just huge philosophies behind the answer of every single question. So a little different the way we did it, but I want to do more shows like this because I think it gave us some pretty tangible advice to our listeners. What do you think?

David:
Well, we basically got free coaching. That’s tens of thousands of dollars worth of coaching we would’ve had to pay for, and it’s all free on a podcast. I think that’s why we’re riding high. This is incredible, incredible stuff. If you guys are interested in business, interested in success, grab a pen, grab some paper, open the app on your phone. You’re going to want to take some notes and you probably want to listen to this one twice.

David:
Before we bring in Gary, today’s quick tip. Check out Gary’s resource page he designed specifically for you, the BiggerPockets listeners, at sharperbusiness.com/biggerpockets. A bonus quick tip, if you need to, bring your teddy bear to work. If you want to know why that’s the bonus quick tip, listen all the way to the end of today’s episode to have your heart melted in love. All right. Rob, anything you want to say before we get into this?

Rob:
No, I think the last 10 minutes were probably the most beneficial to me and I think it’ll be very beneficial to any parents that are in real estate. So stick around to the end.

David:
All right. Let’s bring in Gary.

David:
Gary Harper, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. So nice to have you here. How are you doing?

Gary:
Good. Thanks for having me on, guys.

David:
It’s our pleasure, actually. We’ve heard some really good things about you. So let me ask you a couple brief background questions on you, and then I want to get your take on our understanding of your life because it seems fascinating so far, and just like many people’s stories, the more flavor you have in the origin story and the background, the better the final product comes out. So I have here that you are a wild child in your teens, that you went to live with family out of state. That’s interesting. You learned real estate from a brother-in-law and got into flipping and wholesaling at an early age. This was Indiana, Gary, and you were doing this in an area that was so bad. You slept with a nine millimeter at your side and a gleam in your eye at your properties to prevent theft. That’s how bad this was.

David:
You went into the corporate world from there. Can’t really fault you for that. Eventually became an exec at a Fortune 500 company. Again, this is gladiator. No matter where they put you, rise to the top of what you’re doing. You are Six Sigma certified, had a health scare in 2011, and recovering from that or when recovering from that realized you needed a change, built a real estate business with that same brother-in-law that taught you real estate and did 300 flips per year across three states, moved on to start your own companies and helped coach some of the top investors in the game. You currently have 11 businesses and invest passively in real estate now. Did I leave anything out?

Gary:
No, I think you nailed it. In the flips, it was majority wholesale, so about 300 wholesale deals a year. I think our number was 76% of that was wholesale, rest was fixed and flip or buy and hold. It definitely wasn’t all me. I had a team, my brother-in-law being the visionary at the time led that team, and we just worked it well together, but it was fun. The rise to that was a lot of fun. I loved real estate. I always say real estate was the thing to get me to my thing. I borrowed that from a guy named Matt Andrews who said that and echoed it and I’m like, “Man, I really like that.” It has definitely been the thing to get me to my thing. I bridged those two worlds together from being an executive and Fortune 500 and now also real estate. These two things came together and allowed me to help coach.

Rob:
Yeah, man, that’s really cool.

David:
That’s awesome. I’m curious, many people don’t know this, but Gary, Indiana was actually named after you. That’s how big of a deal you were from the time you spent sleeping in those homes.

Gary:
Yeah, I wish I could take credit for that. I’d have to be pretty old at this point to claim that at this point, but yeah, the homes were interesting. I moved into them, wasn’t really owner of them yet. I was working with my brother-in-law and, actually, a layman working with him in the business and it was his first rendition of doing it in the nineties. We had read Carlton Sheets and some other type programs at the time and we’re like, “All right. We’re going to try this.” Some of the homes were high cash flow, but not in the greatest of neighborhoods. So people would break in and steal copper and pipes and things like that. So part of the ways to protect that is to rent the house, but also then keep a Glock 9mm and different types of special guns next to me to keep me safe at night.

Rob:
Hopefully, you never have had to use it. I’ve always found that the best to turn is actually a small chihuahua that barks really just an insane amount if anyone knocks on the door. So a little bit cheaper too, I think. Gary, you mentioned that you your brother-in-law was, I suppose, the visionary for this flipping business and for this real estate business. As I understand it, most businesses typically have a visionary and the opposite side of that would be the operator, the person that’s on the ground, the boots on the ground running the logistics side of it. Was that your involvement with the real estate arm of that company at that time?

Gary:
Yeah. Some of the businesses we partnered in and then others that we were in together were him being the visionary and then I was the integrator operator, if you will, and helping him build systems and processes and hiring the right people, putting them in the right seat, leading, managing, holding people accountable. With my background in corporate America, obviously that was a good fit and helping him create that back office structure where he lived in more of the offensive side of the business.

David:
Well, that is quite the story, man. We are happy to have you here and interested to get to know more about you. Remind me we need to connect offline when we’re done here because anybody with a story like that I want to know more about. Before we get into the listener questions that we have lined up for today, let’s get clear about the work that you do as a business coach. So first off, what’s the biggest misconception about what a coach is?

