Real Estate and the power of Leverage and Connection

Many years ago before I started out on my real estate journey I was once an 18 year old electrical apprentice whose main job responsibilities included digging holes, crawling in attics and cleaning up job sites at the end of the day.On Fridays I always had the distinct pleasure of cleaning out the work truck and reorganizing it.From there, within (8) years I went from an electrical apprentice making $12.00 an hour (if I was lucky) to a senior construction manager making a six figure salary with a full benefit package and bonus incentives.It feels odd to reflect back on my past but making that transition is always something I will be very proud of.

When I look back at how I did it, there are a lot of reasons I was able to evolve my career as my peers continued to remain stagnant.But if you asked me to pinpoint the thing(s) that allowed me to experience that growth above all other reasons it would be my ability to connect people and leverage other people’s experience.

When I was an electrical apprentice I didn’t know the first thing about turn-key construction projects and how to build projects that required maybe 10-12 subcontractors.So how was I able to bid and manage multi-million dollar construction projects just a handful of years later?I certainly didn’t go to school to get my welding license, plumbing license, mechanical license, rigging certifications, machinery operating licenses, crane operating licenses, etc…That would have taken me half of a life time to learn each individual trade inside and out.But what I did learn to do was leverage other’s people’s experience and connect people to get projects built.And learn a LITTLE about a LOT so that I could manage efficiently them from afar.

For example, when I first got promoted to my construction management role I had just come out of an electrical project management role where my job was to strictly oversee the electrical operations and nothing else.All of sudden I had been thrust into the position of overseeing the entire projects including every trade and aspect of the job.One of the very first projects I had given to me was a project that included installing a large $100,000.00 steel platform to support some equipment on the roof of a 13-story building.At this point in my life I knew exactly nothing about steel work and if I messed something up it could cost my company a lot of money and for me maybe my job.My first thought was “oh crap how the hell am I going to do this”?After some thought, it ended up going a little something like this.

1. Consult/get bids from (3) reputable steel contractors who specialized in this type of work by sending them the engineered plans and scope of work/specs
2. Choose a steel contractor based on price, experience and reputation
3. Acquire bids for a crane contractor, choose one and connect him to the building owner and steel contractor so that they could all be on the same page when it came time to get materials onto the roof
4. Leverage the steel contractor’s knowledge to learn about this particular installation including the welding, the time frame, and attachment details, and how it would be built
5. Use the knowledge that the steel contractor gave me to explain the schedule, safety plan and expectations to the building owner so he could sign off on the install/schedule
6. Leverage to engineer’s knowledge on the plans who designed the platform and more importantly get him involved so he could oversee and approve every step of the install
7. Connect both the engineer and the steel contractor to the local building inspector so the inspector could sign off on the project as well when completed

So what did I really do?I leveraged other people’s knowledge, learned a little or enough to get by and connected everyone to the right person.If a steel project comes along now I have customers who refer me to do the job because I have great team members that I can connect and leverage to complete the project successfully. This is just one example of one small facet of a project where you don’t need to know everything to get it completed successfully, you just need to know how to connect people and leverage THEIR experience.That’s when I realized that the process I just went through wasn’t just applicable to this one project but really it was a universal way of operating/managing that could be adapted to anything including real estate investing.

Real estate investing is no different than construction in a lot of ways.You don’t need to be an expert in every single aspect of real estate investing like property management or be a real estate agent that has completed 5,000 transactions to be successful you just need to be able to bring connections together and leverage the experts.If you ask the most successful real estate investors in the world what makes them so great and they will tell you it’s not their own personal knowledge as much as it is the team of experts they have surrounded themselves with.Take one of my mentors and real estate coaches Joe Fairless for example.Joe is one of the most knowledgeable real estate professionals I have ever met.He owns over a 1,000 units and is crushing it.And why is he crushing it?Of course he has incredible knowledge of multifamily real estate but it’s not so much that as it is because he has connected all the right people and built amazing teams and systems.If Joe needs to underwrite a deal he has an expert department that does it, if he needs a property managed he has a great PM company that runs it, if he needs financing he has great lenders that give him the best terms.The list goes on and on.The point is he is connecting people and leveraging experts experience and that’s what allows him to be a super successful real estate investor (amongst other things of course).

If you have the right team around you whose experience you can leverage and have all of the team members in place to connect to each other the rest is just managing them and making sure everyone is doing their job.

If you still don’t see the value in connecting parties consider this.The biggest taxi provider in the entire world is UBER valued at 50 billion dollars, and do you know how many vehicles they own?None, zero.How is that possible you might ask?All they did was connect customers with service providers.If that doesn’t show you the power of connecting people I don’t know what will.