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How to Break Past the Fear Barrier with Tony Maree Torrey

Listen to the podcast here

 

Tony Maree is an Australian born now based in Los Angeles, Tony Maree has been dubbed LA’s Foremost Success Coach. She is the founder of the Innate Wisdom Business council and host of the Legacy in the Making Show a video podcast.

For the past 18 years, Tony Maree has been hired by CEOs, celebrities, and top performers to help them transform limitations into strengths, amplify their instincts & have a profound impact in the world.

She combines the power of traditional coaching and psychology with evidence-based advanced modalities in a proven 9 phase Legacy Maker coaching system.

Her vision is to empower thousands of leaders to activate inner wisdom and create unprecedented results. All without sacrificing their health, relationships or wellbeing.

Beyond her traditional education, Tony Maree has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building skills and certifications ranging from Executive Coaching to Rapid Transformational Therapy in order to facilitate fast and lasting transformations in the lives and legacies of her clients.

In this episode we talk about:

• Launch your most effective, speedy and insightful decision-making skills with my 6 step Innate Wisdom activation process
• Expand decision making stamina
• Reduce fatigue driven mistakes
• Increase confidence, self-trust and peace of mind

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How An Aussie Can Move Half Way Across The Globe With Limited Funds with Reed Goossens

 

Your dream of financial freedom is attainable with the right strategy. In this episode, Reed Goossens, real estate investor, joins Moneeka Sawyer to share his journey moving across the globe from Australia to the United States with limited funds and how he found success and financial freedom. Reed talks about building a holistic long-term business by creating an ecosystem to recession-proof his business. By having diversified multiple streams of income, Reed dives into how you can create your own ecosystem that’s more stable in the long-term on your way to wealth generation and financial freedom.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How An Aussie Can Move Half Way Across The Globe With Limited Funds with Reed Goossens

Have you been interested in investing in real estate, but nothing you’ve looked at so far looks blissful? If so, I totally understand. That’s why I’d like to introduce you to Maureen McCann at Spartan Invest. At Spartan Invest, they strive to identify real estate assets which will offer viable investment options with exceptional rates of return. They do the work for you. They locate, purchase and rehab the property, then find and manage the tenants. You simply invest in a turnkey property and monitor your investments from the comfort of your own home. What could be more blissful than that? If you would like to find out more, go to www.SpartanInvest.com/Investing4Women, or email Maureen directly at [email protected]. Let her know I sent you.

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I am delighted to welcome to the show, Reed Goossens. Reed is a real estate investor, bestselling author, entrepreneur, podcast host and an all-around good bloke. I love the way he says that. In 2012, Reed quit his job in Australia and moved halfway across the globe to the United States to change his life and to chase a dream. With limited funds, no investing experience and no credit, Reed went from purchasing a small duplex to growing his own real estate investment firm. Reed syndicates large multimillion-dollar deals across the United States. He has also achieved financial freedom and has taken control of his life. If we can move halfway across the world and achieve this success, so can you.

One of the things I want to tell you, ladies, about Reed. I was on his show. I’ve been on a lot of shows and this was probably the best show I have ever been on. Reed is heart-centered in spite of his success. I know many people come on here and want to talk about how amazing they are, but I’m not sure whether it’s in spite of or because of his success. He is so heart-centered. That interview warmed my heart. I was tingling for days remembering the conversation and what I learned from it. I’m delighted to share him with you. Reed, thank you so much for blessing our show by joining us.

That’s a very awesome introduction. Thank you.

Welcome to the show. Could you tell us a little bit about your story, like the two-minute version?

You pretty much summed it up. I moved here in 2012 to chase two loves of my life. One was the love to live in New York City, to be an ex-pat. My background is instructional engineering. The other love was for a girl who is now my wife, Erica. We live in sunny, California. We were in New York for a couple of years and then moved out here. When I first moved out here, it was more to do with the fact that I wanted to live in the United States for a period of time and not have the fear of regret when I’m 60 or 70 years of age. Fast forward many years later, so much stuff has happened and it’s been an incredible journey and I loved every single minute of it. I know the next decade is going to be even better. That’s the two-minute pitch in terms of the coming to America story, wanting to chase a dream, wanting to scratch an itch and opening doors and walking through those doors and throwing away worrying about ten years later what’s going to happen. Enjoy the now, the moment, being in the present.

Where in California are you?

We are in Los Angeles. We are near Culver City if you know where that is.

Reed, I know that you talk about creating a holistic long-term business, which is what I’m all about also. Could you talk to me about creating what you call an ecosystem to recession-proof your business?

Enjoy the now of the moment and being present. Share on X

When you start scratching this itch of how to create financial freedom for yourself, you increase your financial IQ. I’m very much a math nerd being an engineer. I love numbers. When I got into real estate, it is a vehicle to achieve financial freedom. To have a legacy wealth and long-term freedom of having time on your hands, it’s the other ancillary business that you can create from the one vehicle that will feed one another that will ultimately create this system. You could remove yourself from it and continue going without you being in it. What am I talking about? We talk about funnels and there’s the marketing side of it.

I do my own podcast. I have my income streams from the marketing side piece of it. There’s obviously the deal of the acquisition side, which is important. It’s a very massive pillar that supports the foundation, but it’s one pillar. From there, there are other businesses that we can create. In my business, we don’t do it now, but you could do property management, you could bring that in house and you could create fees and income from that. You can also create construction management, which is something we do in house for our deals. We’re not outsourcing it to a third party and giving someone else the profits, but bringing the profits in house and making it more sustainable.

Through doing that, you create this system of one feeds the other and that keeps the profits in house. It creates better returns for our investors. It also helps when you may not be acquiring assets, you still have other income streams coming in through the management of the portfolio that may be in the past, you’ve given it away to a third-party company. Instead, you now brought it in house and creating that ecosystem. For me, long-term wealth is created through creating ecosystems. That’s just one example. There are many different examples of what an ecosystem can look like within any business. It’s understanding the stuff that you may do on a daily basis that you may pay for that you could potentially bring in house over the long-term.

It’s interesting because we hear over and over again that the rich have seven streams of income. A lot of times what people think is that seven different businesses, “I’m going to do this MLM and I’m going to do this job and then I’m going to do this.” What is the mistake in that is that you end up being spread thin between all of those different avenues of creating a stream of income. The rich don’t do it that way. They are not plugged in to every single one of those pieces. What they do is they create passive income and other income streams that are related to their main business or main genre. For instance, our genre is real estate. What you talked about is multiple streams of income within the umbrella of real estate. When we’re creating multiple streams of income, like you say, if you’ve got one that’s not performing but another one is, your business is still fine or another five are. It gives you an opportunity to be successful in different kinds of markets.

Different kinds of markets, but also different kinds of volatility in the markets. When one market may be going better or now in COVID, acquisitions have gone completely to a grinding halt. Having other ancillary fees coming in like asset management fees or construction management fees or property management fees that can keep the business supported and keep the lights on, it’s important to creating that ecosystem that we spoke about, those multiple streams of income.

Could you talk a little bit about if you’re a professional working full-time, how this might fit into your ecosystem investing in real estate?

If you like what you do, and some people do, they don’t want to quit their job and they only want to be passive. That’s the beauty of real estate investing, particularly in the syndication’s world, which is what I am in. I’m in the multifamily, but you could have an ecosystem of diversification. Meaning that you could have your passive dollars invested in different asset classes. There could be some multifamily, it might be some single-family investments. There might be some mobile home parks or some warehouse, some self-storage or some office space. All of that can help you be diversified and have those multiple streams of income. When one asset class is sucking wind like retail right now, you might be more heavily reliant on multifamily or more heavily rely on a warehouse, whatever that might be.

That helps you create the multiple streams of income, which makes your little ecosystem as a passive investor more stable in the long-term. That’s why I think from the passive side is powerful about the vehicles that are now accessible to the average investor. Maybe several years ago, these vehicles went away and weren’t available. The way in which we’ve evolved over time, with the way we’ve invested in people not wanting to invest in the historical traditional ways of investing in the stock market and going investing in hard assets with different operators has become more plentiful in the last 5 to 10 years. That has opened up a Pandora’s box of opportunities for investors to go out and we’re like a kid at a candy store.

I want to give a little bit of clarity on what Reed is talking about here. It’s to invest in other operators. This isn’t you go out and invest in a single or in a multifamily, a mobile home park, a warehouse or whatever. This is finding other operators that you trust that are paying you. Everybody has a different schedule. Some of them will pay interest. Some of them will pay interest plus equity. There are different formulas and you want to find an operator that you trust and then take a look at their formula and see if both of those things work for you. If you’ve got the cash, then you can turn it over and make quite a nice return. It’s easier to diversify that way.

Reed, tell me if this analogy works for you or if you’ve got a better one. It is like investing in the stock market where you’re investing in a company that has a series of assets that then will pay you on. The big difference here is that we have hard assets as opposed to paper assets that we have no control over. When you’re investing in a syndication, some have a level of where you can vote or make an impact. The other thing is they are usually smaller operators that do feel very committed to communicate with you. That is different than a lot of the bigger companies that you can get stuck on there. They say they’re committed to their shareholders, but that looks a little bit different to us than we might hope for. You do get a lot more control as a hard asset in a syndicator that is going to be paying you.

That’s where the transparency comes in. You have the element of the hard asset for the depreciation benefits. Also seeing that you’re investing in ABC Smith Street. It’s not just throwing your money into the stock market and hoping that it’s going to do well for you. It’s a physical asset and you can see it. To your point, it’s usually smaller operators like myself who will communicate directly with the investors that can see what’s happening. They can walk the property if they want. We encourage investors to go walk. They’d probably keep an eye on the onsite team, make sure they’re doing their job. That’s your money in that deal. There are a lot of benefits of investing in smaller operators, in physical assets, in syndication that you don’t have to be the expert going out and finding these deals. You can be more of what’s called an armchair investor, passive investor and go along for the ride.

Where do you do most of your syndications?

We do most of them in Austin and San Antonio in Central Texas.

We’ve had several people on the show from different areas. I like people to see that if you like the Texas market, you might call Reed. If you like a different market, you might call one of the other people that have been on the show. That’s a great resource. Thank you for that. Could you talk to me about re-entitling land? This is my personal strategy, so I want someone else to talk about it so I can learn.

You look at it like flipping paper, but to boil it down to its nuts and bolts is highest and best use. What is the highest and best use for a piece of land? I’ll give you an example. You might have a single-family house on a larger lot that you could simply split into two lots and you can sell one of the lots and make a profit. That is a highest and best use because it zoned for two lots. Back in the day, back in the early 1900s or wherever it was when the house was built and zoning laws have changed a ton with density increasing and housing crisis, particularly in places like LA and up in the Bay Area where you are. Zoning always evolves over time.

You can find these gems where you can split the block. You could find with a single-family, but maybe you could build a fourplex on it. It’s a highest and best use. Here’s the rub. You don’t have to go and do the construction. You could go in and get the physical paper or the plans approved for a second edition, or a full unit. You can sell that paper to a developer who wants to build it. There’s profit in that. You can’t go to a broker and be like, “Tell me what all those pieces of paper we’re selling for to those developers.” There’s no actual MLS for that, but you can go and create value out of literally the house that you own, going to the city and saying, “I want to build a granny flat on the back. I know by looking at the zoning laws, I could potentially build a fourplex.” Maybe that’s your exit strategy.

You’ve created value for someone because also you’ve taken risks off the table. If you’ve gone to the city and spent time negotiating with the city and going through planning approval and they get comfortable like, “This is a good idea. Let’s put four units on it.” You can package it up. You can say, “Here, developer, go nuts. Here’s my piece of land. Here’s a single-family house on it. You could build four units on it. You take all the construction risk. I’m going to walk down the road with my profits and go do something else.”