Gary:
Well, I think a coach, probably one of the biggest misconceptions is understanding the difference between what a coach or this person can do for you. There’s three things. They can help facilitate answers out of your head and on to paper, they can teach practical lessons and practical tools, but coaching comes down to experience and driving the results. I think a lot of times people in this industry label themselves as a coach and they’re a facilitator or a teacher and they’re not actually a coach, nor have they earned the right to coach based on the experience and results of those experience. Results are not always being good. Sometimes you learn from mistakes, you fail forward, and that causes good results to come and gives you the experience necessary to coach somebody else so they don’t stumble on the same mistakes you made, but it’s really hard to put that title on as a coach if you have not had experience in the area that you’re teaching or coaching in. So I think we got to be careful sometimes of hiring somebody who’s teaching us and thinking we’re hiring somebody that’s coaching us.

David:
Is this going to throw some salts in the game of the 24-year-olds on TikTok who own a house hack and investment property and are ridiculously good-looking and are telling everyone how to become a millionaire in real estate? Are you trying to say that’s not a real coach?

Gary:
Yeah, I’d say that’s absolutely not a real coach and I’ll call it all out all day long because they can teach what they did that found success, and if they’re 24, they had that success in one of the hottest markets we’ve ever seen in real estate. I’d like to know that they also failed at some point in 2008 like some of us did and lost everything. I lost everything in real estate in probably 2011, and it was that failure that gave me the success of 2011 to 2016. So I can then coach on what that experience was and how to sustain and how to grow past.

Gary:
I was just on a call this morning with a team and they feel like they’re not growing where they wanted to be. The words were, “Well, we’re not where we want to be, but we’re where we were two years ago.” I’m like, “How do you not look at that as success? 2020 and 2019 was one of the hottest markets we ever been and you’re still producing at the same level as you were then and you call that not growth? That’s great success.” It’s just perspective. So when you’ve never gone through those changes, you then can’t coach somebody and say, “Listen, this is success.” The fact that you’re maintaining where you were two years ago is actually an increase in success.

David:
That’s a great point. It’s one of the reasons I typically highlight what’s going on with the economy in general. You can run a 10-minute mile and if you then go into a steep incline but you maintain that 10-minute mile pace, you’re actually getting faster, you’re in better shape even though the metric that you’re using to measure that doesn’t reflect it. Conversely, if you’re running at a 10-minute mile pace but the road goes downhill, you’re not pushing yourself, you’re not improving. I love that you’re pointing that out. I think oftentimes we look at, I guess you’d call them lag indicators like, “How much money did I make or how many units did I have?” and they don’t tell the whole story of success. Is that basically what you’re getting at?

Gary:
Yeah. Even running that 10-minute mile, if you’re going up a 90-degree incline and say you dropped to a 12-minute mile, the fact is you’re still gaining strength. You’re still able to run up that hill where before you weren’t. Everybody looked at success like we were running down that hill and everybody could run down the hill. The question is, can everybody now run back up the hill now that we’re in a different market? So how have we prepared physically, mentally, emotionally, business-wise to be able to run up the hill of a market shift versus downhill like we have enjoyed over the last many years?

Gary:
That’s the difference between coaching and just teaching because if I teach you how I ran downhill, how does that help you go back up this hill? Coaching’s about the experience of running up and down hills and mountains over the last 20 years like we’ve been able to do and then sharing that experience and say, “Listen, it felt good here, but it’s going to feel real good when we get to the top of this mountain.”

David:
That’s awesome, man. Well, I’m excited to do this. We’re going to get into some questions from our listeners, perhaps yours if you submitted a question at biggerpockets.com/david, and Gary will share some of his business wisdom as we answer them. All right. Our first question is coming from Tyler in Texas. Tyler says, “How do you manage your busy schedule and businesses? I am currently searching for a software like Monday.com or Smartsheet to implement at my job. This is something I would like to use for my personal ventures as well. Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with everything going on and I think that this would help me get more organized. How can I more effectively manage my time and the teams around me, and how can I approach the conversation of easing out of a job I’ve had for nine years?” All right, Gary. You want to take a stab at that?

Gary:
I love this question. Every entrepreneur goes from like, “How do I reduce complexity and reduce my job, my J-O-B too? I want to be on the beach.” They forget about the ocean in between those two questions. It’s such a journey to getting that from here to there. Let’s address the beginning part of it. Let’s start talking about the, “How do we reduce the complexity and get control of my life?” Softwares are a big part of that. You got to have Asanas, you got to have Mondays, you got to have CRMs. Every major function in a company, sales, marketing, operations, finance tend to have their major software that creates that structure within that area.

Gary:
So Asana, Monday really good with task management, and that’s what I think this gentleman’s referring to mostly here is, “How do I get task management under control, manage my productivity, things like that?” Before you do that, let me just caution you. So many people dump their process, procedures or policies into that, the task of the business. I would highly recommend that you process map out what you’re having to do every day, the processes in which you’re accountable for, and make sure you reduce it all the waste within that process before just dop it in a software. So we’re always looking at process and mapping it out and going, “Does this bring value to my customer? Is it essential to my business?” If it doesn’t bring value but it’s essential, then we automate it. If it brings immense value but it’s not essential, maybe you outsource it.

Gary:
Then if it brings value and it’s essential, then we put it in a software for management. We put it in Asana, we put it in Monday, but if it doesn’t bring value and it’s not essential or it was at some point and it’s not anymore, we challenge the status quo of that and we eliminate it from the business before we put it in a software because we don’t want to just create process, procedures, and policy and automate those things for the purpose of it. We want to make sure that as we scale, we increase efficiency and reduce complexity and waste.

Gary:
That’s what I call reducing the waste or leaning the process, but once you have that process leaned, then absolutely, let’s put it in Asana, let’s put it in Monday, let’s put it in a task management based software. I recommend Asana. We use that with all of our teams. For them, it’s free. We pay for subscription because we’re managing hundreds of teams. I think we got over 300 teams we’re managing right now. So we put it in there to help run their weekly meetings. My wife, my kids, my son, my daughter, they all put their stuff in there like when vacations are going on. I think when my wife helped plan my son’s wedding. It was all in Asana from a task management. We could assign it to resources, audit the resources, make sure it’s getting done, be notified when it’s not being done. So it definitely would. Just caution, as a coach that’s done this 20 years, eliminate the waste first. Get rid of that redundancy or waste in the process before you just start assigning it.

Rob:
Really cool. I had a mentor one time that had a similar process, and I think it’s effectively what you’re saying. He called it DAD, delegate, automate, delete. That is something that I’ve worked on quite a bit these last couple of months is delegating because I think one of the problems that people have and the reason that people are so busy with their schedules is because they think that the people that they hire are incapable of doing the job better than them. I’m very selfish in this capacity, and so it’s very hard to relinquish control, but let me just say, the moment you do, boy, don’t it feel good. It feels so good to delegate. Oh, my gosh. I’m a delegation king now. I actually was trying to delegate this podcast right before I hopped on, but no, no, it’s been really, really great.

Rob:
Then automating, there are a lot of ways that you can do that as well. We’ve been using a process in a software called Zapier, which basically allows you to … It takes all of the things that you already automate and then it syncs everything together so that whenever one thing pops up in Asana, it sends you an email or a text notification. There’s a thousand ways that you can zap things back and forth, but it really does create a very, very strong foundation once you actually have automations in place to take things not off of your plate and not just off of your team’s plate, but really just helping the business run a lot more efficiently.

Gary:
I think to address the second half of that question, which is like, “How do I become in the owner’s box and get out of my way and start running it like a business?” is you start to delegate these things through what we call the heart, the head, hands and feet. So determining, I always say, the heart, head, hands and feet tell you if you’re in the right seat. Little cliche rhyme right there. So when you have the heart for it, desire for it, then it energizes you. If you have the head, then you have the natural ability, behavioral traits to do the job. The hands are the skills, the training, the experience, and the feet is your mobility, your ability to grow the seat or grow with the seat. If those are lacking in any of those areas, then you should delegate those seats and get rid of those seats.

Gary:
I always say if you’re below expectations in those seats because those four things don’t show up for you, those are the seats we’re hiring for first, and we’re finding somebody with the heart, the hands, the head, the feet to do that seat. Then we get people around us that are going to grow that seat and we’re going to empower them to let go.

Gary:
Then, Rob, going back to what you said, then become the master of it. Delegate. I always tell people when you delegate, you better make sure you delegate properly. That happens in four areas for us. One is like, “Do we give you autonomy when I delegate to you? Do I give you 100% autonomy and let you make the decision? Do you want the autonomy?” We have to have same page there. We also want same page with, “Do you need instruction? Do I think you need instruction or do you think you need instruction before you go do this?”

Gary:
Next is, “Do you need feedback? Maybe we’re delegating and you do it and they give me feedback or I give you feedback.” So we got to make sure we are on the same page when delegating and the area of autonomy, areas that we give autonomy to, areas that we give instruction to, areas that we get feedback or give feedback. The last is we make sure we set a budget around that decision, whether hiring somebody or spending money on our marketing or lead gen or advertising like, “You make the decision, but here’s your budget and then I want full autonomy here. I don’t want to have to hear back from you,” or, “I want feedback from you,” or, “Don’t do it until we talk.”

Gary:
So moving to that owner’s box, it’s a transition. It’s a big C, but it starts with getting the processes out of your head to some degree, identifying the right resources, inspiring those resources, giving those resources the right systems, the processes, and then letting go.

David:
Then making sure that once you’ve let go that the plane’s not being run into the ground by measuring those key performance indicators. I’ve often found that people that will demand autonomy, once they get it, they don’t always keep the plane going in the right direction, and then if there’s resentment when you come in and say, “Hey, the plane’s going to crash. I’m jumping in,” it’s, “Why are you micromanaging me?” There is definitely a balance, right?

Gary:
There is. It’s funny, when guys are in the resource quadrant, the first stages of business, and they get to the engagement quadrant, which is the expansion quadrant, marketing and sales, if they grow too fast and they get there too fast, this is a mantra I hear. In resources they go, “I want my time back. I want my time back. I want my time back.” If they grow too fast and get to engagement and they don’t do it properly, they don’t lean the waste, they don’t hire the right people, they don’t put them in the right seat, they don’t have the right systems, process, procedures, right KPIs, right meeting structure, right coordination, and right communication, then they go, “I want my money back. I want my money back. I want my money back.” So they go from, “I want my time back. I want my time back. I want my time back,” to, “I want my money back. I want my money back. I want my money back,” because they did it wrong.

Rob:
Can you clarify? When you say the seat, what exactly are you saying in that? When you say a seat, do you mean just that position you need? Is that just effectively the role or the position on your team that is the seat?

Gary:
Yeah. When we start with every new team, we identify all the seats that are in the company, all the roles and process ownership. We call it a process ownership chart, where we identify all the processes in organization, and sales, marketing, operations, finance, operations manager, visionary, innovator, and we figure out what all those seats are, what processes are accountable to those people or vice versa, and then we figure out if you’re in the right seat.