You can find those in the MLS. It will often say, “House for sale, great contractor, special plans already approved by the city.” We will look at those properties myself because every once in a while, I might want to pick something up like that. Everything has gone through the city. I’m not dealing with that piece of the paperwork.

Long term wealth is created by creating ecosystems. Share on X

It’s very bureaucratic. In saying that, once you do get to know the planners and your local municipality, it’s not as hard as people think. It’s a people’s game. You’ve got to make sure you’re on it. Person A is talking to Person B and the right hand is talking to the left hand.

This is my thing. I talk about how to go in and take a look at a property. I’m calling it an underdeveloped property. It’s a property that has something on it, but it has so much more potential. I don’t have very many people that come on the show that talk about that. What I love is your strategy about the value add. You buy the land and then the value add is you go through all the bureaucracy. You upsell it. It’s almost like a wholesale deal, but it takes a little longer.

The people who are out there reading are thinking, “How do I even get started?” There are many municipalities around the country that are very gray. Compared to my home country of Australia, they have incredible systems online that you can go see what the zoning is. What I’m encouraging people to do is educate yourself in your local municipality about what are the zoning laws? Here in LA, there’s R and there’s C. R stands for Residential, C stands for Commercial. There’s more but I’m not going to get any more complicated than that. It starts with R1. That is like a single-family block, you can only build one on it. There’s R2, there are R3 and R4. As you go down the line, what happens is the zoning laws then tell you in plain English, you can have the smallest amount of habitable space, meaning it might be for example an R4 lot.

You can have an R4 lot and the smallest dwelling size on it can be a 450 square feet unit. If you’ve got that in the back of your mind, “I’ve got 10,000 square feet here. I can maybe split this block up into X amount of units.” There are setback issues on the front and the back, and I’m not trying to get too complicated. What I’m getting at is that there is a lot of information readily available at your fingertips. You can find out exactly what zoning you’re sitting on right now, what block you’re looking at to see what’s the highest and best use. An R2 lot is a great example. My wife and I bought an R2. It’s a single-family house, but it’s on an R2 lot, which is a 5,500 square feet lot that I can put another dwelling on the back.

I’m not trying to change the zoning. It’s the highest and best use. It wasn’t built to the highest and best use back in the day. That’s the easiest way to get approved because the city can’t stop you if it is the highest and best use. For example, it’s an R2 lot. You can build two dwellings on it. You’ve only got one. You’re not changing anything. You’re literally going through the process, from A to Z, stock standard stuff to get it approved. It’s not like zoning changes where you need to go in and some developers do that. It’s something that you need to be very educated on to do, but that takes years.

Where something that is buy right, that’s the thing you need to need to understand, “I can buy right to build two dwellings on this block or I can buy right to build four dwellings on this block and it’s only got one.” Know that in the back of your mind that you can find that information online. When you go to the city, they’re not going to put up these red flags. “This is my right to build. I own this land. I can build four units on it and you need to approve plans for me.” You go down that path with the city and it takes a period of time. It won’t happen overnight. Once you do get it, there’s value in that. That value you can sell to some other person or you can build it yourself if you want.

There’s also value in building that relationship with the city like you said. There are a couple of things I want to add here. He talked about rezoning. Also, don’t ask for variances because again variances will slow things down quite a bit. Variance is a fancy word for exceptions. I want to do something a little bit different. It’s only this little thing. If it’s such a little thing, don’t ask for it because it will slow things down quite a lot. The other thing is to take the time to get to know the planners and the engineers in the planning departments of your city, especially when you’re starting. Even though everything is laid out online and with the zoning, you’ll have things come up. One of my favorite questions with my different planners that I go and see in the different cities is, “Is there something I should be asking you that I don’t know to ask?”

For instance, I’ve got a project that I’m interested in Campbell and they’ve got all the electric wires above ground, but they’re trying to change in that particular area to have everything underground. Every single developer that comes in that gets new permits has to go underground. There’s no way we could have known that by looking at it online, but I knew it because I went in and they know me. Everybody in the office was like, “Moneeka, you should be paying attention to this. Moneeka, this is probably going to cost you about another $100,000 on that project.” I was like, “At least now I know what my hard costs are, what my soft costs are and what this is going to take to make it happen.” As you start to open up that conversation and you’re a likable person and they want to help you out, you start to have these conversations where you get so much more information about what’s possible.

I don’t know what it’s called up in the Bay Area, but at least here in LA, it’s called a Q condition. It’s a Q overlay. You might view it online. It’s an R2. This is what it is. When you go into the actual city, there might be what’s called a Q overlay where they may have added something that the website hasn’t picked up yet because it hasn’t kept up in real-time. A bill modeling passed down by the local council to say, “We want all power lines now to go underground.” That might not be online yet because it was only past 6 or 7 months ago. Keeping those relationships up is important.

 

The one thing I’ll also add is how blown away I was when I first moved to this country that pre-COVID, you could walk into most cities and have a chat with someone who is in the city planning department, and they’re willing to do it. You’re taking a ticket at a meat sale line and I call your name out and you go up and say, “I’m looking at this particular piece of land. Is there anything else in this state or county in its Q conditions? Are there any other Q conditions I need to be made aware of to see if I’m doing my due diligence?” You can do that before you even bought the property. In Australia, you can’t do that. The system isn’t set up like that. Realize that the access to information here is so much greater than when you’re trying to develop in other countries, even like in my home country of Australia.

Originally when I started doing this, I was like, “I haven’t made an offer. I don’t know if I’m going to buy this place.” I felt a little bit bad about taking their time, but no, they love it. They love chatting. It’s like a puzzle for them. They’re like, “Yes, we could do this. We could do that.”

The other thing I’ll quickly add in there is for us, we bought this house. It was 1912. They don’t have any plans on record of what the house looks like. They have some very loose papers that it’s a 3-bedroom, 1-bath, but they don’t have physical plans of it. When you’re going in to do these improvements, they love the fact that you’re bringing plans to the city and that goes on file for the next 100 years or whatever it is. The city is incentivized to make sure they’re collecting as much data as they can. When you’re in there, even when you’re prospecting, they’re interested to know what you might want to do with it because that might give them ideas for their planning or urban development committees in their file.

They aren’t having conversations for no reason. They’re having a conversation listening and taking them back to their superiors and giving feedback, “We had someone come in today. They’re looking at doing X, Y, Z. What do you think of that? Does that go with the plans that the mayor wants to do for the downtown urban center or whatever it might be?” Most cities will have that. I bring up another point. Different cities called different things. I know in like the city of Long Beach, they call it the downtown urban development plan. It’s a book. It’s 100 pages of this outline of what they want to invest in the city over the next 20, 25 years. They have different areas they want to inject money into. They want to have certain sidewalk improvements. They want to have more shops and mixed-use areas. You can read that and see if it aligns with what their downtown plan might want to be and look like in the future. Get your hands on that. It’s great nighttime reading if you’re interested.

It’s also impressive because one of the reasons why I get things through is because people know that I’m interested in the community. I’m not some developer coming in and saying, “I want to make $2 billion.” I care about the community, what’s going up, what’s their plan, how to make something beautiful and how to up-level the community in different ways. I’ll often go into what we call redevelopment areas. If you’ve done that reading or at least scanned it, they’re like, “This particular developer is interested in us and our plan and what we think, not just in themselves.” That makes a huge impact on them.

You’re doing a great job. It sounds incredible. I want to come and join you one day.

I would love that, Reed. Let’s do it. I can do something down there with you. That would be fun. We are going to have more of Reed in EXTRA where we’re going to be talking about what he calls his six Ps, which is all about what successful people do to up-level their relationships to increase their business. I’m excited to talk about that in EXTRA. Reed, could you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you?

The simplest and easiest way is to go to ReedGoossens.com. If you go there, you can find my podcast. You can find books. If you are ever coming through LA and you to hit me up, you can send me an email at [email protected]. Give me a little bit of heads up and we can go out for lunch, coffee or whatever you want. We can talk shop. For those readers, if you are interested, I have a book out and I’ve got a lot of them sitting in my office at home and my wife is nagging me to get rid of them. If you want a free copy of my book called 10,000 Miles to the American Dream: Our Story of Financial Freedom, email me at and I will shoot you a free copy. Just say you read the show and I will shoot you a free copy.

Could you tell everybody what your amazing podcast name is?

You don't get to deal number ten without doing deal number one. Share on X

It is called Investing in the US. It is a collection of conversations of people coming and creating something from nothing in and around obviously real estate, but overdoing it. We talk a lot more about the journey and creating something from nothing. Check it out.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to be on that show. Go check it out. It’s good. Reed, are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Let’s do it.

Give us one super tip in getting started investing in real estate.

A quote that my dad always said, and I use this all the time, “A fool and their money are easily parted.” Don’t be a fool when it comes to your money and be educated. Start with education. I’m self-educated. I didn’t go to school for real estate development. I went to school for engineering, and I’m all self-taught about how this business and how to go out and be successful. The same can apply to the readers.

What is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?

Getting started. Everyone asks me, “What’s the best deal you’ve ever done?” I said, “It’s the first one,” because you don’t get to deal number ten without doing deal number one. Getting off the fence, there comes a point in the education piece at the start, and then you get to analysis paralysis where you start spinning your wheels, and then you need to go take action. I vividly remember reading books on the subway in New York City and thinking, “I need to get going. I need to go do my own deals because reading a book isn’t going to do anything for me.” It’s like reading about losing weight. You’ve got to stop reading that and go open the door and go to the gym. It’s the same thing. Take action. Educate yourself first and then go and take some action, and massive amounts of it because it’s going to be needed to get you to that first deal.

The other thing is don’t feel like you need to be so educated that you know everything. Going to the gym, it takes time to build those muscles and you’re going to learn different skills and increase your capacity. All of those things change, but you have to start somewhere. Get enough education to get started and then take action. What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

It was changed over the years. As I become more self-aware of my subconscious, and it sounds like you talk a lot about on this show, which I’m very much a huge believer of. I have changed my mindset around some things that I’ve had hang-ups in the past. Meditation is a big one for me in the morning. Taking some time in the morning to sit with my thoughts before jumping into the day. I’m very much guilty of trying to turn the phone on too quickly or jump into emails and having that quiet time, being prepared, being self-aware, centering yourself, and then not going often in tackling the day. When I don’t do my breathing exercises in the morning, it throws the whole day off. That’s a massive spanner in the works. I don’t feel as productive as what I usually do.

 

Probably that and exercising are the two big things. A lot of people say that a level of mindfulness. It’s counterintuitive. People are like, “I don’t have the time for that. I’m busy. I’ve got a lot to do.” The problem is that if you don’t do it, you need a lot more time to do the things that you need to do. If you do get centered, you do meditate, you do take some time to be very introspective, you are so much more productive during the day.

You stop that chatter of, “I’ve got too much to do,” because all of a sudden, you find time to do those important things, which is working on yourself first and foremost before you can help others.

Reed, thank you so much for all you’ve offered in this portion of the show. I can’t wait until the next portion.

Thank you so much for having me. I hope everyone has learnt a little bit and remember to reach out if you’re ever in LA.

If you are subscribed to EXTRA, we have some awesome stuff. We’re going to be talking about Reed’s six Ps, which will help you to create the relationships that will build your business. I’m excited to learn all about those. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free, so you can check things out. See if it’s like up your alley. You can binge on a bunch of stuff. The other cool thing is that EXTRA comes down on whatever device or app you’re using. You don’t have to have new technology around that. That’s cool too. Go check it out. If you’re leaving us now, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. You know how much I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Spartan Invest
• www.SpartanInvest.com/Investing4Women
• [email protected]
• Reed Goossens
• [email protected]
• 10,000 Miles to the American Dream: Our Story of Financial Freedom
• Investing in the US Podcast
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

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How To Build Your Team To Build Your Business with Kris Ward

 

Even the brightest and most successful people have a team behind them. In this episode, Kris Ward explains why building a team can help you grow and build your business. Understand why it’s important to aim to be replaceable in your own business and why it’s not a bad thing. She talks about the importance of shifting your time away from jobs you can delegate to someone else. Kris believes that if you can afford to hire someone, you should go ahead and do it. She also gives a reminder on why stretching out the responsibility of a single person can be a bad idea. Kris also gives away some tips and shares some platforms you can use to build your dream team for a penny in order to start getting your time back.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Build Your Team To Build Your Business with Kris Ward

I am excited to bring to the show Kris Ward. She is the leading authority in building your business by building your team. She is the Founder of the Win The Hour, Win The Day! philosophy. She helps entrepreneurs easily double their income and triple their time off. After the loss of her husband, she turned full-time to her work as a marketing strategist. She was thrilled to see that her business had not only survived her absence but was thriving. She has completely changed the landscape for entrepreneurs by sharing the successful practices that allowed her absence. She has been interviewed by one of the original sharks from Shark Tank, Kevin Harrington, and ABC’s Secret Millionaire, James Malinchak. She has been featured on award-winning podcasts, radio, and TV shows throughout North America. Kris, welcome to the show. How are you?

I’m excited to be here.

When I was reading your bio, the first thing that came to me is people’s feeling of, “If I’m gone and the business does great without me, I’m no longer needed.” That fear mentality that people have. I hear my husband talk about this all the time where he’s like, “If an engineer has gone and everything that they have set in motion continues to go, then they’re likely to get laid off.” There’s this mentality of, “I need to be active in my business to be relevant.” It’s not true. As business owners, we stay relevant by being the visionary and then having the teams underneath us. I’m excited to talk about that as a time management tool. Could you tell us more about yourself? How did you get to where you are?

I’m a marketing strategist and I was pulled away from my business when my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer. What happened was quick that started to gobble up our calendar like nobody’s business, it’s insane, chemo appointments, surgeries, and specialists. Quickly, that became the new normal. One thing led to another and all of a sudden there I am and many years have passed. After his passing, I come back to work and it became public for the first time. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew what was happening. My clients were completely not aware of it. They started to ask me with a gentle approach under the capacity of time management, productivity, and team building. How do they manage that?

They were not even aware of my absence. I had a renewed commitment to the fragility of life and that business should be fun and that it should support your life and not consume it, whatever your business whether it’s your side hustle or this or that. It should be something that enhances your life, not drains your life. I started working with people because I love helping people. I wanted to create a movement where we weren’t always doing things you hated or you’re hiding in the closet, answering emails because you’re zoning out when you’re with your family. That started with me having a lot of success, offline group coaching, we took it online. I wrote a book and we have our first product, The Outsourcing Playbook for Busy Entrepreneurs. That’s how it evolved is helping other people so that you could enjoy life.

Through the whole Coronavirus thing, one of the things that I realized is that most of what I was doing day to day was not filling me up and not giving me bliss, which made feel I’m not being authentic to my superpower, which is being blissful, but also my message. I have to walk the talk and I’ve walked the talk for so long and I don’t know where I lost sight of that. Fortunately, I caught it, I don’t think I’ve been in that place for long. This particular topic is a topic that has been heavy on my mind. There’s still a lot that I want to accomplish.

There’s still a message that’s important. I still want to do my podcast. I still want to do all of these things, but I can’t have it eating up my life the way that it has. I’m delighted that there are other people that are out there having this conversation because, for the Millennials, it is a cool topic, but for people in my generation, the opposite topic is what’s like, “How much do you work? How many hours do you put in?” All of those things are the things that make you seem powerful as opposed to, “How am I creating a lifestyle around my business? How is my business supporting that lifestyle in a way that brings me bliss so I don’t have to put in as many hours and the priority is the play and feel blissful?”

You could change your life by simply starting your team. Share on X

You bring up a lot of good points and it happens gradually that you start with this mission in mind and you’re going to do this thing, whatever your thing is, and you get all excited and passionate about it. All of a sudden, that thing you do requires a little bit of pre-work, post-work and it starts gobbling up your calendar. It’s like sitting in a bathtub and all of a sudden, “When did this water get cold?” It happens gradually. This is a story that happened to me many years ago and how my team started. The turning point for me was I realized you could change your life by simply starting your team.

I remember many years ago, which seems long ago now technology-wise, and I was still going to physical appointments. I would go to some of these offices, we would sit down, we would plan their marketing, and I would give them different ideas and packages. I would be writing these notes on my laptop or on my iPad, but still, they were temporary notes. I would promise myself hand to God when I got back to the office, I would put them right in my computer. That never happened. What I started to see was a pattern where on Friday afternoons, I had the stress of the whole week and things got distracted. Now, I have to put in a bunch of notes from meetings I had during the week.

What happened with that is these notes are written with the idea that they were temporary. In twenty minutes, I get back to the office, I’ll put the notes in. I found myself when people called the next week to ask, “Let’s do this. I promised them a package. I made them an offer.” I could barely make out my notes because there was supposed to be something that lasted twenty minutes. My fear was, as I panicked, what if I gave them the wrong price or missed one thing off my promise? They will think I was trying to swindle them. Not that I had bad notes. When I started working with building a team outsourcing, it was still the mindset that you were dealing with somebody on the other side of the world who is driving a chicken to work. This seems crazy.

It’s a little bit more mainstream and people don’t understand how to leverage it. My first outsourcer was a transcriptionist. What happened was I would sit in my car after the meeting, I would talk 30 seconds with great clarity and being specific. She would put it in the file, it was there within 24 hours. I got all of Friday afternoon back. I stopped beating myself up all week and because this is what she did and this was her passion, she was fast at it. She had ten clients, but some weeks I needed her an hour, some weeks I needed none. The first week she saved me and got me all Friday afternoon back, I spent $12. When you say building a team, you often get confused with an employee mindset like bringing somebody on and managing them and the cost and the upfront work.

That’s what I want people to understand. No matter what you’re doing, if this is your side hustle, you do real estate on the side, or you have a full-time job, they still admit I’ve worked with people who were gainfully employed and I helped them outsource some of their work so that they could still work fewer hours. The way they were working sometimes from home is that they were still producing as long as you are producing. An average of clients we work with the first month get 25 hours back a week. Even if you had a full-time job and you were building a team under your own umbrella, it’s separate from the company, you still can get eight hours back a week and it allows you to be the creative agent and allows you to move on to the next thing. If you’re holding on to that job at a fear, that is a job and you’re always going to be limited. If you are stuck there, that limits your financial ability. You want to be replaceable.

A lot of the ladies that are reading this show, their side hustle is real estate. They do have a full-time job. They may be moms. We’ve got our relationships and our friends and got many demands in life. This is something I do well is outsourcing housework. I have someone that cleans the house. I take my laundry out. Even if it’s not specifically related to your job, outsourcing a lot of those things that are not the best and highest use of your time is where you can start, which regains your time back. What’s funny about this is that in Coronavirus and I can’t allow my house cleaner in and I don’t have someone else doing my laundry.

I’m realizing how much time that takes and how much time that saved me by outsourcing it so that I could be a better wife, a better friend, better daughter, better business owner, a better podcaster. I can do much more because those hours are not being taken up, but it’s in my face even those little things that we can outsource. Let’s talk more specifically about things that we can outsource in our businesses, our jobs, and specifically in real estate. In real estate, our team is going to consist of our vendors, our tenant, our real estate agent, our mortgage broker, our title company. Those are the people that we think of as our team. There are other team members that are not in the limelight that can help us to be more productive. Wouldn’t you say?

What happens with most of the people I work with. We have 90-day coaching cycles and most of the clients I work with, what they don’t realize is how much redundancy there is in their work. No matter how specific or talented they are or how niche their career is. As somebody that’s doing real estate, social media has to be an aspect of that. You’ve got to be on there. It’s all about networking and relationships. We work with clients where, for example, you have your time allotted and you’re busy. You might pop on and do some social media 0.5-hour in the morning and night, but you could have an assistant, someone you outsource that make sure the way I do it is we have this little thing. If I use BaseCamp or Google docs.

They could tag everybody. Let’s say I was commenting so when I get messages, what I do is I go at the end of the day, my team puts together any link where somebody tagged me, messaged me, asked me about my product. I go in specifically and hit 30 contacts instead of scrolling four different social media platforms and trying to pick up, “I got this message on LinkedIn. I got here, got there.” It’s all put together for me and it saves me a lot of time because then you get seduced into social media and answering this and shiny that, and all of a sudden you bought a pair of earrings and you’re like, “I was up here.”

There are many different things that you think, “I can’t do. Let’s take it even on the grounds of we’re promoting our Outsourcing Playbook For Busy Entrepreneurs.” When somebody asks me about that, I will respond and type it out. When I do that, all of a sudden, I notice that there are fifteen different responses. I keep copying and pasting my response to Google Docs. Now, my team is out there and if somebody asks a question about it because I did a video, they take one of the responses I already gave. It starts off with, “That’s a great question. Here’s what we’re working on.” They copy and paste my language into an answer. It’s the exact same thing only I didn’t manually type it out myself. I’m leveraging my networking, my social media, and doing all these things, but I’m leaning on my team so that I can be somewhere else and not succumb by the overwhelming necessity of being all day long on social media. There are many little things that especially if real estate is your side hustle, where you can say, “Time matters to me. Let’s lean into this.”

Talk to me about how you would find that backend help?

On my website, www.WinTheHourWinTheDay.com, that’s probably the number one question I get. Here’s what happens, people will look at somebody that I have on my team or one of my clients will say to me, “Everyone is envious of my team.” They get thinking that it’s this magical place, this magical well we pulled them from or, “I got this one lucky person.” Everybody needs Ruby. “Ruby’s great. Everyone needs a Ruby.” People will say to me, “Can I borrow her?” That’s like saying, “Here’s my sister. We’re close. We get along well. Would you like to have the same relationship with her?” We have a process. There’s been a history there. She’s been trained, all that stuff, and you can have it too.

What I would tell you is there are different platforms depending on what you need and different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses. A more commonly known one is oDesk, but they take 10% off everything that you pay that person forever. If it’s somebody that’s going to be a virtual assistant, it may not be something you want. Philippines Online is great where you pay monthly and you can cancel after you get your VA for that month and they’re happy with it. You’re done with that relationship and you pay them anyway. There are different platforms for different specific needs.

It’s like, “Can I get pants at Walmart?” “Yes, but you don’t want to wear them to a wedding.” What I think is important in the question is understanding that it’s a process and it’s a talent because people will say to me, “I listened to you. I heard you. I thought you were right. I went off. I hired somebody and it didn’t work out. Kids these days and the economy.” I say, “That’s like my accountant saying, “What you need is a new tax strategy.” I come back three months later and say, “That didn’t work out.” “What do I know about that?” People get confused and think that because you have a business, you run out and hire somebody. That’s not like hiring a part-time at a grocery store. You want to understand that you don’t have the skillset, experience, or training in that area. You’re going to pay dearly on experimenting on yourself. That’s why I created The Outsourcing Playbook For Busy Entrepreneurs. You need to have a strategy.

What is the biggest mistake that someone makes when trying to build the team?

They get one person to do one job and they get excited about how that’s working out. Let’s say you hire a social media person and you say, “I got the social media person. I heard this amazing podcast. Kris gave some tips. They were awesome. She’s right. I saved a whole bunch of time. Copying pasting answers. She tagged all my responses so I could go in 0.5-hour a day, respond to people.” Next week they start going, “That worked well. That saved me much time. I’m happy. I’m going to get her to write some copy. I’m going to get her to do some graphics. It would be good if we have a quote every week.”