Rob:
Cool.

David:
So would that be like an organization chart and this is a position within there?

Gary:
Yeah. So there’s two types of structures there. An organizational chart is names and titles, where a process ownership chart looks like it, but it lists out the top core processes that they’re accountable for.

David:
Which makes a lot more sense because when you say, “This is your job, this is your position,” if that’s not defined, my understanding of what that person should be doing in the org chart could be very different than what they think they should be doing. Oftentimes, I found people are motivated by titles. They really like the title of being president of something, manager of something, lead, whatever. They’re not necessarily motivated and encouraged by the responsibility that comes with said title. So sometimes giving somebody that reward before they are actually handling the responsibility of the systems and processes deincentivizes them to want to take on more stuff. So this is really good. I appreciate you sharing that. I see why all these very successful people have hired you, Gary

Gary:
No. I was going to just add, it’s funny because this is where we find that a lot of owners, visionaries understand why they’re trapped because when we create the organizational chart and they say they’re COO, let’s name Shar, Shar is my COO, but then I get into the process ownership and I start listing out the three, seven things that that person’s accountable for in the COO seat, and then the person goes, “I’m not really accountable for that. Matt is. The visionary, Matt, he’s the one that’s really accountable for that.” It’s like we give him the title but not the accountability, and therefore we’re still really in the seat.

David:
All right. Next question comes from Kyle in Ohio. It rhymes a little bit. Rob, you probably like that. “A friend likes what I’m doing, buying single family rentals, and wants to partner.” His friend wants in. “He puts up the capital, I do the rest, and he wants to do a straight equity split. What percentage would you seek in this kind of arrangement, and how would you structure the ownership to offer him an eye protection? If he does absolutely nothing but put up money, are there legal things to consider? Should he maybe make a few decisions to have some participation for legal reasons? He is an accredited investor. Heaven forbid something goes wrong, a lawsuit from the rental or in his business where the capital’s coming from, how can we structure ownership to protect both of us? How would you structure to own these properties? If things work out on the first one, he is soft committed to do one deal per year for the next five years.”

Gary:
I love it when people think that because they infuse money as an investor they own part of the business. Stop. Stop putting people in your business just because they bring money to the business. That’s why we have programs to allow people to invest in the properties. There’s plenty of people out there that want to be an investor that don’t want to be a part owner. If he’s going to be a part owner in an entrepreneurship, now we’re getting married. We now have to do so many more things. You have to make sure we align in four areas. We got to align in position. We got to make sure that you and I understand the positions we’re going to play in this company, and we’re aligned with what position we’re going to play. Just like when you get married, somebody’s got to do the dishes, somebody’s got to take the trash out. It’s not a sexist thing. Somebody’s got to do it, whether it’s me or my significant other. Somebody’s got to do it. So we better align in that.

Gary:
Number two, we got to have purpose alignment. Now, we got to align in why we’re going where we’re going. We got three. We got to have value alignment. We better get along. We better value each other’s values and not violate them. So we got purpose alignment. We got to have position alignment. We have value alignment. The last one, this is one that kills most entrepreneurship right now, is goal alignment. I want to do a good work, support God’s work. Well, one of my friends go, “Yeah, and that means I want to do 500 properties,” and I go, “500? I want to do 10,000.” That’s not goal alignment. So be careful bringing people in and marrying them in your business by giving them ownership just because they’re willing to be an equity investor into your company. Let them be the investor. Don’t get married to them.

David:
Love this. This isn’t a counseling session about me, but the big problems I’ve had in partnerships were very closely aligned to our goals. Were not the same. They made it sound like their goals were the same as mine and I just didn’t test enough to make sure that was the case. So sometimes when life gets tough, people quit. Then there’s other times where people don’t quit when it gets tough, they actually quit when it becomes successful. They made a whole bunch of money, they’re like, “I’m good. I don’t have to work anymore. I don’t want to have to hold people accountable. I don’t want to have to keep pushing the ball forward.”

David:
Some people quit when the business doesn’t make money because they think it’s not worth their time. Other people, when they do make money, their egos become outrageous. I’ve seen that before, “I don’t even know who you are. We did what you’re supposed to do. We became successful, and now you’re not the person that I thought I was dating before we got married in this relationship.” So I love the analogy you’re making that a partnership is a marriage, and we don’t look at it like that. We’re like, “Well, I’m nervous and they got something I need. So let’s just partner,” as if it’s going to reduce risk where it really just complicates things incredibly. It makes headaches. It would be like if you needed a nanny for your kids and the nanny’s like, “Yeah, I’ll watch your kids, but we should get married. We should be 50/50 partners in this since I’m bringing in the childcare element.” You’re like, “Why would I do that if I could just pay this person to do that part of the job? I don’t have to give up the equity.”

David:
In this situation, the first thing I thought was, well, just pay him for the debt. Just pay him a percentage for the money that he brings in and maybe give a bonus for how the property does or at exit maybe he can get a little piece of that pie or something, but you don’t need to give up control of the decisions that are being made. Now, you’re having meetings constantly because everybody wants to get filled in on what … It just gets so complicated. I’m glad you brought that up, Gary.

David:
Rob, as one of my partners who I have a great relationship with, you’ve done a fantastic job. Thank you for that. Have you experienced something similar where you’ve gotten married to people in business before and then regretted it?