All of a sudden, they start stretching that job because they’ve had success and they start being unclear as to what that person’s responsibilities are. The VA person becomes a social media person in social media because they’re on social media, starts becoming the graphic designer because people think, “I asked you to grab messages. You did that well. I’ll start getting you to do some graphics.” It starts bleeding into other areas, which frankly is what’s wrong with traditional employment when you are hiring somebody part-time and, “I only need them two hours a week, but who’s going to come in for two hours a week? I have to hire them for twelve, but then I have to fill the other hours with work.” That creates more work and you have to get a desk and a computer. That’s the beauty of outsourcing is like with the idea of the transcriptionist, some weeks I needed her for an hour, some weeks I needed her for none, but she was zoned in on that and she was amazing at it. That worked. Don’t start stretching the responsibilities because someone impressed you in one area.

One of the things that I’ve had an experience with is that I might have five different people that specialize in something on one particular project. For instance, my show. I record it and it goes up onto a Google Drive. There are five people that touch that show before it gets to my audience. There’s a person that does the editing. There’s the person that loads up into Libsyn and writes a little thing. They also produce the newsletter. Someone else who does the video portion and then someone else that loads all the video out to all the different platforms. Even before that, you filled out a form. Everything goes into a spreadsheet so that guy that writes my notes can get all the spreadsheets.

Get everything off of there and it goes up and it’s like magic, but I will say that because there are many people touching it because those are their specialties. I feel like I’m still constantly managing. It seems like it’s flow, but there are all these portions and if one portion doesn’t work, that means that what I’m doing is checking everybody’s work along the way. These people have worked for me for two years. It’s like there was a problem with one of the videos because it wasn’t sized right and she didn’t notice that. I’ve got a beautifully-flowing process, but I’m still managing all of those pieces, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place.

That is the fear of most people and you get these different people, but you’re still the gatekeeper. Let’s say my process from my podcast, Win the Hour, Win the Day, what happens is there might be 40 steps to that and they go through all the departments you do, I’ve not reinvented the wheel. It’s the same thing. He’s got to edit it and do all this different stuff. What happens is the first thing will be this has been recorded. I flag my VA and then there are all these steps. Her job is to push them through all those steps saying, “I’ve got this and that.” She alerts the graphic guy. There is a separate person other than me that approves it going through and make sure it keeps moving through the machine like a widget.

 

We have somebody that we call audits it. You’re saying, “They didn’t catch that.” When we put it up in Simplecast, that’s a platform we all use for podcasts. Somebody has to listen to that podcast because how do we know until a listener tells us that nothing aired or got cut-off halfway. It’s about the process you have. You have some cracks in your process that can be eliminated and those are the two groups of people I work with. They don’t understand they can outsource it all. They have done it with some success, but there are cracks in there which are causing them as much work as before and they think, “I’ve come far. I’ve made such a gain. I’m doing all these great things yet I’m still being sucked back in like those movies saying, ‘They pull you back in one more time.’”

What’s happening is you’re playing a little bit of game of ping pong. You’re pinging into somebody else. They’re ponging it back to you, then you have to ping it to somebody else. We often hire and teach our clients how to hire. We’ve got a whole bunch of applications coming in for one of my clients for a virtual assistant. My assistant goes in, pre-qualifies, and narrows down that list for me. If I get 200 applicants, “These are the things we’re looking for.” We go from 200 down to 45. You can have somebody that nurtures your process and fills in those cracks. You’re almost there but think about making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. One little step where you don’t put the chocolate chips in after the cookies are baked ruins the whole recipe.

You’re like, “I followed all the steps. It tastes like sugar. It’s sweet. The chocolate chips melt when I put them on the hot cookie, it’s not the same as what I thought it would be.” That’s what’s happening there. You were close, but your process has some holes in it. That’s why people get sucked into thinking, “It’s too much time to manage it.” After I record my show, I spend about twelve minutes on it, and then I never see or hear it again, but the process takes care of checking on itself, proofing it, auditing it, and all those things that go into that. That’s the movement I want to create. This is not magic.

It feels magical to have all of that taken off of my shoulders. I do love this show. I love everything about it, but there is a reality about there are only 24 hours in the day.

You love the show because you’re great at it and you are an on-air personality and this is what you do best. Your readers can tell how vibrant you are, how engaged you are, how much you enjoy interviewing people. That does not mean you love doing all the heavy admin work. You don’t have to apologize for loving your show. You do, but all the post-production work, like somebody who’s an actress, a movie star we all have seen TV doesn’t mean they want to be in the editing room.

When do you think is a good time to start looking for a team? For me, before I got into it, it took about a year to buy into, “I needed all of those processes handled because it was not the best use of my time.” That’s my show business. Different businesses are going to have different timeframes. We perceive that, which is where I was headed. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Anything done well in the history of mankind on any level had a team and especially any aspect of the business. People have this false idea and I had it too. Once they get to a certain financial plateau, a certain number of clients, when I’ve been in business many years and I’ll build a team and when I get a certain revenue and like I said, “I can’t afford it. I have no time to manage the team and I have no money.” That example I gave with the $12. That’s a coffee. For $12, I got all of Friday afternoon back to myself and the stress of the whole week and all I had to do was mess up one client and say, “I gave you the wrong price.” Now, I lost that opportunity. It certainly was worth the $12.

If you're holding on to a job, you're always going to be limited. If you are stuck, that limits your financial ability. Share on X

What I would tell you is like the old saying goes, “The best time is day one. The second best time is today.” You want to keep up with your competition with all the things that are happening online, if you want your business to survive, if you want to get to that next thing that’s going to bring you financial opportunities. Frankly, if you want to stay in business, if you’re tired of looking around and saying, “How’s that person getting that? They got a book out, the podcast, and they’re doing all these things.” It’s because they have a team. A team is the backbone of any success story in the history of the business.

Let’s talk about how that would relate to real estate specifically. Many of the ladies that are reading are agents, but the real intention is to be investors. When we talk about my readers are all investors, this is their side hustle. They’re not selling real estate. There are not the processes of lead generation and all of that stuff that you would normally think of with an agent. There is lead generation, for instance with finding tenants or for finding vendors. There are interview processes to find your agent, you have to go through that whole process so you find the right person. Talk a little bit about what backend processes might work for someone who’s got this side hustle that they’re trying to make successful while they’re working full-time?

Everything comes down to admin work. When I gave the example of social media and having my messages tagged, maybe they’re not lead generations for you, but they might be somebody that’s got, “I saw this property. It’s a good deal for you.” It’s still a business of networking and relationships. I still don’t know any business in this day and age, especially now after this whole pandemic thing, there’s going to be a huge shift where businesses are going to have to be much stronger online. Everything’s going to have to have the security and the backbone of running as efficiently online. Even if it’s something that wouldn’t traditionally do that. Let’s say you’re a massage therapist or something like that. There’s always a heavy amount of admin to anything it’s doing whether it’s chasing emails or people, or whether it’s sending paperwork to those vendors. There is a significant amount of copy and paste.

We don’t realize how much we do that in a day and having to move things from pile A to pile B. What I would tell you is when I’m working with people like that, we first sit down and we do a little audit and we take a look especially when they’ve got a full-time job and the investment is their side hustle. Whatever their processes are, when they take on a new vendor, they send them these pieces of paperwork. Having somebody else do that, “That only takes five minutes.” “We’ll times that to the other twenty things you did today, then we saved you two hours.”

Every time you shift from a five-minute to a five-minute, you lose time. That took five minutes and I have to think about what’s that next project, pull everything up, and do and get into that. Any five-minute project from my own experience takes at least twenty minutes.

In fact, in my book, when the day we talk about whenever you switch modalities, even being interrupted, they say it takes you about 22 minutes. They’ve done studies. It’s in the book. About 22 minutes to get your brainpower back to the same intensity or focus that you had before the interruption. Even like me, I think, “I work much faster and harder.” That doesn’t apply to me. Let’s say you’re superhuman and they’re wrong. Let’s cut that in half and say, “It’s twelve minutes.” The 5 minutes plus the 12 minutes to take you back to get there. It is like your cell phone where all the apps are open and start burning down your battery quicker.

It’s nice to have someone that is turning and doing that thing because even if they’re switching clients, they’re doing the same process so they don’t have to get back into the mindset. They have to find the new client, but they’re still in the flow of that thing that they’re doing.

 

Especially real estate and relationships like that because it’s paper-heavy, it’s admin heavy. It’s full of a lot of paperwork. I’ve got one situation where one of my rental properties is like, “There’s an issue with the plumbing. We have to process quickly. I’ve got fifteen minutes to deal with this because it was out of nowhere.” I need you to respect your time. This is what happens. We have a process for emergencies. Somebody is taking care of that because here are the steps. It’s not going to be the first nor the last time.

That’s the key to blissful investing. The way that I only spend 5 to 10 hours a month building a multimillion-dollar business is because I’ve got the processes and the team to handle that. For me, I’ve trained my renters to be the team, but not everybody can do that. I deal with executive homes, not everybody’s doing that. You have to have a team and for me, it’s my renters, but it’s the process that creates the freedom and the time so that you’re not reinventing the wheel every single time. Because that plumbing problem happened for you, unless you’ve got 100 doors, that same plumbing problem or similar plumbing problem is probably not going to show up for another year. You have to recreate the process and try to remember what you did, who was your contact, and who was it that you liked. If you’ve got a process, now you can say, “Here’s my plumbing issue thing. This is the guy that I call. This is what I tell him. This is what I asked my tenant to do.” It’s done in fifteen minutes rather than the recreation and trying to remember that, which can take two hours.

Many years ago, when I was doing trade shows for my business, I had a process even then, “I need this. I need that.” I was going to a trade show for the first time that was super close to my home. I was looking at my computer and was like, “I don’t need the keyboard because I’m not going to be dueling. There’s no Wi-Fi. I need the computer screen for display to rotate these visuals and stuff.” Before the doors open, I turn and the password comes up on my screen and they need a four-digit password for my computer to work. I left the keyboard at the office because I thought I didn’t need it. I violated my process. No matter how loudly you scream at a computer, it will not absorb the password.

The point is, what happened was I hadn’t done a trade show in a year, even though I had the process, I was tired. It was down the street. I took some shortcuts. I knew better. Whenever I step outside the process, it’s like, “You’re going to get burned.” Some people don’t have that process at all. Every year they’re doing something and they haven’t done 6 or 3 months. You’re wasting all that fuel relearning, “Where’s that phone number? What’s that plumber guy’s name? Did he have brown hair or was that the redheaded carpenter?”

What would you say to expect some getting help would cost?

Anything done well, in the history of mankind, on any level, had a team. Especially any aspect of business. Share on X

It’s crazy affordable. It’s like I explained with the transcriptionist, that was $12. I don’t even know what she does anymore because there are many platforms out there that are $0.10 a minute. It’s a magical time to be in business because with the global economy, we are dealing with economies around the world. In the Philippines, it’s $4.75 a day for minimum wage. When you pay them $5 an hour, they are thrilled and they’re living quite the life. That’s affordable for you. What that also lets you do is give your in-house or people that are local, you can pay them more and you can invest in the company more.

Originally, there were some concerns like, “Are we exploiting them.” I had a couple of people many years ago talk to me, she was an American from the Philippines. When I was first introduced to outsourcing many years ago, I was like, “That seemed like I was exploiting someone.” She said like, “Who are you to tell them what they should spend their money on? We look at the North American lifestyle of wasteful and ridiculous and your family’s all spread out and they’re not in one home.” There were these misguided understandings in the beginning, but you globally can do a lot for a dollar these days. I call it building a rock star team for pennies. It’s super affordable. I got all Friday afternoon off and back in my hands for $12. That you can stomach. If you can’t afford to hire someone, then you need to hire someone.

It will free up the time for you to do the things that are going to make you money. Could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

Tell me you heard me on this amazing show on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. We’ve got some free gifts from FreeGiftFromKris.com. Your readers can go in and grab some stuff. It’s a little bit of a treasure box. There are things that we still charge for that are in there.

Why don’t you tell us a super tip on getting started in real estate investing?

Get in on any level that you can and you will be shockingly surprised that it increases the value. I bought properties where I think, “This is a cute little place in a rural area. I’ll be lucky. I pay down a bit. It’s an investment.” All of a sudden you come back five years later, it’s this crazy amount of money for this little house. Even then you think, “It can’t go up anymore.” We know real estate keeps going up in an insane amount. Get on any level you can and it will grow.

What is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?

 

Take care and maintain the property. Don’t take shortcuts because it starts to unravel quickly. There is no, “It’s just the garage door.” It tatters quickly. Treat it with respect and put quality into it when there are adjustments or repairs that need to be made.

What is one daily practice you would say contributes to your personal success?

Taking care of yourself first and putting work inside that. If you don’t have your health, you have 100% of nothing. Vitality is everything. I exercise, I stop for a proper lunch, I learned how to chew my food slower. Make sure that there are non-negotiables as far as self-care goes and put the work inside that because there will always be more work.

Kris, thank you for what you’ve offered in this portion of the show. It’s been amazing.

Thank you for having me. There’s nothing more valuable than someone who can give you than their time. I appreciate that.

Ladies, thank you for joining Kris and me for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Win The Hour, Win The Day!
• The Outsourcing Playbook for Busy Entrepreneurs
• oDesk
• Win the Hour, Win the Day – podcast
• LinkedIn – Kris Ward
• Facebook – Kris Ward
• Instagram – Kris Ward
• FreeGiftFromKris.com

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook

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How Anyone Can Create Stress-Free Passive Income Through Real Estate With Laurence Jankelow

 

What comes after property acquisition is management, and it’s a whole different ball game that can be frustrating for some. Providing a solution on how to create a stress-free passive income is Laurence Jankelow, co-founder of Avail. Being a landlord himself, he realized the cost that accompanies outsourcing property managers, so Laurence and his partner created a tool and system that can automate most of your responsibilities as a landlord. He also explains the importance of having a defined system and process in place as a landlord and shares some strategies on how you can achieve it.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How Anyone Can Create Stress-Free Passive Income Through Real Estate with Laurence Jankelow

I am excited to welcome to our show Laurence Jankelow. Laurence is the Cofounder of Avail, an all in one software solution designed for do-it-yourself landlords that are used by more than 600,000 landlords and tenants across the United States. Prior to launching Avail, Laurence spent seven years in data analytics first as a consultant at Protiviti Chicago and then at Goldman Sachs. Originally from South Africa, Laurence has a heartbreaking spirit, and together with his Cofounder Ryan Coon, they developed the idea of their company on a napkin that solves the needs of thousands of landlords. I love that, the napkin business plan that launches something that changes the world. Laurence is also a long-term real estate investor with a passion for three-unit multifamily properties. Laurence, welcome to the show. How are you?  

I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

I’m excited about this topic because few people talk about tools that can systematize the do-it-yourself landlord process and systems is what I call the key to bliss. I only work in my business and I manage all my properties. I only work about 5 to 10 hours a month and it’s because of my systems. Systems equal bliss. You are our bliss guy. I’m excited.  

I’m happy to be that person.

Could you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what brought you to this?  

I’m a landlord myself. I’ve got six units in Chicago. I started my first foray into real estate buying a three-flat from a friend who I worked with at Goldman. When I was there, you’re a full-time employee. You’d imagine that a company like that you’re putting in some hard hours and I had these properties on the side and it’s tough doing both. My buddy and I, we constantly stay in contact about real estate investments. He was doing the exact same thing. He was at a different bank and we got together and saying, “What are you using?” We would share stuff with each other. I would send him Excel spreadsheets of what I was using for a rental application where I’d merge cells together and make it look pretty, print it out, and give it to a tenant to fill out. He’d have his rent roll in Excel. He would show me like, “These rows are highlighted in green because I received the rents.” We realized that’s not how professionals would manage their property. We went looking for software tools and systems as you’re saying to help us and automate it. What we were seeing were only things available for someone if they had 1,000 plus units at least back then.

For us, we could do those, but the costs would be more than the rents we were making combined. Not feasible. It was then that we decided we’re going to quit our jobs and start a business that helps solve this problem. We realized it wasn’t just us. It was other landlords of our size and nature. What we didn’t know then was how many of them there are and there are eight million do-it-yourself landlords with less than ten units out there. A large audience we set out to build it. We couldn’t get an engineer to come and do it for us. We didn’t have the money. We rolled up our sleeves and taught ourselves to code and built the website completely ourselves and then it took off from there.

We started thinking about, what are the things that we need to do to manage this property that a professional already has access to? We thought if you need to find tenants, you would normally go to the MLS. We couldn’t do that so we started thinking, “Where else can you put listings?” We built a tool that syndicates the listing to Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, PadMapper, Lovely, all the places that tenants look for houses. We hooked into TransUnion to get criminal credits and eviction background reports. We hooked into a payment system to allow tenants to pay their rent online. We provided state and city-specific lease agreements that could be signed online. We took all of the operational stuff of being a landlord and moved it online and automated 90% of it. You could flow through it quickly and get back to either your life or your other full-time job.

Property managers definitely provide a lot of value, but they also come at a huge cost. Share on X

This is the thing and ladies that are reading, understand that the large investors are such a small percentage. It’s a large business in the United States. The biggest percentages of businesses are small businesses. What makes the world go round there? They’re what makes our economy go round. It’s also true for landlords. Most of us are the little guys. You can be a multimillionaire and be a little guy but setting up these processes is going to be key to keeping it easier for you. 

The average number of units that our customers have is three units. Most of them only have one unit. You can see it’s skewed towards more if you don’t mind the term mom-and-pop landlords, it’s the small business landlord.

A lot of people talk about the way to keep it blissful is to get a manager. I have never gotten a property manager. It’s not my way, but I will say that I have all my properties close to home. Mine are all within a 50-mile radius. Talk to me about do-it-yourself versus a manager and let’s talk about distance. If I were to invest outside of California, which I’m looking at doing because of the way prices are and lending mostly is what I’m thinking about, could you talk a little bit about that, Laurence? 

Property managers provide a lot of value but they also come at a huge cost. For most landlords out there, that cost is going to take you from being profitable to potentially breaking even, and more often than not, not making money on that property. Typical fees to find you a tenant can be something a half month’s rent or full month’s rent. If you want the manager to help you with handling maintenance and collecting the rent, then you’re paying 10% of the rent. On $1,000 rent on one unit, you might be paying $2,400 for the year and that might be the entirety of your profit. If that’s you and you’re using a property manager, your best bet is probably to sell the property because it’s not worth it. If you’re not making the money, then you shouldn’t necessarily be in it. The alternative is to try to figure out what is that property manager doing? How can I do that myself, affordably, and not do it wrong? The value that a property manager is going to do is they know what they’re supposed to do and they have access to tools. If you can get access to tools and you can get access to a process when you’re not going to make mistakes, that’s your better path.

Is the cost of the software significantly less? It’s going to be less than 10%, but it’s another one of those things that I think about that’s going to be another cost involved. You don’t need to give us numbers, but could you give us an idea of what that looks like?  

I don’t mind giving real numbers. When we set out to create Avail, we did it with the purpose of reaching everybody who needs that assistance. It’s free. If you want to use us to list your property and find tenants or collect rental line, all of that’s free for an unlimited number of units. We do have a premium version of it. If you wanted to, for instance, have late fees be automatic, you might want to upgrade for that but by no means, do you have to do that? We’re trying to put it out in front of everybody, make the process seamless and easy. If you put any price point on this, especially because most people aren’t making that much money on the rental, that’s probably a misconception that people have out there that small landlords are rich but they’re not. The average person, maybe they’re making $100, $200 a month on a single unit. It has to be affordable for them. When you compare that then to a property manager, it’s night and day difference.

Thank you for that. Talk to me a little bit more about the process of instituting this into your business.  

That’s critical even if you don’t use Avail or software, you should have a process at the very least. The process is always better supported by some system or software, but your process should always be the same. You want to go through a standard way that you screen tenants, find them and you’re describing the property. Those things help you avoid violations of fair housing laws. You want a lease agreement that you know is going to work for you, state and city. You need all those things and you need to create a process around those things. Similar to rent payments, you have to decide upfront, what are you going to do when a tenant doesn’t pay? Do you charge a late fee? How many days, grace period do you want to give? Also, the law dictates some of that too. You want to know those things and set up that process. If you’re trying to save time and money, you might want to also then supplement that with a software solution that’s going to fit your process. The process is first and foremost, the most important thing that you should try to do and set up when you’re becoming a landlord or if you’re already one and you can’t describe your process in those areas I mentioned, it’s a good time to take a look at that.

 

One of the things that I tell people through my coursework is the best way to start setting up a process when you’re going through it the first time is to take notes on what you’re doing because the smaller landlord isn’t usually doing this on a daily or monthly basis, they get rents once a month. They might buy a house once a year. If you have to reinvent the wheel every single time, that takes a huge amount of emotional and mental energy and time. Many of us are busy. A lot of the ladies that are reading this are executive women with high power jobs that are already working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. They don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel and then it hinders them from taking their business to the next level buying that next property when they’re ready. I love this idea of having that process set that is all automated. For me, what I have often said is take notes the first time you’re doing it so that you’ve got those notes and you know what you’re doing the next time. Talk to me a little bit more about if you’re a first-time homeowner landlord and you’re setting up your process for the first house, what is it that you go through to do that? I know that I beat the bush around that but this is what I’m thinking about, Laurence. As a busy woman, do I need to learn a bunch more software and spend a huge amount of time setting up processes that I’m not going to understand is going to cause me frustration? That’s the real question.  

With Avail, you don’t have to learn much. Although we take significant pride in teaching people, we try to do it as they’re going through it in a way where it doesn’t feel like you’re having to sit down and study for a course. In real estate in general, you do want to be educated in what you’re doing and understand your legal requirements and your obligations. It’s time-consuming and hard to go and teach yourself those things and curate that stuff. That’s where I feel like Avail is super helpful in curating a lot of that content for our customers. If you’re a first-time landlord, depending on if the property you bought already has tenants or not, there’s a different path you would take. If it doesn’t have tenants, then you’re going to need to find your first tenants.

Our system is essentially going to ask you to add your units. It’s going to guide you through how to create a listing step-by-step the entire way through. It’s going to tell you where the listing is going to go, why it’s going to those places, what you should do when a lead responds to your listing, how you should screen them. It’s going to give you canned messages to use. A lot of it’s designed to keep you from being in legal trouble. You don’t want to put in your listing something perfect for families or young couples because you’re going to get sued for housing violations. We provide a lot of that material and then next to it, we’ll explain why it’s written such a way. It’s up to each individual how deep they want to go into the learning or if they want to adopt the process we’ve created for them.

Ladies, this is a thing, no matter where you get started, you’re going to have a learning curve. If you can get some tools that are going to help with the learning curve, even if there is learning there is going to be, how long is that going to take you? This sounds like a tool that will speed up that process, right?  

Yeah. If someone’s getting started and they don’t know what they’re doing, let the system do it for you and you can learn as you’re going. If you want to change what the system is recommending, you can, but by no means, do you have to?

Could you tell us about how to find a good real estate deal?  

Good real estate deals are everywhere and hard to identify. I’ve always thought when you make your money as a real estate investor is at the beginning when you buy it. You have to buy it at the right price. I don’t know that I can specifically say, “Go to this website and you’ll find good deals.” When you’re looking for a good deal, there are some things you want to look at. I’ll throw out some terms that are relevant. I don’t want to term wash people here, but for me personally, I look at what the gross rent multiplier is a lot. Each city or part of the city will have a multiple on the rental income that you’d expect to pay. If you can get under that multiple, then you’re essentially getting a good deal. It’s a quick way to assess if it’s a good value or not. It’s a twelve times rent in Chicago standard rent multiplier, where I buy my properties. If I can find a deal that’s less than that, I feel like I’m getting something of value there.