Rob:
Honestly, not really. I think that it’s very common to get into business with somebody, it be a successful partnership, but ultimately, the goals may not align for future endeavors, but honestly, for the most part, you and I, we talked for a long time before we bought a property. We sat down. We met every week. We created grids and spreadsheets of like, “Hey, here’s our philosophies. Do we mix? Do we match?” all that kind of stuff. So I think we both knew what we were getting into.

Rob:
Honestly, I think that’s what this question … To me, there’s a key difference in this question and how it’s worded because he’s saying it’s a friend who wants to partner versus an investor. If an investor comes to you and says, “Hey, I want to invest,” that’s a very different relationship, and in that instance, I agree, taking on equity or then you paying a return on the capital that they’re giving you, that makes sense to me, but when someone says, “Hey, I want to be a part of this business. I want to partner. I can bring the money, but I don’t know anything. Can you help run it and maybe you teach me how to do this thing?” that to me does sound like a little bit more of a partnership where a 50/50 stake is possible or is totally a feasible route, so long as they talk through some of the actual philosophies of that partnership.

Gary:
I read that too. He did say friend. The part I held onto was him saying that he didn’t want to be active at all in regards to the business, which is fine. You don’t always have to be active to be a part owner, but I do think if they’re going to maintain that friendship, they better protect those four areas because those four areas create culture. If they don’t protect them … Sounds like to me with YouTube, Dave and Rob, you guys did a great job upfront of prepping the relationship and making sure that we protected the relationship.

David:
We also went very slow. So we did a deal and then stopped. I can say there’s parts of that that I don’t feel great about where I’ve let Rob down on my end. I don’t know. He may feel like that about certain things too, but because we just did a little bit and now we are letting all the pieces fall where they need to, I’m seeing where I need to be better, he’s seeing where he and his team could have done a better job. We work those issues out before we go buy the next property or start the next business or do the next thing. You’re moving at a pace that the relationship can handle versus imagine if we’d bought 10 properties and then these issues then came to light because every marriage are going to have those issues that come to light, how much of a strain that would put on our friendship, on the podcast, on the relationship? Yes, and that might have been too much for us to be able to handle.

Rob:
Which I did bring a 10-property deal to you and you’re like, “Dude, you’re bringing us a job, not an investment opportunity,” and I was like, “Dang it,” but yeah, that’s very true. I will say the amount of initial due diligence that we did with each other beforehand, by far the most I had ever done with any … I’ve had probably six or seven partnerships. So I think talking is important and I think the way you’ve outlined the key components here, Gary, time, money, resources, accountability, those really do hit a lot of the emotions that I think will come up when you’re working through your first deal with somebody.

Gary:
Making sure that we just protect the relationship or protect the culture, and we talk about value alignment, purpose alignment, goal alignment, and those areas aligning in position as well, knowing what role you’re going to play in the relationship. It could easily be, “I’m just going to provide money, I’m not working in the business.” That’s okay as long as people are aligned with that. Value alignment still has to happen, purpose alignment, and then goal alignment has to still come into play there too. So if you protect those four areas, you could bring anybody in as a partner, but protect those four areas at all costs.

David:
That’s smart. This reminds me of a line Dave Ramsey said, actually, that I thought was very insightful. He said, “When a family member asks you to borrow money and you give them a loan, you are changing the dynamic from family member, loved one, unconditional support to something closer to a slave-owner relationship.” There is now a debt that is involved. The person who owes money in a sense becomes a form of a slave to the person who they borrow the money from, and that can strain the relationship significantly. If someone … I just remember being a kid and hearing my buddies that had let their friend borrow 50 bucks complaining about how their friend bought a pack of gum and it was like, “Oh, he can afford a pack of gum, but he can’t afford to pay me back any of the money.” Those thoughts go in your head.

David:
It’s very similar with the partnership. What was once a person you loved, you had a lot of fun with, you enjoyed, they brought a lot of value to your life, you go to vacation with them, they made you laugh, you needed someone to talk to, they were there, they gave great advice, that goes out the window when the two of you are at odds over money. It just spoils the whole thing. So that’s a great reason to consider not becoming a partner with a friend. I guess the upside would be maybe you know the friend better so there’s more due diligence that’s happened if you known that person for a period of time, but you’re risking quite a bit more when you lend money to someone you know like a family member or when you go into business with a friend.

David:
Our next question comes from Claire in San Diego who’s on sabbatical from her W2 and looking to grow, “Hi, David. I’m a huge fan of your work and your advice on BP.” That’s not a bad way to start off a question. There you go, Claire. Maybe why we picked you. “Seeing Greene episode is like going to church for my goals, mindset, and clarity.” Okay, Claire, if you want a job, I can hire you right now. You’re already off to a great marketing start here. “Going to church for my goals, mindset, and clarity. I appreciate your answers to people’s questions so much. I left my job as a people development manager in the tech sector right before COVID hit. The cost of daycare for my two young children was 70% of my takehome.” Oh, that’s not efficient.

David:
“My husband is a firefighter and gone for extended periods of time. Six months earlier, we bought a short-term rental in Joshua Tree and then later we added a short-term rental in Palm Springs. Short-term rentals have been successful, have replaced about 50% of my income, but the market, especially Joshua Tree, has gotten more competitive. I’ve got a year until I had planned to go back into the workforce. I’m interested in other parts of real estate, like maybe wholesaling, looking for businesses to buy in San Diego such as a laundromat, which sounds like a great change of scene from short-term rentals. As someone who is used to running special projects for various C-level executives, I’m so excited to use that same resourcefulness and grit to earn assets and build long-term wealth. I’d like to continue to do so, but diversify and build up more income for my family. I’ll be so grateful to hear your thoughts and insights on how to navigate this transition and ideas I could look into as I find the best path forward.”