Give us the formula for that because people throw around that term a lot.

A process is, first and foremost, the most important thing that you should try to do and set up when you're becoming a landlord. Share on X

The gross rent multiplier is you take the purchase price and you divide into that, the annual gross rental income, and that will give you a multiple. If you make $10,000 a year on gross rent and the place costs $1,000 then that’s ten times multiple. If you can get what the average is for your area and you get under it, then you know you’ve at least got a good deal for the area. You can’t stop with that though. That’s a quick weed out. You didn’t have to look at the rest of the numbers and how they fall out and what’s it going to cost you to run the place versus what you’ll pull in. Are you expecting vacancies? All those things you should try to use some tool to calculate out a net operating income for the property. What a cash-on-cash return might be for the property and is that better than your next best alternative? For me, I look at properties that have a minimum of 10% cash-on-cash. If I’m buying $100,000 property and I’m putting $20,000 down, I want to make sure I’m getting at least $2,000 a year in net income out of it, or it doesn’t meet my cash-on-cash requirements.

Let’s slow down with that, Laurence. That was good. I want to highlight it. Ladies, we talk a lot about leverage. You buy $100,000 home, but you only put $20,000 down. How much money have you put in? Your cash investment is $20,000. When we’re talking about cash-on-cash, we’re not talking about how much you are making on $100,000. We’re talking about how much we’re making on the money that you put in. It’s so you ladies know, I account for the entire amount of money that I put in. Let’s say, for instance, I put $20,000 in and I had $5,000 in closing costs, my cash-on-cash is on $25,000. I do it a little bit differently than others do it but you should have that number. What does that look like for you each year? What’s important to you? 

I couldn’t say how important that is. It’s critical. You’re going to make all your money by buying correctly. It’s not one of the easier steps to do. There are a lot of online tools that will help you calculate that out. Avail has one as well that people can find, we call it our rental property calculator. It’s something that’s valuable. When you calculate that cash-on-cash return, that’s the thing you should potentially look at, what other investments are out there? No one’s got unlimited money. You want to take what your best option is. If you can get more than that rate somewhere else, by investing in your friend’s hair salon, in the stock market, or in something else, then you potentially should be doing that instead. Real estate generally is a good investment cash-on-cash that doesn’t have the full picture either though, because there is appreciation in a property. You can start to calculate out an ROI or an internal rate of return that runs the gambit of things, but the point is no matter what those terms are, those are easy to google and look up and then try to plug in the numbers and see what you get.

I remember the first time I heard all these terms, I thought, “You’ve got eyes to all these numbers. This is confusing.” I’m good at math. I was a loan officer so it’s not that I’m afraid of numbers, but it gets a little confusing. Understand that all of those terms are out there. If you hear a term that someone says on this show when you’re reading a book or you’re studying and you’re like, “I don’t know what that means,” look it up on YouTube. If you’re more visual, you can look it up on Google, they’re all there. It’s all self-explanatory. Don’t get intimidated by that. As you’re doing your process, do start to learn what those numbers are and why they’re important for you. 

I hope your audience doesn’t take it the wrong way. I feel silly for trying to plug our website, but if you do a Google search for Avail Rental Property Calculator, they can use that calculator. You don’t have to sign up. It’s free. It will explain all the terms as you go. It’s good especially if it’s the first time you’re buying a rental property.

Thank you for plugging your software. I’m excited about looking at it.  

I’ll try not to plug it too much.

One of the things that I’m excited about is, we’re going to be talking more in EXTRA about how to run your real estate investing as a business. We’re going to move into that but before we do that, Laurence, could you tell people where they can reach you?  

 

If they want to reach out to me personally, I’m happy to do that. My personal email is [email protected]. We couldn’t afford the dot-com. They can reach me there or they can go to our website Avail.co. They’ll see it as a live chat widget. They’ll see a lot of different ways to reach out to us or they can sign up for a free account and check it out. I’d love to give people a discount on the price, but that’s hard to do. What I can do is if you sign up and reach out to our service team, we can go ahead and give you a free rental analysis report. You type in the address of a property that you may be buying or listing, and this will return what the fair market rent price would be for that property.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions? 

Yeah, absolutely.

Laurence, tell us one super tip on how to get started in real estate investing.  

It will be tough if your audience will think of this as a super tip, but it’s essentially doing it. I know when I was thinking about it, I hummed and hawed for years about it. I was nervous about it. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. It’s easier when I started because on Google, there’s so much information out there. Maybe that makes it harder to waste because there’s so much to look at and you don’t know where to go. My super tip is, get started now if you’re nervous about it, go in with a friend, co-investing is good. You de-risk it a little bit. You have someone to help motivate you and guide you along. If that’s what it’s going to take for you to get started, get a friend in and do it now.

Give us one strategy on being successful in real estate investing. 

For me, I’m lucky that I was a Finance Major. I’ve always had this mindset because it got drilled into me in college. If you’re going to buy a rental property, it’s important that you realize this is a business that you run. Even if you only spend a couple of hours on it a month, it’s still a business, it has revenue, expenses and some liabilities. If you don’t think of it, a business, you’re never going to be thinking in terms of, “How do I grow the revenue? How do I minimize my expenses? How do I treat my customers well? Tenants, or customers, we want to treat them well.” That’s where you get into where slumlords may come in. They don’t view their tenants as customers. They don’t necessarily view it as that business where you want to reward your retention of customers. Treating it as a business is critical if you’re going to be successful.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do, Laurence, that contributes to your personal success?  

No one's got unlimited money, so you want to take what your best options are. Share on X

I like to end the day knowing that I’ve accomplished stuff, even if it’s potentially the wrong stuff. I want to know that I’ve moved a needle forward. Every single day I make a to-do list. Sometimes I’ll do it the night before, especially if I feel like I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll have a to-do list of 10, 12 items. I won’t end my day until my to-do list is done. That way I know I’ve accomplished stuff and I can keep going. That provides me the motivation to keep things headed in a direction that’s going to be successful.

Thank you. That was such great information. I can’t wait for more in EXTRA but thank you for what you’ve shared so far. 

You’re welcome.

Ladies, in EXTRA, Laurence is going to talk some more of the specifics about how to think of it as a business. I do a lot of mindset stuff around that, like the employee mindset versus the business mindset, but Laurence has specific keys to what makes it a business. It’s not your mindset, it’s the things that you do. How do you structure? How do you look at the numbers? All of those pieces are what he is going to share with us on EXTRA. This is going to be juicy and valuable. If you’re already subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned. This is going to be amazing. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA, but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get your first seven days for free. We’ve got about 50 EXTRAs up there, so you can binge on them and you can get this one too. You decide after that if it makes sense for you to stay subscribed or not. If you’re leaving us, thank you for joining Laurence and I for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time and I appreciate you, but until then, remember goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time.

 

Important Links

• Avail
• Avail Rental Property Calculator
• [email protected]
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

On this episode, we talk about

• How to handle issues as a DIY Landlord
• What tools and resources are there for you
• Should you use a rental manager?
• How to evaluate real estate deals

 

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How NLP Can Make You a Better Negotiator with Matt Brauning

 

In this episode, Matt Brauning, keynote speaker and entrepreneur, joins Moneeka Sawyer as they discuss the power of NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, and how it can make you a better negotiator so you can best navigate through difficult conversations. Matt and Moneeka talk about learning the recipe and patterns consciously through NLP in anything you want to do and start to find success in your field. When you are aware of the pattern, you can consciously correct them. Matt also dives into ecological NLP and his mission to make the world a better place through better communication and clear intentions. Get in touch with how you create meaning for yourself and learn how you can take control of the narrative.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How NLP Can Make You a Better Negotiator with Matt Brauning

I am excited to welcome back to the show Matt Brauning, my dear friend, and mentor. Matt has been a writer for Forbes, a two-time bestselling author, and host of the top podcast The Driven Entrepreneur on iTunes and is syndicated on sixteen AM/FM stations coast to coast. He filmed in the movie, The Journey, with Brian Tracy and Bob Proctor. You’ve seen him on television on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Matt has been an entrepreneur since 2002 speaking all over the world including the US, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. He has shared his message at places like The Harvard Club, McAfee, New York Life, The NASDAQ Marketplace, and the United States Air Force Academy. He is an avid motorcycle rider, church leader, and rock climber. He resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his amazingly beautiful wife Lola and his awesome son Valiant.

I’m glad to be back. Let’s make this happen. I can’t wait for this conversation with you.

I always love our conversations, Matt. Not only do I get to share you with my friends, but I know I’m going to learn something amazing.

Right back at you. This is one of the top real estate show for women so I’m looking to learn too.

I know you’ve been on the show before, but could you give us a little bit of background of who you are and why you got started in NLP?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the programming of our brains, our mindset, and our subconscious mind. I love this show in particular and you for this because I’ve only had two careers since I was eighteen years old, not including Caesar’s Steak House at seventeen. Since then I have run and owned my real estate brokerage as well as being a real estate investor myself, getting to $5 million in property by 25. I also turned away from the real estate world and decided to go in the coaching world and the speaking and training world because I love the fulfillment of helping an individual transform and change their lives and it’s fun. I love doing training at real estate companies, working with investors because I understand both sides of the mindset, but I also get the practical strategy because I use that in my life so much.

That’s why I wanted you back on this show because you bring a perspective of NLP to real estate. Let’s start by defining NLP.

I’ve gone some times in presentations for twenty minutes and somebody raises their hand and says, “What is it called again?” It’s a foundation for my life and the business. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is what NLP stands for. Neuro is for the mind, Linguistic is for language, and Programming represents the programs that we already have running behind the scenes. Our mind is not a computer by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, it’s like that as a metaphor where you have these programs running, cleaning up, or taking care of something. Sometimes I find that we have programs that run that serve us and sometimes we have forgotten programs.

Those that we set up at five when we saw mom and dad fight over the checkbook and I thought to myself, “Money must be the root of all evil.” I’ve heard that somewhere. Now, many years later, I’m somehow subconsciously trying to stay away from money, but consciously I want to have it. That’s an example of a program. NLP is studying the programs that our mind runs and I believe how to take charge of them again, how to take control back for your subconscious mind.

A lot of times when people think of NLP, if they’ve even heard of it, they think about the guys on TV that manipulate people to do weird things. It’s a lot like hypnosis because there are languaging patterns and stuff like that with NLP too. Ladies, what I want you to know is I have my own story of why I found Matt. I was a coach for several years for executives. I found that in a lot of the training that I had, I would implement my coaching practices and people would say, “That’s NLP.” I kept hearing that and I thought, “What in the world? I had never taken an NLP training or whatever.”

What I discovered is that through a lot of the coaching practices, but also my life, NLP is simply a categorization of things that we naturally do. We naturally speak certain ways. We naturally connect with people in certain ways, and we naturally create programming in our heads. One of the things that I think is important to success is to live your life more consciously. Running your business more consciously and relating to your spouse more consciously. It was important to me that if I was already doing this thing, to be more conscious and purposeful about how I was doing it so it would improve me. It would improve my relationships, it would improve my business. That’s where I went on my search for an NLP trainer.

Negotiation is not compromise. Share on X

One of the things that I love about Matt is his heart. I met a lot of NLP trainers and they were all about success, business, self-improvement, patterns, and all of this stuff, but they didn’t talk about the thing that was most important to me, which is this is about connection, not manipulation. I think that was a fear that I had about it. It was important to me to find somebody that understood that connection piece and Matt is one of those people. One of the things that he talks about early on in any of his courses about keeping it ecological. Matt, could you talk a little bit about that?

If NLP was a tree, you’ll find a few twigs and the branches of the people that are out there trying to say, “This is a powerful communication tool.” Like any powerful tool, the metaphor has been probably drilled in the ground at this point, but you take a hammer and you can use a hammer as a tool to build something amazing. I flip the hammer around and I can use it to tear down and do all my demo too. A great tool can be used for whatever your purpose is. To me, it’s not about NLP but it’s about any industry that you get into. The question of manipulation is always there versus connection. I think there’s only one question to ask yourself is intent.

When you’re working with someone, when you go to a car dealer, when you go to a dentist, when you go to an NLP practitioner, coach, a real estate salesperson, or whatever it is, the question is, what is their intention? Is the intention to serve, to connect, to give you what you want, and also I get what I want and we have a mutually beneficial or ecological relationship? Is my intent solely to take care of me? Worse, is my intent solely to take care of me at the expense of you? Which I think is the ultimate level of not caring.

If that person with that kind of heart who doesn’t care, doesn’t want to serve, and wants what they want at anyone’s expense, if you give that person kryptonite, they turn to Lex Luthor. If you give that person a powerful tool, they’re going to use that to get ahead. I’m on a big mission in our NLP community. I have a whole membership, a group of people that love to practice ecological NLP. I want to get into the hands of everybody. I want everyone in the world to understand it because if we all understand how to communicate deeper, more effectively, more intentionally, consciously, I think the world will be a better place.

If everyone knows the NLP language “patterns” that you know and that I know, then all of a sudden if you do hear that random 1,000 people trying to lay some pattern on you or whatever and manipulate a situation, you’ll smell it a mile away. You’ll go, “What are you talking about? Get out of here.” I think keeping it, looking at the intention, you never have to worry about that. If you are ever worried about manipulation, learning the skillset that you’re worried about happening to you is one of the greatest ways, one of the greatest armors to tackle that in the world.

I don’t mean to say that other NLP trainers are not ecological also. There are a lot of wonderful people.

Many of them are, but some of them are not for sure.

What I love about you specifically, Matt, is that we talk about this first. It is the foundational piece of what you teach. One of the things that I will say about as a blissful investor, my relationships are key to everything that I do. My tenants are my business partners. My real estate agent is my real estate partner so I’ve got a team of partners that help to grow my business. Relationships are important and those communication things become critical to building my business.

Sometimes I’ll say that to people and people are like, “Moneeka, if you’re using patterns or whatever, you’re being manipulative.” I think that what’s important to understand is that there’s a fine line between manipulation and connection. It’s like what you said, your intention. My intention is to be heard and to fully hear. If you can create a way to do that connection that feels natural and there’s more flow, then there’s going to be a better understanding, rapport, and connection with that person.

You’re likely to hear what their needs are much better. I’ll give this example with NLP. I lived in France for 1.5 years. It was one of the most beautiful times of my life and what was interesting is that when I first got there, I spoke French poorly, so communication with the French was difficult. As I learned more French and I started to speak to people in French, they became interested in speaking to me and would automatically switch to English.

 

Together, we found a way to communicate that allowed us to understand each other better. I feel like these NLP patterns are another way for us to communicate in the other person’s language so they understand us and then they want to reciprocate that communication back. That’s all NLP is. It’s a natural way of doing things. We do it naturally anyway but if you can make it more conscious, you up-level your ability to communicate and build rapport.

Not only up-leveling, but you also talked about consciousness. I think of NLP as a recipe. You have a whole recipe book and that’s the catalog of behaviors and then there are several areas of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Some are language patterns. Some are state control. Some are understanding the process subconsciously of how we do what we do there. There are some in sales and some in negotiation. We have NLP for public speaking. What it all comes down to though is imagine someone who bakes a phenomenal cookie, and you want to replicate that cookie over and over again because it’s good. You ask them, “How do you do it?” They go, “I don’t know. It seems like it’s magic. My grandma has been making that cookie for 60 years and she has no idea how she does it. She puts a spring of this and a dash of that.”

The NLP modelers, trainers like me, we come around and say, “How is it that you do this thing? Like in therapy, was there a language pattern, certain patterns that all put together can accomplish the change more effectively?” We looked at presentation patterns and say, “Are there certain language, types of words, and structures of wording, structures of sentences that are more emotionally impactful than not?” You take two communicators. They said the same thing, but one structures it a different way and it emotionally lands. The other person structures it however it comes out of the brain and it doesn’t emotionally land.

Going back to the metaphor of the recipe. Imagine you have two people trying to make cookies. One makes cookies that taste too salty. One makes perfect cookies. NLP is looking at the recipe and then saying, “Is it manipulative to say, ‘I want to learn that recipe so that when I make cookies, everybody enjoys them. I want to learn the speaking recipes when I have a speech, my message that I intend to land lands. I want to learn NLP in my relationship communication that when I looked at my wife and try to express that I love her, she feels loved versus me doing it however I’m trying to do it?’”

It’s all about the pattern and the recipe. When you do it consciously, you can duplicate the result you want over and over again. There’s another side of NLP, which is also a good side, which is getting rid of the bad recipes. If you have salty cookies, you can stop making those when you become aware of the pattern. Maybe you keep getting into conflict in a relationship, you keep waking up late to your alarm clock even though you want to get up and go to the gym. These are the patterns that I would call salty cookies. You use NLP to scramble, rip up, and destroy the recipe and replace it with a better one. That’s all it comes down to for me.

I loved your example of the beginning when you were like, you see your mom and dad when you were five years old, arguing about money and you’re like, “Money is a bad thing. It makes people fight.” You suddenly have this little seed implanted, which then grows. Here’s the other thing that you’ll notice is the second you have a belief, you’re going to find lots of things to support that belief. Now you’ve got this seed planted and now you look out to the world for all these reasons why it’s true and your conscious mind is maybe fighting that, but that’s what your subconscious mind is doing. An opportunity with NLP is to take out that seed, to pull that weed for instance, and instead plant a beautiful daffodil, a rose or something like that.

A garden has everything. There are weeds, soil, worms, flowers, vegetables, and everything. Oftentimes, we will look based on our beliefs. We’ll look at a garden and we’ll see the weeds or we’ll look at the garden and we’ll see the flowers. Neither one of those are true. The world or reality is much more complex. When you talked about whatever belief you believe you’re going to find a reference to make that true, there’s an actual physiological and neurological reason that happens.

There’s a great book and I’ve talked about this on stage. It’s an old book called Flow written by a Hungarian biologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In that book, Professor Csikszentmihalyi says that there are 2.3 million bits of information coming into our awareness every second of every day and that’s a lot of bits. That means that there’s so much information coming in. Let’s take twin brothers as a random example. They come down the stairwell one morning and they see mom and dad fighting over the checkbook. They don’t talk about it. They see what happened. They go back to their room and they go separate beds and they decide what that means. One brother decides that means that money is the root of all evil. “They’re fighting over money so I need to stay away from money. Money equals conflict and loss of love.”

The other brother saw the same information. He heard the same conflict, but he comes with a different conclusion. This brother believes that mom and dad aren’t able to pay the bills. Therefore, not having money is the worst thing in the world. “I don’t want to lose love and connections. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make money.” The first brother ends up far poorer than he expects himself to be. The second brother is maybe extra rich. He does all the work and becomes successful. Maybe the successful brother is happy or maybe he’s not.

Maybe the poor brother is happy or maybe he is not. That’s a whole other conversation. When we see an example of something, when we experience an event, what does it mean? Humans are meaning-making machines and what we study in the field of NLP is, how do we make those meanings? When you make a meaning that you don’t want, how do you change it? When you have a fresh experience, how do you make a meaning that you do want? Nothing is more important in life I believe than the meanings we give to events and the story we tell about those events.

I like to say to people that no matter what’s happening in your world, you’re making up a story about it. Why not make up a good one? That’s oversimplifying it, but it’s that same thing. We have control over the message that we give ourselves about anything that’s happening in our lives.

When you play the game well, you get invited to more games. Share on X

The only challenge with the control is that most of the meaning we give is unconscious or subconscious meaning creation. This is what we talk about so much. We’ll have these long conversations about how to take back control of the narrative. The problem is going back to those 2.3 million bits. If you have 2.3 million bits of information, that’s like ultimate 4K TV, 1,000, million channels all at once at the same time, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, feelings, experiences, streetlights are going on and the cars are out, people are walking, all this stuff’s going on every second of every day.

We can only consciously process 126 out of 2.3 million. That is the equivalent of a needle in a haystack. Our subconscious mind processes the haystack and finds a relevant needle, and I call that needle the meaning. That’s the meaning and the narrative we give it. How did you discern which was the needle you want to focus on? Your subconscious mind is powerful and that’s the part of your mind that focuses on the meaning and finding it.

After you found it, then we run around and go, “This is what I believe. This is how the world is. Relationships are hard. Relationships are easy. Men are this way. Women are that way.” Whatever we believe, we run with that. NLP is when you study it deeply and we do this course in our membership community and going through these studies and this process, we’re wanting to uncover how did you make the meaning? Not why, but how. How do you take control back so you give the meaning that you want? Ultimately, so you can do the things you want and feel the way you want to feel.

That’s what bliss is about. It’s creating way these habits, because eventually after you’ve learned it, like in the beginning you have to focus on it but over time it becomes this natural default way of being. You can catch it much more quickly, but you also do things that serve your subconscious much more naturally so then you’re able to live more in bliss more frequently without the huge effort that it takes.

Bliss is your default setting. I’ve talked about this with you for years. We’ve been friends for a long time. It’s almost like, “How does that happen?” You said, “Default setting.” I think it’s interesting because people go, “How do I get bliss as my default setting? How do I get peace? How do I get love as my default? How do I get forgiving as my default setting versus holding a grudge?” The secret is we always have a default setting.

You already have it. If you love sushi, you don’t have to keep figuring out if you love sushi every time someone says, “Do you want to have sushi?” Your default setting is, “I’m a sushi guy. I like sushi.” It’s as easy to have a default setting of, “I hate sushi. It’s disgusting. It’s raw fish.” The question is what’s your default setting now? I think the first step to getting an intentional, conscious, default setting that you want is to figure out what your current one is because, believe it or not, you have one.

We all do. Let’s move into a little bit more real estate-specific NLP. One of the biggest things that we do in real estate is building relationships. In those relationships we have to negotiate, we have to build rapport, and we have to have conversations. Sometimes they’re difficult conversations. Talk to me about how we can use NLP specifically with those difficult conversations and with negotiation.

This is something that is one of my favorite topics, because usually when you think negotiation, it’s almost always you have to “win-win” the negotiation. The default setting is negotiation is back to that manipulation of how do I get what I want kind of a thing. I don’t believe in that. Negotiation is, simply put, I have a concept, idea, or desire and it is different than your concept, idea, or desire. How do we come together with the intention of finding an outcome that you and I agree with? An outcome that serves you and serves me? An outcome that gets as close to what you want and as close to what I want as possible. That’s how I define negotiation.

Let’s find an outcome that we can both agree on even though our initial ideas are disparate, separate, and they’re not the same concept. Negotiation is not compromised, and this is a huge writer downer to understand. Compromise is where we meet in the middle. Meeting in the middle is one of the worst negotiation tactics in the world. It leads to some of the deepest dissatisfaction with outcomes. You make an offer on a house and let’s say the house is $250,000 and you offer $200,000. The seller wanted $250,000. They feel like that’s a real value.

You want $200,000, you feel like that’s a good deal. Meeting in the middle means you say, “How about $225,000? Why don’t we meet in the middle?” What does that mean? It means the seller didn’t get what they want and they feel like they sold it too cheap and the buyer didn’t get what they want. They feel like they overpaid so that meeting in the middle compromise is a lose-lose. Here’s a simple metaphor for compromise.