Gary:
That’s a dream, for sure. This is a question that’s centering whether she put it this way or not, centering around purpose. It’s centering around why she’s doing what she’s doing, the decision she’s making, where she wants to be. Purpose comes from three areas. It comes from the future, the past, and the present, the future being what does she want to be remembered for, past being what does she love to, do and the present being what gift can she give the world today, and the world being could be just her family. That’s her world. It sounds like that’s where her purpose is centered around her world right now and that’s her people.

Gary:
I think when we answer those three questions, the future, what do we want to be remembered for, the past, what do we love to do, and the present, what gift can we give to the world, then we can drive to our own purpose. That purpose then creates a passion. That passion creates a business. The business needs to be bred and born out of that passion. We got to be careful with that. We can’t be so in pursuit of our purpose that we forget to fulfill it either. We can’t get so busy and get so unfocused trying to do so many different things that we never truly fulfill the purpose.

Gary:
I don’t know how many entrepreneurs or masterminds or rooms I’ve sat in and it’s like, “I left my W2 to fulfill this purpose and I work now more than I ever have. I never see my kids, I never have this, I never had that,” and they feel like they’re enslaved or tied to their own business now more than they were before. Entrepreneurship has a very good reputation of doing that to us. It creates that bipolar as we talked about, who we thought we wanted to be versus who we are now. So we got to be really intentional.

Gary:
I think the keyword here is intentional with what we’re going to try to do and vision. The Bible says, “Where there’s no vision, the people perish.” So vision’s really important for her at this point. She’s got to create a vision plan, long-term vision, short-term vision. Vision long-term gives us hope. It gives us perspective. It gives us where we want to be. It inspires us to get there. We have to have hope, and in order to get to hope, we have to drive hope down into short-term vision, which is what creates results. So we got to have the purpose, we got to have long term, we got to have hope, we got to have inspiration, but then we have to actually get tangible results from it, and creating a three-year plan, a one-year plan, a 90-day plan, and driving the right KPIs off of that.

Gary:
Dave, we talked about key performance indicators earlier on the other question. There are four types of KPIs. I’m my curriculum, Rise, I trademarked this as the four types. First one is key profit or purpose indicator. What is your key purpose indicator? How are you measuring your purpose? If you want to do a good work to support God’s work, which is my purpose, how do I measure that? My goal is to give 2.6 million dollars away to a faith-based cause by 2026. That’s my key purpose indicator. If I’m answering your question, let’s figure out that purpose. Let’s figure out why we want to be there and let’s figure out how we’re going to measure it and when we’re going to measure it. There’s a timeframe around it.

Gary:
Then we got to drive that down into actual steps in the next two years, and then the next one year, and then the next one year like, “What is our goal going to be?” In real estate, we don’t really have revenue, so it’s gross profit and net profit. So what’s our gross profit? What’s our net profit? What are the measurables to get in there? Are we going to go fix and flip? Are we going to buy and hold? Are we going to wholesale? What are we going to do? Then stay focused on that niche.

Gary:
One of the things that people get distracted here with, and this is why we rob ourselves and we create bipolar in entrepreneurship, is because we start chasing too many shiny objects and we don’t stay focused. I always tell people FOCUS is an acronym, Follow One Course Until Successful. Stay focused. Follow one course until successful. That’s what I want. I want us focused in one year or less to get our goals, and then we take those goals and we drive it down in the next 90 days. How do we measure that? We take that key purpose indicator and then we drive to keep profit indicators.

Gary:
The profit indicators are our annual, are our 90-day numbers. How much profits do we need to make to get to our purpose? From that, we create a performance metric, a weekly goal that we’re hitting every week in order to create the profits to support our strategy, our vision. Then we drive those down into key process indicators, daily activities we have to do every single day that we have to create discipline on. If we focus on the daily activities, those tactical things, we’ll create process that creates performance, that creates profits, that drives to our purpose.

Gary:
So I always tell people you have to start at the top and you have to build down, and then you measure up. You build down and you measure up. So that transition from employment W2 to her purpose starts with the purpose, builds a vision off purpose, drives the hope and inspirations of her desires and where she wants to be, and then we take it tactically down into results by driving those purpose indicators into profit indicators, into performance indicators, into process indicators, and measure it every day because every day if we do these tactical things, and that’s one of the biggest things as an entrepreneur, we lack that discipline of every day of accountability to hold ourselves accountable to getting to our purpose, where when you’re employed, you get that accountability naturally with a job, but if we build down and we have that key process indicator every single day and we know hitting that every single day will cause us to hit our purpose. We’re inspired.

Gary:
I lost 105 pounds in the last year. You know how I did it? I didn’t get on the scale every day. I got on the scale once a week because I had a goal. I had a purpose that drove me to my goal, and that goal drove me to my performance, and every day I measure my macros. Why? Because macros are my process indicators. They tell me whether or not I’m doing the things every day that are going to result on the scale, that are going to drive me to my profit of life if I will, that are going to ultimately get me to my purpose, my ultimate goal. Business is not different and it’s not hard.

David:
What do you think about her perspective where she says, “I’m so excited to use that same resourcefulness and grit to earn assets and build long-term wealth”? So she’s saying, “I did really well at this area of life. I know I was successful working for somebody else. Now I want to use that to build my own wealth.” Are there things people need to know about that? Can that become misleading that just because you were a successful NFL player, you’re automatically going to become a successful musician if you switch or are you of the mindset that if people are good at working a job, they should become an entrepreneur and work for themselves?

Gary:
So I think what people miss there is all the tangible things that come into building a proper business. So you don’t want to just take talent and performance and take it into a business and create another job for yourself because that’s the mindset, the mindset. I always tell people there’s four reasons why we don’t take this leap and we don’t grow. Number one is fear, fear success. Honestly, one of the biggest things, fear of, “What if it does get that big? Am I the right person?” fear of failure. Two, mindset like, “I was successful as a job, I can automatically be successful as an entrepreneur,” and so not having the right mindset, making the right adjustments there.

Gary:
The average wholesale business has about 60 seats in it, guys, 60. That’s a wholesale business. Do you know some of these seats are an hour a week? Some of these seats are 10 hours a week. Some of these seats are 40 hours a week, but just because you had talent in a job doesn’t mean your talent and desire and push and grit is going to translate to success in all those seats. Well, we got to figure out what seats we should be sitting in and then delegate and hire people that compliment our weakness.

Rob:
That makes total sense. Gary, I want to go back a little bit because you mentioned part of your purpose and what you were looking for when you were losing a hundred pounds, that you measured your macros, but you never stepped on the scale every single day or you didn’t step on the scale every single day, but you did it every week. What is the reason for that? Is it because tracking your progress every day is a lot more disheartening than checking on it week by week? Was there a particular reason for you?

Gary:
Yeah, because you’re not always going to get performance off the tactical process. It doesn’t show up every day. It’s a compound effect of it that creates performance. So I don’t want that discouragement on a daily basis, nor is it my daily goal to lose weight. If I’m losing weight every day, I’m probably doing it wrong. That’s not going to be healthy for me. I’ve done that before and you drop weight too fast and it’s unhealthy. So same thing can happen in your business. If you focus just on the performance every single day, you stop valuing the process. I always tell people the process is the tactical things that you do in repetition that creates compound effect to performance. We know these things. You get 100 leads, you get 20 qualified leads, you get 10 appointments, you get two contracts.

Gary:
Well, what am I going to do to get two contracts? Well, I got to make offers. I got to go on appointments. I got to run comps. Those are process indicators that we should be measuring every single day because now we know that if I go on 10, if I make 20 offers this week, then I’m going to get this amount of accepted contracts at some point. It’s usually a 10 to two number. Go in 10 appointments, I’m going to get two contracts. So I want to measure every day what are the tactical things I’m going to do that usually show that result and drive towards that result on a weekly basis. Monday, Rob, I could make five offers and get zero contracts, but I know it’s the compound and it’s the commitment to the process that creates the results over time.

Rob:
Yeah, and especially considering that. A lot of this, it is a numbers game and it is consistency, and a lot of the times that consistency pays off in the final 10 minutes, in the final 10% of the actual process where you’re like, “Oh, it’s all hitting at once.” So I can totally see that. I’ll take your advice. I step on the scale at a minimum three times a day, but I’m going to try to do once a week. I’m going to challenge myself to do once a week.

Gary:
That’s good. I like to see that. Process is another thing for me that’s really important because process is the ultimate lead metric, if we call it a lead. It tells us whether or not our beginning of our cash conversion cycle is starting to shift, cash conversion cycles from the time we get a lead or market for lead to the time we make money or close on a house. The beginning part of that process indicator tells us when things are shifting or the process isn’t working anymore.

Gary:
I always tell people three days of broken process can affect up to three weeks of performance. If you wait and just look at numbers on a weekly basis and you call them all performance metrics, then you’re not going to make changes on average to about three weeks to the process. If three days of broken process affect three weeks of performance and you don’t look at that process number for every week and you don’t make changes till three weeks in, you could have a whole quarter of bad performance before you catch it.

David:
Solid point. That’s one of my biggest complaints with my bookkeeper is they are so far behind that by the time I see there’s a problem, it’s been going on for a month and a half to two months sometimes, and a lot of money has been lost before I correct it, and then many of those problems are not just I make one thing and it’s fixed. It’s like I got to fix this so I can fix that, so I can fix this, and then finally when everything’s there together, I look at it like it’s a log jam in a river, like somebody puts the logs at the top of a river and they go all the way down and then at the bottom they take them out. Well, when they stop coming down the bottom of the river, you don’t know why. You got to hike your way all the way up that thing to try to figure out where was the problem. Sometimes it’s a short hike and sometimes it’s a long one and then a complex problem to solve. That’s a great point. The closer realtime data you can get, the quicker you can maneuver.

Gary:
David, you made the statement about the problem you had with the bookkeeper, but, bookkeeper, where far downstream is that? You got process first, performance second, then profit. Profit is at the end of your cash conversion cycle. So if your cash conversion cycle, say you’re in upstate New York or in that area, northeast area or say San Diego, California, where your cash conversion cycles could be nine months, Miami where they have title issues and a contract, things like that, and that could be easily 12 months of cash conversion cycle. If you are not measuring process, you’re not going to see when things are shifting, and you go through managing that wrong and you wait till the end of that cash conversion cycle, you’re a year into broken process. That’s a really bad place to be and you’re out of business.