I’m hot, which is normal in my house and my wife is cold, which is normal in our house. We’re sitting in the same room together and I want the window open for the breeze. I want the window open because it’s too hot. She says, “No, I’m cold. Shut the window.” What’s the compromise? “Why don’t we meet in the middle? Let’s open the window halfway.” What does that do? Now she’s freezing and it’s still stuffy so you’re not getting what you both want.

Instead of trying to compromise, instead of meeting in the middle, what you need to do is recover the intention. Recovering the intention is like sometimes in our behaviors and our desires, the intention behind the behavior, the intention behind the desire is lost. We don’t know what it is consciously. We don’t communicate what that is. I say, “Can you close the window?” We don’t communicate that the intention for why I want the window closed is because I’m cold. It’s a simple thing but we oftentimes in communication don’t communicate our intention. We communicate our desire or behaviors. Rule number one for negotiation is to quit compromising and look for the intention. Look for what you’re both wanting.

Rule number two is to recover the intention. I don’t care what the situation is, whenever someone says, “This is what I want. This is what I need. This is what I’m looking for. This is my offer.” You always ask the question, “What’s your intention for that?” Another way to say it is, “What’s the purpose of offering this number? What are you wanting out of that? Why are you offering this number? Why is that the number you landed on? I want to know. The example I gave to a RE/MAX office where I was doing training. I talked about the idea of termite reports and this is a common thing they’ll come up but not as much of a cash investment.

You got to fix the fence. The fence is beaten up. There are termites. The termite guy says, “You’ve got to fix the fence. What do we do?” The seller says, “I don’t want to fix a fence. That’s not fair. We already agreed on the price.” The buyer says, “I didn’t know that the fence was broken down. I think it’s fair. You fix the fence.” Now you have this little detail of a $1,500 fence and it’s make or break it. In my time as a mortgage broker, as a real estate broker and investor, I’ve seen them fall apart over something much smaller than that, but that’s a common one. I’m not willing to do the seller credit thing. What you do is you start with recover the intention.

The seller doesn’t want to not fix the fence because they’re a jerk and the buyer doesn’t want them to fix the fence because they’re greedy. There’s an intention behind it. Maybe the intention is, “I don’t want to fix a fence because I’m already tapped out and we thought we were going to net this much money and now it’s about the cash.” Maybe though that’s not. People always assume it’s money. It’s not always money, especially in real estate. Sometimes I don’t want to fix a fence because I feel I’ve already done many repairs to the house that I feel like it’s too much. I’ve already made it nice and it’s a feeling they get.

There’s also this thing like it’s the principle of it. That’s that feeling of, “I’ve done enough.”

The house we live in when we were negotiating this, it was a small little thing, but we had two things happen that the deal changed. The first one was the appraisal came in less. Now I went in and I said, “I’m willing to pay you top dollar. I like this house. We want to live here.” The appraisal came in short, I said, “We want to pay you top dollar but it turns out top dollar is this much and not a little bit less.” We talked about it and we had a good negotiation and it seemed fair. They liked it. They thought, “We’re still getting the top of the market for this.” I still felt good because coming from California to Michigan, I think houses are 70% off so I didn’t care. I felt like it was a good deal and it’s gone up since then so it’s fine.

A second thing happened and then we had the inspection. We went back and said, “This, this, and this is not functioning properly. We would like it to be fixed.” The principal felt when we uncovered the intention was, “I already feel like I gave you something and now you’re asking for more.” They didn’t want to do it because they thought we were being greedy. What did we do? I communicated our intention and I said, “I feel like these are two different things and we want to pay you the top dollar we promised based on the appraisal and that is that. When it comes to the repairs, we’re not looking for anything over and above. My intention is that we get a fair deal and I know that you want to sell a house at a fair deal too.”

What happened is we both found the same higher intention. We landed on the fact that they want to be fair people and we want to be fair people and as simple as it is. That went so far to use the language and this is where NLP comes in, the language pattern itself. I kept coming back to no matter how detailed we got on the concessions and what’s the price, I want $50 for this or $2,000 for that or whatever it is. We always made sure I wrapped it in the package of, “I think what the fair thing to do would be this. It would be fair to split this cost down the middle. I feel like if I was in your shoes, the fair thing to do would be this.”

As long as we kept the intention alive of we’re looking for fairness, they agreed on fairness, we agreed on fairness. The only question is what is exactly fair? Sometimes you don’t get what you want. I go, “If I want to be fair, maybe we shouldn’t ask for that extra dollar. It’s fair to do this for the person.” What you find is you don’t get as much of what you “want” but you’ll find better deals. You’ll be a better human, a better investor, a better partner, a better seller. Ultimately, more wins happen and you get to play the game.

I talk a lot about playing the games and winning games. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game and that couldn’t be more truthful. How you play the game of negotiation isn’t about winning and losing. It’s literally about how did you play that game? If I play the game well, I will win more than I lose and hopefully, there won’t even be losers. When you play the game well, you get invited to more games. I quoted that from Jordan Peterson who is an interesting professor who talks about the game of life.

Life's about playing more games, not about trying to win the little one you have. Share on X

When you get invited to more games, that means someone thought, “I’ve got a great deal from this investor and they took care of me.” All of a sudden, they send you their uncle and they say, “You should talk to Moneeka too. She got me out from under this house that was a burden and it was a fair deal.” All of a sudden, you get a bigger deal because of that. You get the referrals and you start to play more games. Life is about playing more games, not about trying to win the one little one you have.

The only thing that I like about the way that you present this is you’re finding some mutual ground and some mutual intent. That mutual intent allows you to see the best in the other person, which then brings that out in them. It also allows you to plug into the best in yourself and then that person comes forward. With the game analogy, my husband and I play board games all the time. I always lose and he always wins. The reason we keep playing is that he’s fun to be around when we’re playing.

It’s fun when he wins and you’re fun when you lose.

If it turns around, then it’s fun the other way too. The thing is that we bring out the best in each other during that process because it’s fun for us. We have a common intention. When you’re negotiating, remember that it’s you who’s showing up for that and if you allow the other person to be the best, then you allow yourself to be the best person. It feels much more blissful for everybody, which is the end result that we’re looking for.

When you give a metaphor or an example of playing board games with your husband, you can get worked up and like couples games and Monopoly feels like it’s the end of the world and it feels like there’s nothing more important than, “You cheated.” “No. The rule is you can’t roll three times. You have to pay and then it’s my turn. Get out of jail.” We can get bogged down in this little rule. What happens is this, the game feels bigger than it is. The rule for negotiation is this game is never what it’s about.

There’s always a bigger game and life is the bigger game. If I’m in the middle of negotiating like this house, if we made an extra $2,000 or lose $2,000, it doesn’t matter. At the end of our life, more than the end of the day, there’s a much bigger game I’m playing. If I want to win real estate, I can’t win from one house. You’re going to win from many rental properties, many flips or many combinations of these, or you want to work your way from residential to multifamily or commercial. There’s something you’re doing. There’s a broader game. Remember when you negotiate that, “Is this the hill you want to die on?”

Sometimes it makes more sense to go, “I pick relationship over rules and I’m keeping the relationship with this person. I’ll give up the $1,000 because I’m playing a bigger game.” I hate the metaphor of the battle or the war. That’s not where I’m going. There’s a bigger game in life here and if I want to succeed in life and I want to succeed long-term, there’s a much bigger game and this is Monopoly. It’s a Wednesday night family game, so what if the rule was broken? Let it go. My wife is more important than whether or not the rule says this. What we’ve got to remember is, this game will not last but the big game does.

One of the things that I’d love to do, Matt, if you’re open to this is we’re going to be moving into EXTRA. He’s going to share some of these patterns with us so that we can become more default blissful and play the game better in our lives. Matt, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

I’ve enjoyed this conversation immensely. I always love connecting with you Moneeka and everyone reading. If this was relevant to you and you’d like to learn a little bit more about NLP, what this thing is, I decided to make a simple gift for everybody. If you head over to NLPWithMatt.com, instead of giving some template or report on something, I decided, “What if I gave everybody interested in NLP and further in the conversation a complete and total NLP practitioner manual?”

This is a 74-page color manual that I use for my advanced certification training. I took the whole course manual and give you the whole thing. You can look from A to Z and learn everything about what NLP is from language patterns, to state management, to mindset, all of it, and then some are all in the manuals. You can follow me anywhere on social @MattBrauning, on Instagram. I put all memes in the family and fun clips and things like that on there. If you want the free manual, it’s right there on the website for you.

Thank you, Matt. That’s generous. I love that. Give us one super tip on how to be successful in real estate investing?

 

One super tip is to act immediately. I think when I look back in my early career, I ordered this home study from Carleton Sheets, the No Down Payment. I never used his method exactly, but it got me motivated and I realized, “Why am I still waiting for the perfect time?” The principle I learned from Carleton Sheets wasn’t about no money down. I put the money down, but I decided to purchase it. I said, “I’m going to get out there and look for something.” I found this five-unit place in Long Beach, California. I bought it and sold it four months later and I made $180,000 profit. I did that when I was 23 years old. I share that story not to impress you, but to impress upon you that concept of start now because there’s never a better time than now besides yesterday.

Give us one strategy on how to be successful in real estate investing?

Here’s the opposite side of it. Stop and think things through. In life languages, it’s called a mover, Enneagram Type 7. When I get a feeling of motivation, just go. If I want new patio furniture and I feel motivated, I go to the store that day and I want to get it home today. If you’re like me, the other side starts acting and goes after it then when you get the deal, when you get an opportunity in front of you, stop and think. If you don’t normally work the numbers, work the numbers backward and forwards, send it through to a friend that knows what they’re doing to hash it out with you. It’s not the end of the world if you say no to an opportunity. Stop and think things through and lay the emotion down, you’ll stop a lot of dumb mistakes.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

It’s changed over the years a lot. It used to be the standard, I read this or I meditate or I journal. What it is now for me as I get busier is always making sure that every day I find a way to create moments with my family. I have my wife Lola of several years and our son Valiant, and we all live at home together. Especially during the year 2020, we’ve been at home more than we probably ever have before when my traveling stopped. Even during these times, I’m up in my office all day. In between my last interview and this one, I got twenty minutes and I went downstairs and I grabbed my son.

I’m thinking, “How can I create a moment out of these extra 5, 10 minutes?” Not just, “Can I sit on the couch and talk to him for twenty minutes?” How do I make a moment in my spare time if every day you can look back and say, “What was the one outstanding magic moment for myself with my creator, myself with my family, myself with my friends, whatever it was?” You’re going to look back at a week of seven magic moments minimum and you’re going to feel like you had a great week.

I’ve never heard anybody say it quite that way. I love that because I think it’s true. Dave and I have date nights every week and that’s our sacred time. We’ve been doing this for many years. It is true that during the week like I’ve got a day like you, I’ve got interviews all day long, I’ve got twenty-minute breaks in-between and feel like I need to scramble instead of thinking, “What can I do for five minutes that would create something magical for me?” What’s beautiful about that is it helps relationships. It also uplifts both of us to then perform at our best wherever we’re going next. I’m going to implement that. Thank you, Matt.

You’re welcome.

Matt, this has been an amazing conversation as always. Thank you for joining us for this portion of the show.

I can’t thank you enough. It’s always a pleasure being with you, Moneeka. Any time, any bad time, any bad channel, I am here.

Ladies, stay tuned. Matt’s got more. He’s going to go into some of those patterns to try to change your paradigm during the show. If you are already subscribed to EXTRA, if you’re not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. When you subscribe, you get seven days for free so you get to download a ton of stuff that’s already there. Check it out and then you can subscribe if you’d like to. The cool thing is that once you’re subscribed to EXTRA, it will show up.

You don’t need any new apps. You don’t need any new tech. It will show up right there for you. For those of you who are leaving us now, thank you for joining Matt and I for this portion of this show. You know how much I appreciate you and I look forward to seeing you. Until then remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time.

 

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