Gary:
I had a team last year in San Diego, and it was March, and I noticed their process indicators were not hitting target, but guess what, guys? They were making bank. Why? Because their cash conversion cycle was nine months. So they were getting the lag effect of nine months ago still, but I started to tell them, “Your process indicators are changing. You need to change strategy right now.” You know how hard it is to make that decision as an entrepreneur to make changes in your strategy when you’re making bank right now, and have to have the mindset of, “No, this money’s coming from nine months ago and what we did nine months ago, what did six months ago, what we did 90 days ago versus what we’re doing right now”? Because listened and because they were willing to make those adjustments in faith, they didn’t get hit as hard as the rest of the country did when the markets started shifting in March. I know the markets started shifting in March of last year because I saw the process indicators shifting at that point.

Rob:
Well, Gary, before we let you go, I know that we have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast and I know you yourself are a parent and you’re obviously a very busy man, but you’re keeping it locked down over there. Do you have any tips that you could share for anyone that’s in the throes of both parenting and scaling their real estate portfolio?

Gary:
Yeah. So everybody talks about this thing, elusive thing called balance. Do you hear that a lot? We got to create balance? You ever seen a balance scale, what that looks like? It’s like you put equal amounts on both sides. That’s how you create balance on a scale. Do you ever see that in life? Do you ever see somebody put equal balance on everything? So first thing is kill the mindset of balance and think in regards to harmony. I don’t want balance. I want harmony. Harmony is when different things work together. Harmonization in a song is where you have a baritone, a tenor, and these different things harmonizing to create the product.

Gary:
Stop leaving your children out of your daily business. Here’s what entrepreneurs … We do this in every aspect, by the way, with our children. We go to work, a W2, and whether you’re a W2 listening on this or you’re an entrepreneur, this is the same thing applies. Stop segregating the two. At 12 years old, I would come home and struggle with things in my business and my life and my work or whatever. My son was that age, I’d say at 12 years. My son at 12 years old. I would bring things home to my kids and ask their perspective on that problem. I didn’t come home in a bad mood and blame it, and dad doesn’t have time to throw the baseball, and dad doesn’t have time to go shopping with my daughter, and I don’t have time for this, I’m exhausted and all that. What I do, entrepreneurship, building our business as a crux of not wanting to spend time with them. I didn’t make them resent what I was doing.

Gary:
I say, “Well, you know how tired your dad is? I’ve got to go do this in order to buy you those shoes.” I came home and if I was upset, I would say, “Hey, Jacob. Dad wants your advice on something. Today, this happened at work. What do you think I should do with that? What do you think I should do tomorrow when I go back in? Do you think I should do this or this or what’s your perspective on it?” Sometimes I would bring my teddy bear like my teddy bear would help, whatever, but I brought them into the solution instead of making them an objection to my life. Stop pushing them away from your life. Bring harmony through these things.

Rob:
Well, guys, I’m bummed. I’m bummed because we have reached the end of the podcast and getting into this parent life as a real estate entrepreneur, investor, easily its own podcast. So thank you so much, Gary. David, I also want you to know you’ll never have to pay me to read your books. Okay, pal? Any other books people have to pay, but you, I will read them for free, my friend.

David:
Gary, thanks so much for coming on Seeing Greene today. This has been maybe the best Seeing Greene that we’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot because we’re getting a lot of rave reviews of this on YouTube. People really, really like this show. So thank you for being here. I thought you did a fantastic job. Would love to have you on again, and just frankly, thank you for sharing your insight that you’ve learned in business with people like us, rather than just using it to make godawful amounts of money and not giving back to anybody else because that is absolutely an option for someone that hits your level of experience and business acumen. So appreciate that. Where can people find out more about you?

Gary:
I appreciate that. My goal is to give them my life, labor, influence, finances, and experience. So I’m glad the BiggerPockets has enabled me to do that today. I definitely want to give back. It’s not about money. I just do more deals if I wanted to make more money. It is about leaving a legacy and giving back to people. It means a lot to me that you would say that. People can find us at sharperbusiness.com. We actually created a specific page for the readers and listeners here, and that is sharperbusiness.com/biggerpockets. So we’ve got a lot of free content on there, things to give away to you, a lot more knowledge, a lot of videos, stuff on YouTube. You can find us on YouTube, you can find us on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as well, but we created that page, and link it all that. Just go to sharperbusiness.com/biggerpockets.

David:
Awesome. Rob, anything you want to say?

Rob:
Find me on the Apple review platform where you can leave us a five-star review. If you walked away from today’s episode thinking, “Man, I have been thinking about business wrong,” or, “I am going to try something new based on something I learned today,” before you take action by doing that, take action by leaving us a five-star review because we read all of them and it helps us get served up to new audiences so that we can teach other people how to run their businesses in the real estate world.

David:
Once they leave you that five-star review and they want to tell you that they just did it, where can they find you online?

Rob:
You can find me at Robuilt on both YouTube and Instagram where I make funny, goofy videos that teach you something allegedly. What about you, David?

David:
Same thing. Instagram, YouTube, and everywhere else, @DavidGreene24, e at the end of Greene. Gary, thanks again, man. This has been fantastic. I’m going to let you get out of here. This is David Greene for Rob throws small chihuahuas at problems like Angry Birds at buildings Abasolo signing off.